Happy Handwriting Day! (Article from Education Weekly)

1/24/2012

MetaFour fully realizes that cursive handwriting will never have the time commitment for teaching and practice that it did in days past--and that is rightly so; however, we believe that it is still an essential skill. There is a strong research base pertaining to learning, the brain, and handwriting. We believe in a relaxed approach that emphasizes legibility and neatness instead of striving to make everything a carbon copy of the model. (Now that expression just dated me!)

The relevancy of cursive is again a point of conversation with the advent of the Common Core Standards. The conversation is back as keyboarding is specifically mentioned as a needed skill. But then again, CURSIVE is being embraced is expressly mentioned in some state's version of Common Core, such as California.

Enjoy the Education Weekly article--and note the lively comment postings after the article!

Third grader Michael Capps listens to his teacher during a cursive-writing lesson at Charlotte Park Elementary School in Nashville, Tenn. —Joon Powell for Education Week

Summit to Make a Case for Teaching Handwriting
By Jaclyn Zubrzycki

Handwriting still has a place in the digital age, its proponents say, and they hoped that what they billed as a "summit" on the subject this week would spotlight their case for the enduring value of handwriting in the learning process.

The Washington conference was designed to draw together research from psychology, occupational therapy, education, and neuroscience to demonstrate handwriting's role in students' physical and cognitive development, states' learning standards, and the classroom.

The occasion also marked National Handwriting Day, Jan. 23—the birthday of that most famous exemplar of penmanship, John Hancock. (Partial article --see the full article at Education Week, link below. )

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/01/25/18handwriting_ep.h31.html?tkn=TSCCONY7f8plNvHxIAjSVBjW8JDczcsw8GzJ&cmp=clp-sb-ascd

2 Comments

Kate Gladstone link

12/14/2013 10:38:20 am

Handwriting matters — but does cursive matter? The fastest, clearest handwriters join only some letters: making the easiest joins, skipping others, using print-like forms of letters whose cursive and printed forms disagree. (Sources below.)

Reading cursive matters, but even children can be taught to read writing that they are not taught to produce. Reading cursive can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five- or six-year-olds, once they read ordinary print. (In fact, now there's even an iPad app to teach how: named "Read Cursive," of course — http://appstore.com/readcursive .) So why not simply teach children to read cursive — along with teaching other vital skills, including some handwriting style that's actually typical of effective handwriters?

Educated adults increasingly abandon cursive. At the Zaner-Bloser Handwriting Summit in 2012 (the same event thst the above article described), handwriting teachers from across the USA and Canada were surveyed. Only 37 percent wrote in cursive; another 8 percent printed. The majority — 55 percent — wrote a hybrid: some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive. When most handwriting teachers shun cursive, why mandate it?

Cursive's cheerleaders sometimes allege that cursive makes you smarter, makes you graceful, adds brain cells, or confers other blessings no more prevalent among cursive users than elsewhere. Some claim research support, citing studies that consistently prove to have been misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by the claimant.

So far — in the above article and elsewhere — whenever a devotee of cursive has claimed the support of research, one or more of the following things has become evident when others examine the claimed support:

/1/ either the claim (of research support for cursive) provides no traceable source,

or

/2/ if a source is cited, it is misquoted or is incorrectly described (e.g., an Indiana University research study comparing print-writing with keyboarding is usually misrepresented by cursive's defenders as a study "comparing print-writing with cursive"),

or

/3/ the claimant _correctly_ quotes/cites a source which itself indulges in either /1/ or /2/.

What about signatures? In state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!)

Questioned document examiners (these are specialists in the identification of signatures, the verification of documents, etc.) inform me that the least forgeable signatures are the plainest.
Most cursive signatures are loose scrawls: the rest, if they follow the rules of cursive at all, are fairly complicated: these make a forger's life easy.
All writing, not just cursive, is individual — just as all writing involves fine motor skills. That is why, six months into the school year, any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from print-writing on unsigned work) which student produced it.

Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring.

SOURCES:

Handwriting research on speed and legibility:

/1/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. “The Relation between Handwriting Style and Speed and Legibility.” JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, No. 5 (May - June, 1998), pp. 290-296: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542168.pdf

/2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer. “Development of Handwriting Speed and Legibility in Grades 1-9.”
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 92, No. 1 (September - October, 1998), pp. 42-52: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542188.pdf

Zaner-Bloser handwriting survey: Results on-line at http://www.hw21summit.com/media/zb/hw21/files/H2937N_post_event_stats.pdf

Background on our handwriting, past and present:
3 videos by a colleague --

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURSIVE --
http://youtu.be/3kmJc3BCu5g

TIPS TO FIX HANDWRITING --
http://youtu.be/s_F7FqCe6To

HANDWRITING AND MOTOR MEMORY
(shows how fine motor skills are developed in handwriting WITHOUT cursive) --
http://youtu.be/Od7PGzEHbu0

[AUTHOR BIO: Kate Gladstone is the founder of Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works and the director of the World Handwriting Contest]

Yours for better letters,

Kate Gladstone
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
and the World Handwriting Contest
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com

royal essays link

6/23/2014 09:56:15 am

Educational guidelines often are limited to one standard, “produces legible handwriting” in the English/language arts standards. When students fail to meet this standard, teachers have no means for examining which skills are lacking. Meanwhile these students are experiencing all the negative effects of poor handwriting.

Happy Handwriting Day! (Article from Education Weekly)

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