In third grade, Jonah had a mediocre teacher. During that year, his handwriting disintegrated. I went to the school principal and showed her work that he did in September and work that he completed in May. There was a huge drop. He never learned how to write in script.
The principal told me that it didn’t matter. She said in the future, everyone would simply type everything. I argued that he still needed to complete tests, take class notes, and even write the SATs with an old fashioned number 2 pencil. But she poo-pooed me.
Jonah’s handwriting is now serviceable, but I think that he would complete class assignments faster with better handwriting. I also wonder whether teachers unconsciously judge him based on his handwriting. Maybe his in-class essays would have another sentence or two, if the writing process wasn’t so annoying for him. I wish I hired a tutor to work on this skill when he was younger.
Now, scientists are showing that children learn better when they write out information. The writing process spurs retention.
Schools haven’t got the memo. The new Common Core calls for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard. Parents need to tell schools that handwriting matters.
Apt. 11d 
Our son’s school is starting everybody in the 3rd grade on chromebooks, so I’ve been thinking about this. I still deeply hate cursive writing from my own experience learning to write. I do think I remember better when I take notes by hand, but so far as I’ve noticed, it doesn’t matter if the notes are actually legible even to myself. The school will teach them cursive, but it’s pretty obvious he’s going to be horrible at it and I’m hoping the typing goes much better.
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“Now, scientists are showing that children learn better when they write out information. The writing process spurs retention.”
Kinesthetic learning. Teachers already know this. 🙂 It’s administrators that are all “yay! laptops! ipads!”
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Believe me, teachers are not judging–I tell my students all the time, “Your handwriting will not be the worst I’ve ever seen, don’t worry about it!”
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My own handwriting has gotten atrocious! I’ve even lost that semi-permanent callous I used to have on my middle finger, where a pen or pencil presses.
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The plus is, my kids can’t forge attendance notes, because mine are in script and they can’t.
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I’ve been wondering about note-taking by hand v computer and was coming to the conclusion that retention was better with writing. The Mueller & Openheimer (Psych Sci) article looks quite promising for providing evidence in favor of the hypothesis.
“We show that 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.”
My kiddo had parsed out the same thing and I believe there’s going to be more evidence in the future.
That doesn’t mean, I think, that people should be writing their papers by hand, necessarily, but the articles cited suggest that learning to read and taking notes are two examples where handwriting might be important.
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I too have noted that taking handwritten notes can help me with remembering even when I can’t read my own handwriting.
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But, I find the James et al study using fMRI less informative — yes, so the brain behaves differently when children had a different experience (copying a letter v typing/tracing one). That doesn’t necessarily say anything about whether the learning will progress differently. I’d like to see evidence that one method actually worked better than the other for actually teaching reading/letter forms. But, that study is much harder to do.
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I had a three quarter organic chemistry course at Berkeley. I got, as I remember, B-, A-, and C+. The A- quarter I took notes in class, then went to the Chemistry Library after class and transcribed them and looked at the book to see what I had missed The other quarters, I had a class immediately following, so the immediacy of second quarter was not there. That A- was a bfd, there were only a few of us in a class of hundreds, the prof noticed me after that and called me by name… until I collapsed the next quarter. So I am a handwriting believer!
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Grew up in the handwriting age, and I still take notes by hand in all meetings – have a huge stack of work notebooks. And yes, it does help with retention. My kids’ learnt cursive (and have decent handwriting) in elementary school but never developed the skill of writing fast with it, so have regressed to printing in middle-school – but the school makes them take notes by hand in all classes though homework is often computer based. Especially Math – the teacher insists they “show their work” the old-fashioned way, which I much appreciate.
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My grandparents were unimpressed with the handwriting we learned in school, so they made us learn at home–bought the work books, and we spent hours at their house every week practicing cursive. As a result I could write very quickly in a very nice cursive script through high school and college. I always take notes longhand and still get compliments on my writing, but it’s degenerated quite a bit since then. I look back at my old notebooks and remember how I thought my writing was so sloppy, but now I’m impressed at how beautiful it is. It amazes me how many people my age don’t know how to write in cursive.
The problem with Chinese is extra acute. In college my Chinese teachers insisted we write everything by hand, and I was reasonably proficient in writing characters. Now that I almost exclusively type Chinese (on phones, on computers), my ability to produce characters from memory is almost nonexistent. The gap between recognition and production is so much greater than it is with spelling in phonetic alphabet type languages, I’ve found.
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We were a military family for several years and I have a kid who finished third grade in a school where they learned cursive in fourth, only to transfer to fourth grade in a school where they learned cursive in third. He never learned! Our kids had some motor skills issues and we had to teach them to print at home using ‘handwriting without tears’ which is wonderful, by the way, and so we never pushed the learning to write cursive with him.
In my experience teaching undergrads, a lot of kids are able to print really quickly so they don’t appear to suffer when taking notes in college. On the other hand, the only time my kids have ever had to ‘sign’ their name was when writing or endorsing the occasional check — it’s so funny to see them carefully writing their signatures, as though it is something brand new or novel for them.
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