Monday, June 9, 2014

Another article supporting handwriting

Screenshot of The New York Times article.
The New York Times recently published an extensive article. "What's Lost as Handwriting Fades?" by Maria Konnikova, citing scientific research to support the benefits of writing by hand.

In part, the story states:
When the children composed text by hand, they not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard, but expressed more ideas. And brain imaging in the oldest subjects suggested that the connection between writing and idea generation went even further. When these children were asked to come up with ideas for a composition, the ones with better handwriting exhibited greater neural activation in areas associated with working memory — and increased overall activation in the reading and writing networks.
 Not everyone in the article puts as much importance on handwriting, but most of the research suggests great benefits from handwriting.

It's an interesting article that, while not about letterwriting, complements many of the things letter writers are interested in. Take a look at the complete article!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thank you so much for sharing this! I might like to pass this article along on my blog too! I collect articles on handwriting and cursive and how the brain responds to this activity. Thank you again. Keep up the good work on your blog!

LitVamp said...

Just to point out something inaccurate in the article ... the decision to leave out handwriting via Common Core instruction is not coming from educators. Common Core policy wasn't written by educators. All the teachers I know believe that handwriting is important and tell our kids "writing is thinking on paper." We know that the processing of writing (rather than typing) is a process best left to traditional ways of doing things when instructing young writers. We don't want this to be an "either/or" choice. Despite the Common Core emphasis on 21st Century skills like keyboarding, many states have not changed their state instructional standards to remove handwriting from the curriculum (typically a fourth grade standard).

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