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must be saved help them please il do anything

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Biological and Psychology Benefits of Learning Cursive | Psychology Today

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Biological and Psychology Benefits of Learning Cursive | Psychology Today

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In response to a growing trend where public schools are dropping the teaching of cursive, I wrote a blog post defending the value of learning cursive. ¹ The new Common Core standards, adopted by 45 states, no longer require the teaching of cursive. But homeschoolers are being encouraged to teach cursive. ² My post lamenting this backward move by the educational professionals drew a huge amount of commentary, 89 posts thus far, some negative, some positive.

I now realize the case for cursive needs to be made more explicitly. First, I want to avoid the distractions over the definition of "cursive" or arguments over the respective merits of different schools of penmanship. I don't think these things matter much in terms of cognitive development, as long as we are talking about handwriting that is not printing and in which many of the letters are connected.

A few of the benefits of learning cursive may happen with learning to hand print, but here is my summary of the special benefits of cursive:

Biological

Hand-eye coordination is a major developmental feature. If you Google "developmental benefits of learning cursive" you will find numerous blog and news posts that emphasize the developmental benefits of learning cursive.

Whatever inherited level of sensory-motor coordination people may have, they can always improve on it with practice. Most parents observe this when teaching a child to throw and catch a ball. Think about what is going on in the brain as such learning progresses. The brain is creating new circuitry to evaluate what is seen, the speed of what is seen, the movements required, and the speed and timing of movements. This circuitry becomes a lasting part of the brain. This circuitry can be recruited for use in other hand-eye coordination tasks. That helps to explain why so many student athletes can play more than one sport.

Learning to write by hand has these same features, plus of course there is a thinking element involved that does not occur with simple throw and catch movements. The thinking level is magnified in cursive because the specific hand-eye coordination requirements are different for every letter in the alphabet. Moreover, in handwriting the movements are continuously variable, which is much more mentally demanding than making single strokes, as in printing A, E, F, H, and so on. Even so, because cursive letters are more distinct than printed letters, children may learn to read more easily, especially dyslexics.

Handwriting dynamically engages widespread areas of both cerebral hemispheres. Virginia Berninger, a researcher and professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says that brain scans during handwriting show activation of massive regions of the brain involved in thinking, language, and working memory. ³

Learning to type makes little demand on the brain: you just have to punch a key. Learning to touch type (typing without looking at the keys) is mentally demanding, and I encourage that kind of teaching too. One should not be taught at the expense of the other.

Psychological

I think that attitude and motivation have the greatest impact on a child's success in school. This conclusion is supported by a lot of research literature and anecdotes from teachers. Both are affected by what the child genuinely believes about his capabilities to learn. As a child learns to master academic challenges, self- confidence emerges and provides a drive to learn more because the child knows that achievement is possible. Learning cursive is an easy way for a child to discover important tactics for learning as well as the emotional benefit of being able to master a task.

I am assuming here that cursive is still taught the way I learned it over 50 years ago. First, the child is taught how to hold a pencil, a relaxed but firm grip where the pencil is held with more or less equal pressure from the thumb and the first two fingers. I see kids these days hold pencils in all sorts of scrunched-up, awkward and hard-to-control ways. Then they are shown how to engage the whole arm in writing movements, not just trying to control all movements with the fingers. I think this important because the motor cortex has such discrete control over fingers that the brain is constantly being confused by all the various options for drawing segments of a letter. Letting the arm participate reduces the cognitive load over finger control. Handwriting becomes easier to generate, less tiresome, and eventually more attractive. There may well be other effective mechanical approaches, but in any case, these have to be mastered first, otherwise the student may become frustrated.

Key principles of learning and memory are embedded in learning to hand write. First, the child learns just one letter at a time. The student is shown a cursive letter and asked to duplicate it. The feedback is immediate. The child sees in one eye fixation both the ideal and the child's version. The child then tries again, and again sees immediately the comparison between the ideal and their current state of skill. With each attempt, the child learns without being told or scolded, how much improvement is occurring. Progress is all under the child's control. The child knows it, and also knows that better results can occur with each thoughtful attempt. The child learns to pay more attention (which in itself is a crucial skill in this age of multi-tasking). The child starts to take ownership over the effort. This is the same thing that happens when children draw pictures. Here, they are drawing pictures of letters and they get to do it where they know what the standard of excellence is and they get to privately assess how well they are doing. Cursive is an art form. If you belief art is important, you just have to support cursive teaching.

Since, reproducing a single letter is rather easy, the child knows that success if obtainable. Positive feedback, instant and specific, comes from the very act itself.

Without realizing it, children learning cursive are also learning self-discipline. I can't think of any school task more important than that.

