[CSPS] Write off?

Wed Oct 11 13:11:34 CDT 2006

Cursive, foiled again.

The Handwriting Is on the Wall
Researchers See a Downside as Keyboards Replace Pens in Schools

By Margaret Webb Pressler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 11, 2006; A01

The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it's threatening 
to finish off longhand.

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the 
class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students 
wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. 
students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the 
primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, 
more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.

Many educators shrug. Stacked up against teaching technology, foreign 
languages and the material on standardized tests, penmanship 
instruction seems a relic, teachers across the region say. But 
academics who specialize in writing acquisition argue that it's 
important cognitively, pointing to research that shows children 
without proficient handwriting skills produce simpler, shorter 
compositions, from the earliest grades.

Scholars who study original documents say the demise of handwriting 
will diminish the power and accuracy of future historical research. 
And others simply lament the loss of handwritten communication for 
its beauty, individualism and intimacy.

"It's like so many other things in our society -- there's a sense of 
loss for what once was," said Laura B. Smolken, a professor of 
elementary education and early childhood development at the 
University of Virginia.

At Keene Mill Elementary in Springfield, Debbie Mattocks teaches 
cursive once a week to her gifted-and-talented group of third-graders 
-- mainly so they can read it. All their poems and stories are typed. 
Children in Fairfax County schools are taught keyboarding beginning 
in kindergarten.

"I can't think of any other place you need cursive as an adult other 
than to sign your name," she said. "Cursive -- that is so low on the 
priority list, we really could care less. We are much more concerned 
that these kids pass their SOLs [standardized tests], and that 
doesn't require a bit of cursive."

Older students who never mastered handwriting say it doesn't affect 
their grades. "A lot of kids have just awful handwriting. . . . 
Teachers don't take off points for poor handwriting," said Matt 
Paragamian, a 10th-grader at St. Albans School in Northwest 
Washington. Many of his classmates take notes in class on their own 
laptops and do homework on computers.

Until the 1970s, penmanship was a separate daily lesson through sixth 
grade, said Dennis Williams, national product manager for 
Zaner-Bloser Handwriting, the most widely used penmanship curriculum. 
At its peak in the 1940s and '50s, most teachers insisted on as much 
as two hours a week, but a 2003 Vanderbilt University survey of 
primary-grade teachers found that most now spend 10 minutes a day or 
less on the subject. To adapt to this new reality, the Zaner-Bloser 
method has been changed to a 15-minute daily plan.

In Montgomery County, schools "don't have separate handwriting 
instruction for handwriting's sake," said spokesman Brian Edwards. 
Only a handful of schools in Prince George's County teach 
handwriting. Fairfax educators struggle to include penmanship.

"It is hard to fit it in," said Pat Fege, the county's language arts 
coordinator. The goal now is only to produce legible handwriting, 
Fege said. "It's just not the vehicle it once was."

There are those who say the culture is at a crossroads, turning 
permanently from the written wCord to the typed one. If handwriting 
becomes a lost form of communication, does it matter?

It was at U-Va. that researchers recently discovered a previously 
unknown poem by Robert Frost, written in his signature script. 
Handwritten documents are more valuable to researchers, historians 
say, because their authenticity can be confirmed. Students also find 
them more intriguing.

"They feel closer to that person as an actual human, that somebody 
actually wrote that just like me," said Jim Mohr, a professor of U.S. 
history at the University of Oregon at Eugene, who wrote a book on 
diaries from the Civil War. "There's a kind of personal authenticity 
to individual writing that's hard to capture any other way."

The loss of handwriting also may be a cognitive opportunity missed. 
The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into 
written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Several academic 
studies have found that good handwriting skills at a young age can 
help children express their thoughts better -- a lifelong benefit. 
Children who don't learn correct technique find it harder to write by 
hand, so they avoid it. Schools that do teach handwriting often stop 
after third grade -- right after kids learn cursive. By the time 
computers are more widely used in classrooms for writing, perhaps in 
fourth or fifth grade, many children already have decided they don't 
like to write.

In one of the studies, Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, 
who studies the acquisition of writing, experimented with a group of 
first-graders in Prince George's County who could write only 10 to 12 
letters per minute. The kids were given 15 minutes of handwriting 
instruction three times a week. After nine weeks, they had doubled 
their writing speed and their expressed thoughts were more complex. 
He also found corresponding increases in their sentence construction skills.

But Graham worries that students who remain printers, rather than 
writing in cursive, need more time to take notes or write essays for 
the SAT. Teachers may say they don't deduct for bad handwriting in 
class, but research tells another story, he said.

When adults are given the same composition written in good 
handwriting and poor handwriting, "they still give lower grades for 
ideation and quality of writing if the text is less legible," he said.

Indeed, the SAT essays written in cursive had slightly higher average 
scores than those written in print, according to the College Board.

It doesn't take much to teach better handwriting skills. At some 
schools in Prince George's County, elementary school students use a 
program called Handwriting Without Tears for 15 minutes a day. They 
learn the correct formation of manuscript letters through second 
grade, and cursive letters in third grade.

In a recent daily exercise, the second-graders at Yorktown Elementary 
School in Bowie carefully formed letters on individual chalkboards -- 
first with a wet sponge, then with a tissue, then in chalk and 
finally in pencil in a workbook. In the future, these kids will 
produce far more legible letters than kids without this kind of 
specialized instruction, said Lynne Maydag, the school's handwriting 
coordinator.

There are always going to be some kids who struggle with handwriting 
because of their particular neurological wiring, learning issues or 
poor fine motor skills, teachers said in interviews. For those kids 
in particular, the growing dominance of typing is liberating because 
they can write without stumbling over letter formation. Educators 
often point to this factor in support of keyboarding.

Paragamian, the St. Albans sophomore, was never great at handwriting, 
and says he can barely read or write cursive even now.

It doesn't bother him. "These days it doesn't matter," he said, 
"because any important thing you turn in is typed."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001475_pf.html

Jonathan Coopersmith
Associate Professor
Dept. of History
MS 4236
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas  77843-4236
979.845.8584
979.862.4314 fax

Secretary
History & Philosophy of Science Section (L)
American Association for the Advancement of Science
www.aaas.org 
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