Handwriting in the 21 st Century? An Educational Summit Questions and Answers For Jane Case- Smith, Ed.D. The Ohio State University, Division of Occupational Therapy What is the evidence that non- handwriting motor planning and visual motor integration affect handwriting? Motor planning and visual motor integration are key to a young child learning handwriting. Studies have shown a strong relationship between these motor functions and learning handwriting. At older ages, visual motor skills and handwriting do not seem to be as important. What's significant is when a child is poor in motor planning or in visual motor integration. These deficits directly affect learning handwriting, leading to OT involvement to support the development of these important skills. Minimally, problems in these areas can delay learning good handwriting; in some children, it can prevent them from having fluent, legible handwriting. Should handwriting be taught in PreK? If so, and a student isn t able to handwrite, does that indicate a disability? A child should learn to write his name at ages 3 4 years. It is also a time to explore and play with writing letters, but without much correction for poorly formed or sized letters. Certainly, the letters can be everywhere on the page and of different sizes. Then in Kindergarten, a child should learn the alphabet and begin to learn about size and alignment (with upper case letters). In PreK, many children are not ready to learn how to form letters and this is not indicative of a disability. Many children write from the bottom up or have trouble with formation. Many children reverse b s and d s. These "errors" are part of typical development. It is good to expose children to writing, but to probably not require them to practice extensively or produce correct form in their handwriting. What would be the best activities to give to children from ages 3 5 to prepare them for handwriting? Manipulatives activities that require children to pick up small objects and move them in their hands are beneficial. Playing games or playing with small cars or dolls build the
small muscle of the hand. Drawing and putting together puzzles also allow children to develop visual motor skills. Stacking, using two hands together, and manipulating tools such as tongs or small scissors help to develop the hand muscles needed to hold and move a pencil/marker to form letters. ipad activities can also be useful, but watch to see that children s little hands are doing a variety of movements. Were all children in your studies right- handed? Not at all, and we did not see differences across right- and left- handed students. What can a middle school teacher do to assist students who increasingly have not had good handwriting instruction in prior grades? Give practice with specific feedback (one on one, if possible). Use letter strips as a model, visual guides on the paper and pencil grips if helpful. Give children extra time when feasible. Use keyboarding when possible. Emphasize good handwriting, but try not to punish children for poor handwriting. It s also helpful to consult with an OT. Discuss: 1) Pencil grips studies on the best ones? I do not know of any studies. It seems to me that different ones work better for different students, so it is nice when you have a couple types and can try different ones with a student. 2) Altered natural grip even with consistent correction, how do you deal with students who continue to use their own versions (like two fingers on the top)? It depends on the problem. A grip pattern is okay when the handwriting is okay. And changing it may or may not improve the student s handwriting. Pencil grips and a slanted surface can sometimes change the grip pattern (naturally). Verbal cues to hold the pencil differently are probably not effective in this case. Have you followed students continued practices for legibility and/or fluency after implementing your learning program? If so, how long did you follow their progress? We have only followed them to the end of the year (six months after the program). They did maintain their gains, but the real issue is long- term gains. Have your OT sessions in classrooms included groups of letters by initial stroke or letter forms, like a, o, c, d, g, q as a letter family? Or do you teach each letter individually?