As each letter is mastered, the child says "I can do this! I can even do this better!" Then it is just a matter of moving on to mastery of the next letter and eventually to the relatively easy task of joining letters. Maybe the best emotional boost of all is when children learn they have acquired this skill on their own. All the teacher did was show them how to hold and move a pencil and show them the objective. Nobody force-fed this new skill into their brain. They did it themselves.

I might add that once a child learns cursive they no longer have to feel embarrassed over their ignorance at not being able to read notes from Grandma

* * * *

If your school is shutting down cursive instruction, I hope you marshal opposition. If it is too late, maybe some kind of out-of-school program would work.

One more thing: help the school child in your life excel in school by getting them my inexpensive e-book, Better Grades, Less Effort, available from Amazon or Smashwords.com

Sources:

1. Klemm, W. R. What Learning Cursive Does for Your Brain. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201303/what-learning-cursive-does-your-brain

2. Blumenfeld, S. The Benefits of Cursive Writing. http://www.home-school.com/Articles/the-benefits-of-cursive-writing.php

3. Hatfield, Iris (handwriting coach). Top 10 Reasons to Learn Cursive. http://www.newamericancursive.com/learncursive

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Biological and Psychology Benefits of Learning Cursive

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In response to a growing trend where public schools are dropping the teaching of cursive, I wrote a blog post defending the value of learning cursive. 1 The new Common Core standards, adopted by 45 states, no longer require the teaching of cursive. But homeschoolers are being encouraged to teach cursive.

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Take Notes by Hand for Better Long-Term Comprehension – Association for Psychological Science

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Take Notes by Hand for Better Long-Term Comprehension – Association for Psychological Science

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Dust off those Bic ballpoints and college-ruled notebooks - research shows that taking notes by hand is better than taking notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long term. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Walk into any university lecture hall and you're likely to see row upon row of students sitting behind glowing laptop screens. Laptops in class have been controversial, due mostly to the many opportunities for distraction that they provide (online shopping, browsing Reddit, or playing solitaire, just to name a few). But few studies have examined how effective laptops are for the students who diligently take notes.

"Our new findings suggest that even when laptops are used as intended - and not for buying things on Amazon during class - they may still be harming academic performance," says psychological scientist Pam Mueller of Princeton University, lead author of the study.

Mueller was prompted to investigate the question after her own experience of switching from laptop to pen and paper as a graduate teaching assistant:

"I felt like I'd gotten so much more out of the lecture that day," says Mueller, who was working with psychology researcher Daniel Oppenheimer at the time. "Danny said that he'd had a related experience in a faculty meeting: He was taking notes on his computer, and looked up and realized that he had no idea what the person was actually talking about."

Mueller and Oppenheimer, who is now at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, conducted a series of studies to investigate whether their intuitions about laptop and longhand note-taking were true.

In the first study, 65 college students watched one of five TED Talks covering topics that were interesting but not common knowledge. The students, who watched the talks in small groups, were either given laptops (disconnected from Internet) or notebooks, and were told to use whatever strategy they normally used to take notes.

The students then completed three distractor tasks, including a taxing working memory task. A full 30 minutes later, they had to answer factual-recall questions (e.g., "Approximately how many years ago did the Indus civilization exist?") and conceptual-application questions (e.g., "How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?") based on the lecture they had watched.

The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.

The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand. Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by "mindless transcription."

"It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently," the researchers write.

Surprisingly, the researchers saw similar results even when they explicitly instructed the students to avoid taking verbatim notes, suggesting that the urge to do so when typing is hard to overcome.

The researchers also found that longhand note takers still beat laptop note takers on recall one week later when participants were given a chance to review their notes before taking the recall test. Once again, the amount of verbatim overlap was associated with worse performance on conceptual items.

"I don't anticipate that we'll get a mass of people switching back to notebooks," says Mueller, "but there are several new stylus technologies out there, and those may be the way to go to have an electronic record of one's notes, while also having the benefit of being forced to process information as it comes in, rather than mindlessly transcribing it."

"Ultimately, the take-home message is that people should be more aware of how they are choosing to take notes, both in terms of the medium and the strategy," Mueller concludes.

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Take Notes by Hand for Better Long-Term Comprehension

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Dust off those Bic ballpoints and college-ruled notebooks - research shows that taking notes by hand is better than taking notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long term. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

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Is Cursive Handwriting Still Important? | Scientific Learning

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Is Cursive Handwriting Still Important? | Scientific Learning

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Most states don't require us to teach handwriting any more. How will this impact today's students? Discover the latest research on cursive and its importance in the classroom.

