Marketing Scoops: cursivelearning

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Recently, my 8-year-old son received a birthday card from his grandmother. He opened the card, looked at it and said, “I can’t read cursive yet.”Then he handed it to me to read. If you have a child in the Philadelphia School District, chances are they have not been taught how to read or write cursive either. But cursive handwriting is making a comeback of sorts for K-8 students in the United States………Continue reading…..

By: Shawn Datchuk

Source: The Conversation

Critics:

As pen-and-paper assignments remain common throughout the century, handwriting practice exercises are still issued by instructors worldwide because handwriting is recognized as a primary tool for the communication of ideas. In order for handwriting to be efficiently utilized by students, it is ideal for the process to be familiar and automatic. The letter-writing skill can reflect the beginnings of orthographic knowledge well, and this knowledge has been shown to be important to spelling in older children.

Better letter recognition can be facilitated by practicing handwriting in late preschool, as studies suggest that elementary students benefit from explicit handwriting instruction. With sufficient practice, legibility tends to improve over time. Additionally, research indicates that handwriting production is more cognitively costly and challenging for children than oral language production.

Poor handwriting skills and autonomy have been shown to often impair higher-level cognition and creative thinking in children, leading them to become labelled by their instructors as dysgraphic or clumsy.^[18] Meta-analysis of classroom assignments also found that the legibility of handwriting affects the grading of work as clearer handwriting tends to receive better marks than illegible or messier handwriting, the phenomenon of which has been coined “the presentation effect.”

Also, it was found that movements through handwriting help children organize their perceptions and improve their ability to recognize letters by shaping their spatial understanding. In further study, because of the implied importance of handwriting to academic success, considerable research has been conducted into the efficacy of a variety of teaching methods.

When quantifying writing fluency through parameters such as writing speed and duration of intermissions, teaching handwriting through digital tablets/technology, individualized instruction, and rote motor practice produced statistically significant increases in legibility and writing fluency which were able to be quantified.

Students with different levels of handwriting ability, including those with physical challenges, showed greater improvements in manuscript handwriting after receiving instruction through a computer-based system, compared to traditional methods. Children with specific learning disorders, such as poor/slow handwriting, have been observed in psychological study to follow specific mental frameworks which instructors can use to help pinpoint weakness in linguistic skill and develop their students’ fluency and writing composition.

The Hayes & Berninger framework is a stratified web of interconnected thought processes which relate different cognitive processes to each other in their function of writing in general, and this framework has seen considerable use in pedagological research. For example, underdevelopment of long-term memory, which is in the lower “resource level” of cognitive strata, can then be linked to underdeveloped motor planning for hand-writing individual letters, which bottleneck higher-order cognitive processes such as sentence structure and other critical thinking.

For a wide variety of writers, writing by hand has been described as a process which enhances expressivity and the discovery of individuality. The act of writing has been described as more “intimate”, and the physical manipulation of a writing utensil on another physical medium, such as paper and pen, has been asserted to be more effective in conveying personal experiences and creating writing as art.

In comparison to technological methods of printing writing, such as with a typewriter or a word processor, handwriting is said to be less impersonal and distancing by writers such as Pablo Neruda and William Barrett. Among many writers who agree with such viewpoints, the sensuality, touch, feel and materiality of handwriting seem to all contribute to a bodily experience which allegedly enhance creative writing.

The Extended Drawing Test is a computerized graphonomic assessment for arm and hand function. The EDT measures the ability of the subject to draw vertical lines, with both the left and right hands. To compare performance between gross arm movements and fine finger control, the subjects draw lines holding either the tablet’s pen (held by the fingers) or a mouse (held by the whole hand). The latter movements do not include finger movements.

Norms have been established for 3- to 70-year-old healthy persons. Deviations from the healthy norms will reflect different pathologies for different patient groups, e.g., hemiplegic stroke patients. The first paper mentioning EDT is Vuillermot, Pescatore, Holper, Kiper, and Eng (2009).

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