We group by letter form and use the grouping published by Dr. Steve Graham and others. Do you believe in evaluating students by giving grades? This is a good question. I do not have to give grades to the first graders. I think the world works better without a handwriting grade, but I can see where opinion of this would be mixed. Grades are motivators. Why do some students have better handwriting skills than others (even those who have received good instruction)? Many, many reasons, some of which include 1) motor skills, 2) visual perceptual skills, 3) visual motor integration, 4) strength and endurance, 5) cognition and memory, 6) attention span, 7) motivation, 8) social emotional issues, and 9) support and reinforcement at home. For Gerry Conti, Ph.D. Wayne State University, Director of the Human Movement Laboratory Why do girls seem to have better handwriting than boys? This is an unanswered question. We know that males are better at spatial reasoning and navigation, but females are better at spatial memory. This may help girls remember the spatial locations needed to learn and then reproduce letter shapes. We also know that males have an innate urge for gross motor activity, which you can see with a boy s love of horseplay from infancy. Girls are less predisposed to this and may be more prone to fine motor activity, including handwriting. There certainly may be other factors as well, such as attention or hand size, that impact this finding. To predict who might need extra intervention for handwriting, would you recommend screening for fine motor skills at an early age? My results showed that limited fine motor skills, as measured by the Grooved Pegboard and the Steadiness Tester, were predictive of illegibility in handwriting. This is intuitive for teachers and therapists, since handwriting certainly can be considered a fine motor activity. Therefore, conceptually, screening might be helpful. We need to keep in mind that the corticospinal tract, which provides neural innervation to the hand and fingers, is not fully mature until about age 10. In other words, the best
fine motor skills available at age five may be much less than the skills available at age 11. Observation at early ages may be sufficient, looking at items such as ability to manipulate a pen/pencil/crayon, or manipulate any small object. At the time handwriting training is initiated, fine motor problems may certainly suggest that illegibility may be an issue or, conversely, problems with legibility may indicate that fine motor deficits may be at least partially involved. Why did you look at slant variability as opposed to variance from the expected slant? Most of us are capable of reading the writing of a person whose handwriting occurs primarily vertically, as well as with slight slants to either the left or right, so legibility did not seem to require a prescribed slant. Indeed, slant is not a characteristic identified in the Evaluation Test of Children s Handwriting (ETCH), nor in other handwriting assessment tools of which I m aware. What does seem to affect legibility is the consistency of the slant chosen. Changing slant within the sample often resulted in collision of the l s (as shown on the graph in my presentation slides). Is degree of slant important in cursive? Has any research been conducted on kinematic characteristics/factors of right- vs. left- handed students? What I found in my data is a wide variety of slant used by boys and girls in both third and fifth grade, and that the slant selected did not affect legibility by itself. Based on this, I would suspect that the degree of slant, within a fairly wide range, is less important to legibility in cursive handwriting. Kinematic research on handwriting in children is limited, and I am not aware of any studies of kinematic characteristics of right- compared to left- handed students. As only about 10 percent of humans are left- handed, these studies are difficult to perform. Did the collision of l s usually happen in the middle of the sample? And, was there usually a change in slant with the collisions? Records with collisions show that it may occur in the middle or the end of a sample, and it typically occurred with a change in slant. Would there have been a difference if you had used lined paper? Research has shown that children find it easier to write using lined paper. There is no literature to address whether the presence or absence of lines would affect the kinematic characteristics of handwriting. It would be an interesting study to assess the effect of lined compared to unlined paper in children. I made a conscious decision to use unlined paper for my lifespan study of handwriting, as research has shown that the presence of lines not only is distracting to older adults but
also affects their ability and speed of writing. Thus a greater negative effect is shown with the presence of lines for older adults than the absence of lines for children. Did the variance in legibility between boys and girls decrease over time? Or did it increase or remain the same? The variance in legibility did not significantly decline between boys and girls of the third and fifth grades. This may be because the time separating the two grades is relatively small. These grades were selected for compatibility of teacher instruction and handwriting expectations as students were in the same school. Further data from my lifespan study shows that there is a significant decline in variability between third and fifth graders and young adults ages 18 28 years. For Steve Graham, Ed.D. Vanderbilt University, Currey Ingram Professor of Literacy and Tanya Santangelo, Ph.D. Arcadia University, Special Education One of the most problematic issues in the classroom is sustained attention. How can handwriting improve attention to task? While this is not a direct effect on attention, students with fluent handwriting are likely to find writing less taxing, and as a result, may be more likely to stay on task and persist longer while writing. This has not been directly tested, however. Have any studies been conducted that reflect a correlation between standardized test scores and handwriting instruction? There are no studies that we are aware of that show improved performance on standardized tests in reading or other academic areas as a result of handwriting instruction. Similarly, as discussed in response to a question during the Summit presentation, there are not any studies that directly link handwriting instruction to large- scale state examinations. Establishing this connection is difficult because it is a distal measure. Have you researched the benefits of specific types of handwriting programs/curriculum?
