As schools move towards our brave new digital world, a battle has raged over the usefulness of handwriting practice and cursive pedagogy. Why do children need to learn to write physically, when every grown-up they’ll ever meet exclusively types their sentences?
A new study shows that the younger learners (pre-K through 5th grade) actually do, in fact, benefit significantly from the physical act of handwriting.
The practice of handwriting activates many areas in the brain, giving important developmental enrichment to growing minds. Handwriting gives the brain visual, auditory, and kinesthetic input. This means that when children form a letter through handwriting, their brain is more likely to retain letter and word structures. The graphomotor movement (the coordination of hand and eye) needed to form letters is key for this retention.
The findings are the most recent star in a constellation of studies that show the general superiority of handwriting over typing in an academic setting. College students who take notes by hand, as opposed to typing or using a digital stylus are more likely to remember their course information.
Handwriting instruction, and cursive instruction in particular, fell out of favor in US pedagogy around 2010 under updated Common Core standards that did not require cursive. Yet, states like California, Iowa, and Oklahoma are now mandating the practice for their K-8 learners. Cursive handwriting practice has been proven to have a host of learning benefits, including improving spelling ability, word recall, writing length, handwriting eligibility, and even learning skills. For dyslexic students, cursive can actually be easier to learn than standard print fonts, as the letters have more distinct, connected shapes.
As interest in handwriting grows, resources have become more widely available for parents and caregivers. While handwriting workbooks have always been available for purchase, other resources are offered for free. The University of Iowa’s CLIFTER (Cursive Letter Identification and Formation for Transcription and Early Reading) program offers resources for cursive instruction to parents and early childhood educators.
Culturally, children benefit from cursive instruction. Almost every document written before the last half-century was written in cursive, including formative American documents like the Declaration of Independence. In order to ensure that the ability to decode the past will not become obsolete, children will need to be taught cursive.
As children’s brains delight in the graphomotor activity of handwriting, adults should give them more opportunities to flex their growing constellation of neurons. Children are profoundly physical beings — much more so than adults — and the more opportunities given to them to learn using their bodies and their senses, the better off they will be.
