![]() ![]() She emphasizes that it's important to find the joy in handwriting, which is not something many students were taught. Gutierrez of Popular Science has written extensively about the benefits of handwriting. Her research has shown that there are far more effective and less time-consuming ways to teach cursive. “They'd spread it out one letter a day and drill-and-skill, and that was not necessary,” said Berninger. She said that a lot of bad press around learning cursive is related to the way it’s taught. Children have to link individual letters into whole units, which mirrors the way reading comprehension turns a cluster of letters into a word with meaning. They wrote better in their compositions when they could use cursive than when they printed or when they used the keyboard.”īerninger said that in cursive writing, each stroke is distinctly connected to the next. The children spelled better when they could use cursive. “And the important finding was starting in third and fourth grade, when children had cursive instruction,” said Berninger. ![]() They followed those same children through seventh grade. By studying kindergartners and first graders, she and a team of researchers at UW were able to show that handwriting plays an important role in reading. But if you're writing an A versus a Q, the motions are very, very different.”īerninger of the University of Washington advocates for teaching multimodal writing. “If I type an A versus a Q, if you're looking at a keyboard, the motion is very, very similar. “The layout of the keyboard is arbitrary in the sense that, you know, when A is next to S, there's nothing similar about the shape or the sound or the names of those letters,” said Wiley. Wiley of UNC argued that handwriting in general is good for our brains - and that writing and reading are intrinsically connected in a way that reading and typing on a computer are not. “Do you make yourself dependent on somebody else's decisions, that could be influenced by politics or other agendas, for the transcriptions?” said Faust. ![]() The students realized they were relying on others to translate important documents and that they'd lost the power to investigate certain parts of the past. “It was an imposition of a limitation on them that they perhaps hadn't recognized,” said Faust. One student couldn’t do an assignment on Virginia Woolf because it would have meant having to read her handwritten letters. They were joined by Robert Wiley, assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Virginia Berninger, professor emeritus at the University of Washington College of Education and Sandra Gutierrez, associate DIY editor at Popular Science.įor Faust’s students, a major consequence of not being able to read cursive was they had to dramatically change how they responded to assignments to avoid reading certain manuscripts. For example, did they have signatures? How would they read handwritten letters? How did they compensate?įaust talked with Forum host Mina Kim about the relevance of reading and writing in cursive - and what we lose when people can no longer do both. California does include cursive in its Common Core standards, but districts may decide how much to teach.įaust's discovery prompted a conversation with her students about the implications of not being able to read and write cursive. states to no longer require teaching cursive in schools. ![]() This may not seem surprising to some, as an emphasis on computers and keyboarding have led about half of U.S. "I guess I recognized that students weren't writing cursive, but somehow that hadn't in my mind translated into the fact that they were also unable to read it." "I just stopped in my tracks, I couldn't believe ," said Faust, on a recent episode of KQED Forum. Harvard professor Drew Gilpin Faust was teaching one of her undergraduate history seminars when she made a surprising discovery: Her students could not read cursive. ![]()
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