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Why Handwriting Is Still Essential in the Keyboard Age - The New York Times

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Why Handwriting Is Still Essential in the Keyboard Age - The New York Times

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Do children in a keyboard world need to learn old-fashioned handwriting?

There is a tendency to dismiss handwriting as a nonessential skill, even though researchers have warned that learning to write may be the key to, well, learning to write.

And beyond the emotional connection adults may feel to the way we learned to write, there is a growing body of research on what the normally developing brain learns by forming letters on the page, in printed or manuscript format as well as in cursive.

In an article this year in The Journal of Learning Disabilities, researchers looked at how oral and written language related to attention and what are called "executive function" skills (like planning) in children in grades four through nine, both with and without learning disabilities.

Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington and the lead author on the study, told me that evidence from this and other studies suggests that "handwriting - forming letters - engages the mind, and that can help children pay attention to written language."

Last year in an article in The Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Laura Dinehart, an associate professor of early childhood education at Florida International University, discussed several possible associations between good handwriting and academic achievement: Children with good handwriting may get better grades because their work is more pleasant for teachers to read; children who struggle with writing may find that too much of their attention is consumed by producing the letters, and the content suffers.

But can we actually stimulate children's brains by helping them form letters with their hands? In a population of low-income children, Dr. Dinehart said, the ones who had good early fine-motor writing skills in prekindergarten did better later on in school. She called for more research on handwriting in the preschool years, and on ways to help young children develop the skills they need for "a complex task" that requires the coordination of cognitive, motor and neuromuscular processes.

"This myth that handwriting is just a motor skill is just plain wrong," Dr. Berninger said. "We use motor parts of our brain, motor planning, motor control, but what's very critical is a region of our brain where the visual and language come together, the fusiform gyrus, where visual stimuli actually become letters and written words." You have to see letters in "the mind's eye" in order to produce them on the page, she said. Brain imaging shows that the activation of this region is different in children who are having trouble with handwriting.

Functional brain scans of adults show a characteristic brain network that is activated when they read, and it includes areas that relate to motor processes. This suggested to scientists that the cognitive process of reading may be connected to the motor process of forming letters.

Karin James, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, did brain scans on children who did not yet know how to print. "Their brains don't distinguish letters; they respond to letters the same as to a triangle," she said.

After the children were taught to print, patterns of brain activation in response to letters showed increased activation of that reading network, including the fusiform gyrus, along with the inferior frontal gyrus and posterior parietal regions of the brain, which adults use for processing written language - even though the children were still at a very early level as writers.

"The letters they produce themselves are very messy and variable, and that's actually good for how children learn things," Dr. James said. "That seems to be one big benefit of handwriting."

Handwriting experts have struggled with the question of whether cursive writing confers special skills and benefits, beyond the benefits that print writing might provide. Dr. Berninger cited a 2015 study that suggested that starting around fourth grade, cursive skills conferred advantages in both spelling and composing, perhaps because the connecting strokes helped children connect letters into words.

For typically developing young children, typing the letters doesn't seem to generate the same brain activation. As we grow up, of course, most of us transition to keyboard writing, though like many who teach college students, I have struggled with the question of laptops in class, more because I worry about students' attention wandering than to promote handwriting. Still, studies on note taking have suggested that "college students who are writing on a keyboard are less likely to remember and do well on the content than if writing it by hand," Dr. Dinehart said.

Dr. Berninger said the research suggests that children need introductory training in printing, then two years of learning and practicing cursive, starting in grade three, and then some systematic attention to touch-typing.

Using a keyboard, and especially learning the positions of the letters without looking at the keys, she said, might well take advantage of the fibers that cross-communicate in the brain, since unlike with handwriting, children will use both hands to type.

"What we're advocating is teaching children to be hybrid writers," said Dr. Berninger, "manuscript first for reading - it transfers to better word recognition - then cursive for spelling and for composing. Then, starting in late elementary school, touch-typing."

As a pediatrician, I think this may be another case where we should be careful that the lure of the digital world doesn't take away significant experiences that can have real impacts on children's rapidly developing brains. Mastering handwriting, messy letters and all, is a way of making written language your own, in some profound ways.

"My overarching research focuses on how learning and interacting with the world with our hands has a really significant effect on our cognition," Dr. James said, "on how writing by hand changes brain function and can change brain development."
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Why Handwriting Is Still Essential in the Keyboard Age

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Do children in a keyboard world need to learn old-fashioned handwriting? There is a tendency to dismiss handwriting as a nonessential skill, even though researchers have warned that learning to write may be the key to, well, learning to write.

