Author: Kevin Dickinson / Source: Big Think
- Ohio has joined many other states in reestablishing cursive in their schools’ curricula.
- Research shows the value handwriting has for developing children’s fine motor skills and a connection between words and memory.
- But experts seem split on whether it’s a question of print vs. cursive, or cognitive fluency vs. disconnect.
Cursive is set for a comeback.
Last month, the Ohio State Legislature added cursive to the Ohio Department of Education’s English language arts standards. House Bill 58 requires the department to include supplemental materials on developing handwriting “as a universal skill,” with print learned by third grade and legible cursive by fifth. With this bill, Ohio joins the more than a dozen states who have adopted such legislation after Common-Core standards dropped cursive as a requirement.
“It seemed we had made a decision that was arrogant on our part that we didn’t think these kids needed something that we had taken for granted, that was our way of communicating for generations,” Beth Mizell, a Louisiana state senator, told the Washington Post. In 2016, Louisiana passed an even more thorough bill than Ohio’s, requiring cursive instruction continue through the 12th grade.
Cursive’s purpose in an era of typing and voice recognition software has dwindled. Even the signature, cursive’s seemingly unassailable bastion, has proved less sound thanks to PIN numbers and touchpads that turn any autograph into a symbolic work of abstract art.
For most of us, that thought elicits one of two responses. Either we bristle at the thought of a future generation’s not knowing cursive’s lovely, flowing script. Or we cheer at the idea, remembering the jeers of teachers past at our blocky, yet readable, print.
Unfortunately, such reactions are seldom derived from an understanding of the research and more often the joy or trauma we experienced when learning cursive. That goes for the legislators, too.
Of course, we can teach children cursive, but does it provide any developmentally benefit to do so?
Handwriting and its proponents
Handwriting, whether in cursive or not, has been shown to help students develop conceptual understanding better than those who use laptops to take notes in class. Image source: Flickr
To start, it’s worth pointing out that some people conflate cursive and handwriting as synonymous, and that’s not the case. Handwriting is as an ink-bound idiolect; everyone’s is different. Some people print exclusively, others use cursive, and many have formed an amalgam of the two (a category that can broadly be called D’Nealian).
If we look at handwriting, not explicitly cursive, there’s little doubt that it is important to child developmental. A study published in Trends in Neuroscience and Education has preliterate five-year-old children either print, type, or trace letters and shapes. They then underwent an MRI scan while being shown the image again. The researchers found that a “reading circuit” fired up only in the children who drew the letter or shape freehand—not the children who typed or traced it.
The brain activity exhibited by the handwriting children was in the same areas of the brain adults use to read and write. Study author Karin James notes that handwriting required the children to first plan and then execute the action, steps not necessary when typing or tracing. The end results were also messy and variable, which James believes may provide a learning benefit.
The advantages of handwriting appear to extend beyond initially learning to read and write. A 2014 paper in Psychological Science compared students who took notes longhand to those who took them on a laptop. The laptop students performed worse on conceptual questions. The researchers theorized the difference resulted from the way longhand notes force us to process and then reframe information.
They were also careful to compare notetaking…
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