To hand write or to type? How can schools balance the rise of digital technology with evidence that handwriting could be better for learning? By Frazer Cairns, Head of Campus, Angela Erickson, Head of Middle School English and Seán McHugh, Digital Literacy Coach Dover Campus Handwriting is in decline. Many of us will have written a shopping list or a note on a post-it in the past few days but few of us will have drafted a long text—a ‘proper’ letter, for example—using a pen. It is not, of course, true that everybody has the same access to alternatives such as email—even though the number of users had increased tenfold from 1999 to 2013, nearly 75% of all internet users in the world live in just 20 countries. The remaining 25% are distributed among the other 178 countries, each representing less than 1% of total.1 That said, a survey in the UK of 2,000 people in 2015 reported that one in three respondents had not written anything by hand in the previous six months. On average they had not put pen to paper in the previous 41 days.2 But if handwritten copy is fast disappearing in the workplace and at home, what effect does this have— should this have—in schools? In the United States ‘cursive’ writing (in which the pen is not raised between each letter) has been dropped from the Common Core Curriculum Standards. Forty three states no longer require the teaching of cursive handwriting in public schools. Finland, a country whose education system rocketed to prominence by occupying the top spot when PISA tests were first introduced, has also announced that from 2016 students will be taught only print
handwriting and will spend more time learning keyboard skills. However, there is concern in some quarters that giving up handwriting may affect how future generations learn to read or, indeed, might hinder their overall learning. Marieke Longchamp and Jean-Luc Velay, two researchers at the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Aix-Marseille University, have studied children learning to write. They found that children who learned to write letters by hand were better at recognising them than those that learned to type them on a computer.3 The evidence suggests that handwriting provides on-line signals from a variety of sources including vision, motor commands and kinaesthetic feedback. In contrast, typing predominantly requires only visual discrimination. Though there is less robust research in this area, there is also evidence that writing in cursive seems to have some benefits as the brain has to visually track rapidly changing positions of the pencil and control hand and finger movements. To learn such skills, the brain must improve its control over eye-movement saccades and the processing of visual feedback to provide corrective feedback. According to William Klemm, “Both tracking and movement control require much more engagement of neural resources in producing cursive or related handwriting methods.”4 Daniel Oppenheimer and Pam Mueller’s research indicates that older students who took handwritten notes retained the information learned for a longer
duration of time. After a week, those who took longhand notes performed better than the laptop users on both factual and conceptual questions. For Mueller and Oppenheimer, the reason is clear: because working on paper by hand was a more laborious process, people tended to paraphrase information. This required them to carry out a preliminary mental process of summarising and comprehension. By contrast those working on a keyboard tended to take verbatim notes. Transcription, it seems, requires little mental engagement. In a recent interview, Mueller explained: “There is such thing as a desirable difficulty, having a little bit of difficulty when you’re trying to learn something is actually beneficial and longhand notetaking might be just that for us.” Maria Alonso reached a similar conclusion: “Since handwriting is slower, the pace of the inner voice allows more time for rehearsal and facilitates in a greater scale the retention.”5 All that said there are, of course, a host of advantages to typing rather than handwriting in many circumstances. There is clearly the question of speed: an average person hand writes at 31 words per minute for memorised text and 22 words per minute while copying whereas an average professional typist types usually in speeds of 50 to 80 words per minute. More than this, though, online tools also allow one to read, review, and edit text almost anywhere; there is access to proofreading tools such as a thesaurus and a dictionary; one can cut, copy, paste, drag and
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm http://media.cfhdocmail.com/2012/06/handwriting-dying-slow-death.html 3 http://www.ac-nice.fr/iencannet/ien/file/apc/velay_longcamp.pdf 4 https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201502/improve-reading-hand-eye-coordination-learning-cursive 5 Alonso, M., A., P. Metacognition and sensorimotor components underlying the process of handwriting and keyboarding and their impact on Learning. An analysis from the perspective of embodied psychology, p.266. 2015. 1
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