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The Scientific Case For Teaching Cursive Handwriting to Your Kids Is Weaker Than You Think

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The Scientific Case For Teaching Cursive Handwriting to Your Kids Is Weaker Than You Think

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A recent newcomer at one of the home-education groups my family attends explained that one of the frustrations that led her to take her son out of the school system was that he wasn't being allowed to write stories. It's something he loves to do, and it seems strange that a school should obstruct that enthusiasm. But the teachers declared he wasn't ready because he can't yet write in cursive.

To me this symbolizes all that is wrong with the strange obsession shared in many countries about how children learn to write. Often we teach them how to form letters based on the ones they see in their earliest reading books. And then we tell them that they must learn this hard-won skill all over again, using "joined-up" script. Yet there is no evidence that cursive has any benefits over other handwriting styles, such as manuscript, where the letters aren't joined, for the majority of children with normal development.

I should make it clear I'm not referring to handwriting itself, often seen as synonymous with cursive. There is ample evidence that writing by hand aids cognition in ways that typing does not: It's well worth teaching. And I confess I'm old-fashioned enough to think that, regardless of proven cognitive benefits, a good handwriting style is an important and valuable skill, not only when your laptop batteries run out but as an expression of personality and character. I should also say that cursive is a perfectly respectable, and occasionally lovely, style of writing, and children should have the opportunity to learn it if they have the time and inclination. My eldest child loves cursive and has the most elegant handwriting, in which I take great pride. And I love a good Victorian copperplate as much as anyone.

But imposing cursive from an early age is another matter. There should be a sound reason for it, as there should be reasons for teaching anything to children. Yet the grip that cursive exerts on much of teaching practice is sustained only by a disturbing blend of traditionalism, institutional inertia, folklore, prejudice, and bribery. It suggests that what teachers "know" about how children learn is sometimes more a product of the culture in which they're immersed than a result of research and data. It seems unlikely, in this regard, that teaching cursive is unique in educational practice. Which forces us to wonder: What happened to evidence?

Something like modern cursive emerged from Renaissance Italy, perhaps partly because lifting a delicate quill off and on the paper was apt to damage it and spatter ink. By the 19th century cursive handwriting was considered a mark of good education and character. Teaching of manuscript lettering (not joined up) only began in the United States in the 1920s, to some controversy. In many countries today, including the U.S. and Canada, children are generally taught to write in manuscript in the first grade and are then taught cursive from second or third grade. In France, children are expected to use it as soon as they start to write in kindergarten, but in Mexico only manuscript is taught. The U.S. and United Kingdom leave some discretion for when cursive is taught, but there is the assumption that it will become the pupil's normal mode of writing. When cursive is taught, it may become compulsory, so children may be marked down if they don't write this way. In France, the cursive form is virtually universal and highly standardized, and children are discouraged from developing their own handwriting style.

Despite this diversity, the teaching of cursive is often accompanied by a strong sense of propriety. It's simply the right thing to do. If you ask teachers why (I've tried), they'll probably look at you oddly before offering a variety of answers, which will probably include these:

* It's faster.
* It helps with spelling.
* It helps with dyslexia.

What does research say on these issues? It has consistently failed to find any real advantage of cursive over other forms of handwriting. "There is no conclusive evidence that there is a benefit for learning cursive for a child's cognitive development," says Karin Harman James, an associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, who studies early brain development as a function of learning experiences.

James cautions that the issue is difficult to study because it's hard to find children whose educational situation differs only in the style of handwriting. What's more, a lot of the "evidence" that does get quoted is rather old and of questionable quality, and some of the findings are contradictory. Simply put, our real understanding of how children respond to different writing styles is surprisingly patchy and woefully inadequate.

The grip that cursive has on teaching is sustained by folklore and prejudice.

Let's take a closer look, though, at what we do know. Many people (including teachers) swear that cursive is faster, and cite not only the fact that there is less lifting of pen from paper but also their own experience. Needless to say, the latter point is like me saying that English is a faster language than French because I can speak and read it more quickly. Of course that's true for something you've done all your life.

Tests on writing speed have been fairly inconclusive in the past. But one of the best and most recent was conducted in 2013 by Florence Bara, now at the University of Toulouse in France, and Marie-France Morin of the University of Sherbrooke in Canada. They compared writing speeds for French-speaking primary pupils in their respective countries. While cursive is quite rigidly enforced in France, teachers in Canada are more free to decide which style to teach, and when. Some Canadians teach manuscript first and cursive later; some introduce cursive straight away in first grade.

So was cursive faster than manuscript? No, it was slower. But fastest of all was a personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript developed spontaneously by pupils around the fourth to fifth grade. Even in France, a quarter of the French pupils who were taught cursive exclusively and were still mostly using it in the fourth grade, had largely abandoned it for a mixed style by the fifth grade. They had apparently imbibed manuscript style from their reading experience (it more closely resembles print), even without being taught it explicitly.

