Why Is Handwriting Important?
As an elementary school teacher, you have one of the most important jobs in the world: building the foundation of children’s education. These early learning experiences can affect students’ entire academic careers. Now is the time to teach children how to learn, to provide them with tools they’ll use to learn every day from now through college.
Handwriting is one of those tools.
Students write by hand every day in every subject. They write their names. They write answers on assignments, quizzes, and tests. They write spelling words and math problems. They write to show what they know and what they think.
Some may say we’re moving towards a time when technology will take over and handwriting will be rendered obsolete. However, considering the strong link between writing by hand and learning, handwriting still plays an important role in education that should not be dismissed in favor of technology.
Do students need to learn how to type and use computers? Of course. But there’s no reason they can’t also learn how to write by hand, especially since handwriting offers educational benefits that typing does not.
The cognitive process of writing by hand improves retention and comprehension of information in a way that typing does not. Dr. Judy Willis, a neurologist-turned-educator, states that “The practice of writing can enhance the brain’s intake, processing, retaining, and retrieving of information. Through writing, students can increase their comfort with and success in understanding complex material, unfamiliar concepts, and subject-specific vocabulary.”1
Dr. Karin Harman James, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, studied how young children’s brains respond when they write by hand. Using fMRI scans, Dr. James looked at the children’s brains while they wrote by hand and typed. The scans showed that the children’s brains “lit up” with adult-level activation while they were writing by hand. Conversely, in scans taken while the same children typed, there was minimal activation of the brain.2
What does this mean? Put simply, it means that writing by hand helps us learn. The act of putting pen to paper stimulates different areas of the brain, which helps us retain the information being written. You may have experienced this yourself; have you ever written a grocery list and gone to the store without it, but were still able to “see” the list in your mind and remember at least some of the items on it?
On the other hand, when students struggle with handwriting, their schoolwork may suffer. Students who struggle to write by hand often become frustrated because they can’t complete tasks in the allotted time, or they can’t get their thoughts on paper quickly enough and lose their train of thought. Early frustration with writing can lead to a negative view of writing that follows students throughout their school years.
The best way to ensure that students experience all of the benefits of writing by hand is to make sure they learn how to write by hand. All too often, handwriting practice is assigned without direct instruction. But what happens when students practice a letter incorrectly over and over again? Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect – but it can make permanent! Writing that letter thirty times the wrong way effectively teaches students to write it the wrong way.
A planned, sequential approach to handwriting instruction teaches students developmentally appropriate skills and builds on those skills each year. This is the approach you’ll be learning in this course.
References
1 Willis, J. (2011, July 11). The Brain-Based Benefits of Writing for Math and Science Learning. Retrieved February 15, 2018, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/writing-executive-function-brain-research-judy-willis
2 James, K. H., & Engelhardt, L. (2012). The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children. Trends in Neuroscience and Education,1(1), 32-42. doi:10.1016/j.tine.2012.08.001