An interesting article, one that I want to come back to when I have more time. Most of my tecaher years have been spent in grade 7 and 8 classrooms and I can tell you that it is my recollection that there has been a sharp decline in the number of students who, by the time they recah 13 and 14 years of age, choose to present their work in cursive. Most “handwritten” were presented using printed letters. I suspect that this is due to a drop in the amount of time spent in earlier grades on cursive writing.

I don’t think that you’ll find many primary and junior teachers spedning the 15 or 20 minutes a day on explicit handwriting instruction that was part of my growing up. When I began my teaching career nearly 30 years ago, even grade 7 and 8 teachers were required to begin their day with handwriting/penmanship practice. A passage was written on the board when students came in each day, and this was the first task for the entire school at which I was teaching. The principal was so insistent on this that penmanship books were randomly collected from each class every week by our school leader!

THe idea that learning to “encode” as well as “decode” thinking makes total sense. The idea of developing fluency in both makes total sense. I have no reservation about this at all. I also have no reservation around the idea of explicit instruction. It makes sense that the more fluent one is in encoding thinking using any medium, whether it be handwriting, music, dance or visual arts, the more proficient they will be.

Here’s the 21st century question: To what extent do students encounter others’ ideas expressed in cursive writing? The art of letter writing used to be primary encounter, didn’t it? And that has fast become a lost art. Most teachers beyond elementary school now prefer word processed work to handwritten material. And, certainly, the idea of submitting any work to employer or college prof is unthinkable today.

Secondary question: How much instruction, and how early, should students be receiving in word processinig skills. The most useful course I ever took was my grade nine “typing” course. ALthough I can emply handwriting in my day-to-day life, the QWERTY keyboard is my primary thinking and communication tool.

Looking forward to conversation on this; it is one of the topics that often comes up at staff room tables in the elementary schools of which I have been a part!

There isn’t much research to support teaching handwriting over keyboarding.  It seems that people who were originally trained with handwriting feel a sentimental attachment for (ie: all of us).

The well-known study of computers vs handwriting is Cunningham & Stanovich (1990), back in the dark ages of computers. Grade-1 students were trained new words using handwriting, tiles and a computer keyboard and then tested on spelling .  The handwriting group did very slightly better than the computer group, but the novelty of using a keyboard might have influenced that result.  In any case, any advantage of handwriting practice did not extend to subsequently reading those ?learned? words.

Graham, Harris & Fink (2000) demonstrated that improving accuracy and fluency of penmanship has a causal benefit to improving compositional skills, extending several studies that demonstrated a correlation relationship.  Scepticism is in order; this effect may show that good handwriters requires less cognitive effort to produce text, analogous to how decoding skills improve comprehension by reducing the cognitive load of word recognition.  It seems plausible that teaching typing would have the same benefit if subsequent composition is electronic.

There is may be a neurological argument for handwriting.  Brain scans indicate that motor processes developed to produce letters are also activated when we observe those letters (Longcamp, Anton, Roth & Velay 2003), suggesting that letter recognition is not purely visual.  The same team later compared handwriting to keyboarding in a traditional study of preschoolers and found superior letter recognition skills (Longcamp, Zerbato-Poudou & Velay 2005).  However, there is no indication whether this effect is lasting, whether it extends to whole words, or whether it has any significance to the practice of reading.

Even if motor training is beneficial for initially learning to recognize the letters of the alphabet, that is only an argument for tracing letters and forming them in clay, and does not justify practicing handwriting to a skilled level.

I’m sure there will always be hobbyists that collect old pens and learn how to use them.  But pen and pencil factories will probably start to close soon, as typewriter manufacturers and goose-feather quill farmers did in their time.