While pupils writing in cursive were slower on average, their handwriting was also typically more legible than that of pupils taught only manuscript. But the mixed style allowed for greater speed with barely any deficit in legibility.

Corey Amaro / Willows95988.Typepad.Com

On the strength of these findings, Bara and Morin hesitated to make any recommendation for teaching a particular style except to say that it's unwise to demand strict adherence to any of them-contrary to the French tradition. That idea is supported by Virginia Berninger, a professor of education psychology at the University of Washington. "Evidence supports teaching both formats of handwriting and then letting each student choose which works best for him or her," she writes in a 2012 paper.

Does cursive help with writing and reading disorders such as dyslexia? There's some evidence that it might. "Some children who have trouble printing letters do benefit from learning cursive because they do not have to take their pencil off of the paper as much," says James. But, she adds, "these children are the exception, and the results cannot be generalized to all children learning to write."

In fact, for typical children, there's some reason to think manuscript has advantages. Because cursive writing is more challenging for motor coordination and for sheer complexity of the letters, some early research from the 1930s to the 1960s indicated that children develop their writing skills sooner and more legibly with manuscript. Because they have to lift pen from paper between each letter, children prepare better for the next letter. Some recent studies suggest that freeing up cognitive resources that are otherwise devoted to the challenge of simply making the more elaborate cursive forms on paper will leave children more articulate and accurate in what they write.

There's also some suggestion that the difference in appearance between cursive and manuscript could inhibit the acquisition of reading skills, making it harder for children to transfer skills between learning to read and learning to write because they simply don't see cursive in books. Reading and literacy expert Randall Wallace, of Missouri State University, says "it seems odd and perhaps distracting that early readers, just getting used to decoding manuscript, would be asked to learn another writing style."

How many of us have great-grandmother's letters in the attic, written in beautiful cursive?

It's not clear, however, how much such difficulties truly show up. In a 2009 study in Quebec, Bara and Morin found no reading difficulties in primary-school children that correlated with learning cursive. Yet a more recent study by the pair and their colleagues, comparing Canadian and French primary schoolers, showed that those who learned only cursive handwriting performed more poorly than those who learned manuscript, or both styles, in recognizing and identifying the sound and name of individual letters.

Regardless of how significant or lasting these differences are, it makes sense that they should exist. There's good evidence, both behavioral and neurological, that a "haptic" (touch-related) sense of letter shapes can aid early reading skills, indicating a cognitive interaction between motor production and visual recognition of letters. That's one reason, incidentally, why it's valuable to train children to write by hand at all, not just to use a keyboard.

But whether it makes any difference, in this regard, which form of handwriting is taught is less clear. In a brain-imaging study on older children, James says that she observed "no brain differences between the two styles of writing." The type of handwriting doesn't matter to such haptic feedback and reinforcement, she says, as long as children are creating the letter by hand and not tracing it.

In short, the jury is out over whether it is better to learn manuscript, cursive, or both forms of handwriting. There may be pros and cons in all cases. And even if being taught both styles might have some advantages, it's not clear that those cognitive resources and classroom hours couldn't be better deployed in other ways.

Why then do some educational systems place such importance on learning cursive? How, if not by consulting the evidence, are educational policy and teaching practices formed?

"My impression is that cursive is still taught primarily because of parental demand and tradition, rather than because there is any scientific basis for its superiority in learning," says Wallace. What's particularly troubling, though, is how inertia and preconceptions seem to distort perception and policy at the expense of the scientific evidence.

In 2011, Bara and Morin decided to take a close look at why teachers do what they do. They and their coworkers interviewed 45 primary-school teachers in Quebec and France about how and why they teach handwriting.

The results were sobering. Teachers had only sketchy knowledge, at best, of what research showed on the subject, especially when it came to the motor-function aspects of forming letters. Their views were, it seemed, formed primarily by the culture and institutional setting in which they worked.

While Canadian teachers were fairly mixed in their opinions about whether cursive was harder to learn than manuscript, and which should be taught when, French teachers were fairly unanimous. Four-fifths of them insisted that cursive was no more complex than manuscript, and three-quarters said that cursive is faster-a belief contradicted by Bara and Morin's studies. More than half of the Quebec teachers thought that learning manuscript first assists learning to read, while only 10 percent of French teachers thought so.

In other words, teachers who are recommended by their education ministry to teach cursive, as in France, seem to become convinced that there are sound reasons for doing so, despite the lack of evidence. And teachers in Canada who decide for themselves to introduce cursive as soon as possible seem likewise to believe that there are advantages that justify this decision.

How much else in education is determined by what's "right," rather than what's supported by evidence?

