Do children in a keyboard world need to learn old-fashioned handwriting?
There is a tendency to dismiss handwriting as a nonessential skill.
And beyond the emotional connection some adults 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, 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, associate professor of early childhood education at Florida International University, talked about several possible associations between good handwriting and academic achievement: Children with good handwriting get better grades because their work is more pleasant for teachers to read; children who struggle with writing find that too much of their attention is consumed by producing the letters, and the content suffers.
In a population of low-income children, 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 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," 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" 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 was 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.
"The letters they produce themselves are very messy and variable, and that's actually good for how children learn things," James said. "That seems to be one big benefit of handwriting."
Berninger cited a 2015 study that suggested that starting around fourth grade, cursive skills conferred advantages in 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.
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," Dinehart said.
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.
"What we're advocating is teaching children to be hybrid writers," said 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."
Dr. Perri Klass is professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University and medical director of Reach Out and Read, a national childhood literacy program.
ActiveStyle on 07/11/2016