There is some research comparing specific different types of handwriting programs, but the studies are poorly conducted for the most part and caution must be exercised in interpreting them. We are currently examining whether we can draw any meaningful conclusions about the relative impact of different instructional approaches/programs using meta- analysis, but as of now, we are unsure. Is there anything in the research on impact of handwriting on decoding? There is not enough research on the impact of teaching handwriting on decoding in reading to draw any reliable conclusions at this point. Did you find any comparison of effect with cursive handwriting? Studies examining the effects of manuscript versus cursive handwriting are often flawed because of a practice effect. If such studies are done after handwriting instruction has ended, writers typically use one style or another when they write, so any comparison has an unequal amount of practice for the predominant style. For example, a person might learn to write in manuscript in Grade 1, but in Grade 2, they learn to use cursive and continue using this script from then on. So, if you compare their manuscript or cursive writing performance in Grade 10 (in terms of fluency and legibility), there is a huge practice advantage for cursive. The results might turn out very different if, after learning to use cursive, the writer uses manuscript from that point forward. In addition, by middle school most writers mix cursive and manuscript when they write. If handwriting instruction aids fluency and text generation, is there evidence supporting the fact that handwriting impacts higher- level vocabulary (ability to learn longer, more complex words)? Not that we are aware of. For Stephen Peverly, Ph.D. Teachers College, Columbia University, Department of Health and Behavior Studies What is the percentage of students who take notes by handwriting? Would the results be the same if notes were done digitally? At the moment I cannot answer this question. A comprehension survey on note- taking has not been done in quite some time, and as you might guess, past surveys did not include questions related to note- taking and technology. However, I constructed a survey which I have begun to distribute that will hopefully provide data on this, and other, related questions.
For the HW 21 Summit Network Team Will future handwriting summits present research on the legibility and speed of the various types of handwriting (such as joined versus unjoined versus semi- joined types of writing)? The focus of this Summit was to elevate the conversation about the overall need for handwriting instruction for children. The brain research clearly shows the connection between children printing letter forms by hand, and their reading acquisition a connection which needed to be highlighted as the nation debates the need for formal handwriting instruction. The research, as presented, did not take a position on a specific form of handwriting beyond print or manuscript. None of the researchers did a comparison of italic versus cursive for speed and legibility. Rather, the concern and the focus of the research was the need to teach children to write by hand. Research has been conducted and evidence has been published regarding the impact of vertical manuscript/print versus slant or italic manuscript/print on students reading acquisition. But, the conversation about cursive versus italic script hasn't received the same level of interest. We find that many schools drop handwriting instruction beyond Grade 3, with an eye on national standards that indicate a need for keyboarding. We suspect that the next round of research will be an examination of the long- term impact of this decision. At the handwriting summit, we learned that the majority of adults combine some print and some cursive when they write. The exact figure was 55 percent. Since this is the usual, majority way to write, shouldn't handwriting instruction in the 21st century be accepting this as a valid style and teaching people to do it even better? What's the point of telling kids that handwriting is either print or cursive, when they can see for themselves that this is not the case? Can we see researchers addressing this issue at future handwriting summits? As indicated above, there is no specific statement from researchers that children should choose one style of writing over another. Rather, the emphasis is on learning to write by hand with automaticity, speed, and fluency. Educators must recognize that, at the earliest stages of literacy development (PreK Grades 1 or 2), children should be practicing the letter forms that they are learning to read. Children must learn to decode letters as they begin to decode words. They should be taught a form of writing by hand with which they can become automatic. We write to learn information, as well as to communicate with others. Letter formation should not be an impediment to retaining information or to writing content. Some people believe that the only way to learn the important skill of reading in cursive is by writing in cursive. Is that belief supported by research? Will future summits have any discussion of research on the issues of reading cursive?
This is also related to the questions above. First and foremost, handwriting is important for learning and literacy development. The concern among teachers and parents is on the long- range impact of eliminating handwriting instruction (in any form) from the national elementary curriculum. When we can get that issue addressed, and get handwriting instruction integrated back into classrooms, then the conversation and research focus can fully turn to the best method of teaching students how to read cursive.