Just because the French situation is probably one of the least sinister or harmful examples of state brainwashing doesn't mean we should shy away from calling it by its real name. Even in the more relaxed teaching practices in Quebec there's a clear sign of the well attested psychological phenomenon in which we "find" evidence to support the decision we have already made anyway, and apply less rigorous judgment when our preconceptions are apparently confirmed.

Indeed, the way rational argument on the question of cursive handwriting so often evaporates suggests that there's some kind of deep emotional investment at stake. When I wrote previously for a British magazine challenging the hegemony of cursive, it received one of the biggest responses the magazine had experienced. Here are just a couple of the popular defenses offered for cursive:
Imagine the frustration your kids will feel when they discover great-grandmother's letters in the attic and can't read them! Without cursive, you're divorcing them from the past. Cursive is beautiful, whereas manuscript looks childish.
But cursive is not another language. If you need to learn to read it, that takes an hour at most. Besides, how many of us have great-grandmother's letters in the attic, written in beautiful cursive? (In the U.S. there are even suggestions that learning cursive is somehow patriotic and that without it people would not be able to read the Declaration of Independence.) And while I relish the elegance of Jane Austen's original manuscripts, it's plain that many people's cursive is rather far from lovely, or indeed from legible. Manuscript, meanwhile, is only as childish as you decree it to be.

Beliefs about cursive are something of a hydra: You cut off one head, and another sprouts. These beliefs propagate through both the popular and the scientific literature, in a strange mixture of uncritical reporting and outright invention, which depends on myths often impossible to track to a reliable source.

Take a 2014 article in The New York Times about the pros and cons of handwriting. This alluded to a 2012 study allegedly demonstrating that cursive may benefit children with developmental dysgraphia-motor-control difficulties in forming letters-and that it may aid in preventing the reversal and inversion of letters. It's a common claim, and so I began to delve into it.

I was taken to a paper by education researcher Diane Montgomery, describing a study that used an approach called the Cognitive Process Strategies for Spelling (CPSS) to try to help pupils with spelling difficulties, generally diagnosed as dyslexic. This method involves teaching these children cursive, with no comparison to other handwriting styles.

Cursive was chosen for use with CPSS, says Montgomery, because "experiments in teaching cursive ... have proved highly successful in achieving writing targets earlier and for a larger number of children." In support of that claim she cites two studies in journals from the early 1990s so obscure that even the British Library doesn't stock them, but which were in any case conducted on non-dyslexic cohorts and so say nothing about benefits for dyslexics.

Montgomery writes that other dyslexia remediation projects have used cursive too, but cites only one "proven" advantage: a 1998 study allegedly reporting that "cursive script appeared to facilitate writing speed." Not only is this claim contradicted by Bara and Morin's work, but the 1998 paper doesn't even make it. It simply reports how, for children taught a new cursive style in Australian schools, faster writing slightly decreases legibility.

Montgomery also cites a 1976 paper that allegedly advocates "the exclusive use of cursive from the beginning." Except that it doesn't do that at all. It describes a study comparing letter reversals and transpositions for 21 children at one school, taught cursive from the outset, with 27 from another taught first manuscript and then cursive. The first set showed slightly fewer of these mistakes, but the author acknowledged that, given the tiny sample size, "we in no way wish to offer the present data as documenting proof of the superiority of cursive over manuscript writing."

So there we have it. But how many people will now be convinced that the benefits of cursive have been affirmed by The New York Times, based on the findings of academic research? No wonder teachers are confused.

Is there, then, any scientific case for making cursive writing a standard component of the primary curriculum? Wallace thinks not. Given the unproven benefits and the demands it places on time and effort, he feels that "the reasons to reject cursive handwriting as a formal part of the curriculum far outweigh the reasons to keep it."

Others, like Bara, Berninger, and James, are more ambivalent, but find no evidence that cursive is best. Some feel that in certain respects it is worse than manuscript-it is slower, and time is wasted in learning (or sometimes relearning) this difficult skill. On the other hand, pupils differ, and there's some potential value in giving them the option of finding what style suits them best, as well as exposure to different fonts so that they might generalize their letter-recognition skills. Or perhaps we should trust that children will find their own "hand" naturally, developing shortcuts for speed and so forth without having to be taught these in some rigid, formal, and standardized fashion.

There's certainly a debate to be had. But it's not one that seems to be taking place in schools or education ministries. And every time I hear of a young child turned off writing because he lacks the fine motor skills needed to master cursive, or prohibited from expressing herself freely because she's not using the approved script, I see that our groundless obsession with cursive is not only pointless but can be destructive.

This must surely lead us to wonder how much else in education is determined by a belief in what is "right," unsupported by evidence. Education and learning are difficult to pin down by research. Teaching practices vary, it's often impossible to identify control groups, and socioeconomic factors play a role. But it's often the case that the very lack of hard, objective evidence about an issue, especially in the social sciences, encourages a reliance on dogma instead. The danger is greater in education, which, like any issue connected to child rearing and development, is prone to emotive views.

All the same, there is some evidence. But it seems little heeded either by teachers or, more significantly, the policymakers who guide their practice. Too often, education is instead a political football. In 2013 in the U.K., the former Secretary of State for Education, conservative politician Michael Gove, became loathed by teachers for instituting changes to the national curriculum based on his own preconceptions about how and what children should learn. Gove's notoriously dismissive attitude to specialist advice was made explicit in a recent interview, where he said that "people in this country have had enough of experts." Such blithe disregard of research is not, needless to say, confined to the political right; education and learning are vulnerable to ideologies of all persuasions.

There needs to be wider examination of the extent to which evidence informs education. Do we heed it enough? Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms? To judge from how children learn handwriting, the signs aren't good.

Philip Ball is a writer based in London. His latest book is The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China. He is a left-hander who does not use cursive. As for what that does to his handwriting, he will let you be the judge:

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Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths - Issue 40: Learning - Nautilus

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A recent newcomer at one of the home-education groups my family attends explained that one of the frustrations that led her to take her son out of the school system was that he wasn't being allowed to write stories. It's something he loves to do, and it seems strange that a school should obstruct that enthusiasm.

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Handwriting is coming back in style for scientific and practical reasons for adults and children — Quartz

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Handwriting is coming back in style for scientific and practical reasons for adults and children — Quartz

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The proliferation of devices in daily life has led to an international handwriting crisis. Teachers, parents, and politicians around the world are debating why they should bother spending time teaching what some say is a dated skill. Accustomed as we are to speedy, wifi-connected devices, we've come to prize the efficiency of typing and there seems to be no point to picking up a pen and scribbling on paper when keyboarding is so convenient, neat, and easy to copy-and-send.

Yet print and its squiggly cousin cursive are making a comeback in some US schools after scientific studies have proven their cognitive utility and because parents are clamoring for the preservation of the practical skill. For example, starting this fall in Louisiana, third to 12th graders will again study penmanship after a law was passed making it a requirement in 2016 (teachers got one year to prepare). Fourteen states in total are now including cursive in curricula after a decade where it seemed doomed to become an abandoned and outdated art.

Busting penmanship myths

It's not just nostalgia-the efficiency of the keyboard may be overstated, at least in some cases.

"There's a myth that in the era of computers we don't need handwriting. That's not what our research is showing. What we found was that children until about grade six were writing more words, writing faster, and expressing more ideas if they could use handwriting-printing or cursive-than if they used the keyboard," University of Washington professor Virginia Berninger told the Washington Post. A leading expert in the field of handwriting education research, Berninger's extensive work with students in elementary school indicates that learning handwriting improves kids' ability to think.

The reasons for taking handwriting seriously are worth considering even if you're not a kid or a parent worried about education. Anyone can benefit from penmanship's cognitive benefits, whether you're taking notes at a meeting or just trying to figure out what you think.

Engaging the brain

Brain scans during the two activities also show that forming words by hand as opposed to on a keyboard leads to increased brain activity (pdf). Scientific studies of children and adults show that wielding a pen when taking notes, rather than typing, is associated with improved long-term information retention, better thought organization, and increased ability to generate ideas.

No one can say why this is exactly, though researchers surmise one reason may be because when we write by hand, every letter of every word demands different actions, engaging the brain more. When we type, we repeat the same moves over and over again, whatever the word.

It may well be that the physicality of shaping letters cements concepts in the mind. For example, to type the word "typing," I made the same motion on the keyboard six times, choosing which letter to type but not forming them. But if I were to write the same thing by hand, I'd have to shape six different letters and put them together. That takes more effort and seems to both demand more of the brain and leave a deeper imprint on the mind than typing. That imprint appears to be critical when learning new things.

Making choices while we write

Another reason that penning is more effective than typing seems to stem from handwriting's limitations. Handwriting when taking notes forces us to make choices.

Researchers from Princeton University concluded in three studies of adult students taking notes on laptops and in longhand that transcription was less effective than selective translation of the information. "We found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand...whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers' tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning," they wrote.

Perhaps when we capture less of what is said verbatim, we pay more attention. Since we can't scribble everything that's being said as fast as we can type it, we end up forced to make choices when handwriting, processing the information as we take it in instead of putting it all down automatically.

Reading into the past and future

There are practical reasons to keep the art of penmanship alive, putting questions of cognition aside.

Louisiana state senator Beth Mizell introduced the cursive bill at a constituent's suggestion after he told her that the high school students he hired for summer jobs couldn't read old handwritten land-transfer documents. (She didn't give details about what these particular jobs involved, but it is true, generally speaking, that even when old records are scanned into new computerized systems, they may still contain cursive.

Mizell also heard from parents that their kids couldn't read old family letters or even sign documents. "People were really upset that kids were no longer being taught to write cursive," she told the Shreveport Times. "They print where the signature would be. It's just little things like that."

Take it from the greats

For adults wondering why they should handwrite when they have no time, rarely have to take in information that comes in lecture form, and have already established a signature, there are also some unscientific reasons to pick up a pen. For one, great writers often drafted by hand and then typed, even after the advent of the typewriter-Susan Sontag, Truman Capote, and Vladimir Nabokov, to name a few. Today, Joyce Carol Oates continues with this tradition, though she's also on Twitter and doesn't shirk technology generally. Same goes for Quentin Tarantino, who says poetry can't be typed on a computer, and Neil Gaiman, whose novels are drafted in notebooks.

Plus, there's the priceless benefit of limiting distraction. Technology can be a trap. The simple act of shutting your laptop and putting pen to paper can help you to improve focus. There's less chance you'll end up spending your time online reading tweets and articles when you should be writing.

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Keyboards are overrated. Cursive is back and it's making us smarter

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The proliferation of devices in daily life has led to an international handwriting crisis. Teachers, parents, and politicians around the world are debating why they should bother spending time teaching what some say is a dated skill. Accustomed as we are to speedy, wifi-connected devices, we've come to prize the efficiency of typing and there seems to...

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The Research on Cursive Handwriting | The OT Toolbox

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The Research on Cursive Handwriting | The OT Toolbox

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The Research on Cursive Handwriting

Over the past 30 days, we've shared cursive handwriting tips, strategies, activity ideas, free downloads including cursive letter flashcards, tricks, and everything you need to know on how to teach cursive handwriting. Today, as a final post in this cursive handwriting series, we wanted to share the science behind cursive. Below, you'll find the research on This post is part of our 31 day series on teaching cursive. You'll want to c heck out the For more ways to address the underlying skills needed for cursive handwriting. These are the studies that explore cursive, the evidence, and the sources you need for teaching and learning to write in cursive.
How to Teach Cursive Writing page where you can find all of the posts in this series.
handwriting, check out the handwriting drop-down tab at the top of this site.

Cursive Handwriting Research

This link explores There is Practice matters! the brain and how it relates to cursive handwriting. Some important areas that are referenced include findings of changes occurring in the brains that allow a child to overcome motor challenges when children are exposed to cursive handwriting. Additionally, the article describes a study in which has shown that physical instruction such as cursive handwriting lessons actually changed the participant's brain structure.
some research indicating cursive handwriting can be a valuable tool for motor control challenges such as those who struggle with dyslexia or dysgraphia.
It's been found that there are distinct neural pathways that develop when we physically write letters.
euroimaging studies have revealed an cognitive processes involving primarily left-hemisphere brain areas that are involved in writing tasks, finger writing, and imagined writing.
Quality of handwriting has been shown to enhance writing skills, reading, and learning or memory of language.

Cursive handwriting, like printed handwriting becomes more individualistic and develops a personal style, especially during grades 3 and 4, and as children develop.
There are studies that have shown improved handwriting abilities through use of multi-sensory activities (Case-Smith et al., 2012; Keller, 2001; Lust & Donica, 2011).
You'll find more research on handwriting in The Handwriting Book:

Need help with the underlying skills needed for handwriting? Start here on our Handwriting resources page.

The Handwriting Book is a huge resource when it comes to addressing handwriting concerns. It's a book written by 10 occupational therapists and physical therapists and refers to every underlying skill related to written work. This is a tool for therapists, teachers, and parents.

References:
Case-Smith, J., Holland, T., Lane, A., & White, S. (2012). Effect of a co-teaching handwriting program for first graders: One-group pretest-posttest design. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 66(4), 396-405.
Keller, M. (2001). Handwriting club: Using sensory integration strategies to improve handwriting. Intervention in School and Clinic, 37(1), 9.
Lust, C. A., & Donica, D. K. (2011). Effectiveness of a handwriting readiness program in Head Start: A two-group controlled trial. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 65(5), 560-8.

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Over the past 30 days, we've shared cursive handwriting tips, strategies, activity ideas, free downloads including cursive letter flashcards, tricks, and everything you need to know on how to teach cursive handwriting. Today, as a final post in this cursive handwriting series, we wanted to share the science behind cursive.