QWERTY questions
Will keyboarding triumph where Handwriting Without Tears failed for my child? Andy’s always had handwriting issues (except for one perfect moment in third grade, when he proclaimed, “Cursive rocks”). These days, it’s as if thoughts rush from his brain like a river in spring, down through his arm, then hit his tightly clenched fingers on the pencil, only to release in a very small trickle on the paper.
Keyboarding, which he has no trouble with, may offer a lightness that’ll help Andy express himself through writing. (Clenching is impossible.) That’s the concept educators are banking on, with most elementary schools devoting less time today to penmanship (down to 10 minutes a day from 2 hours a week in the 1940s and 50s) and beginning keyboarding as early as third or fourth grade. Experts estimate that most elementary students leave elementary school typing 20-30 words a minute.
In fact, kids today receive so little handwriting emphasis, that cursive is eschewed by most. When the SAT added a writing section to its exam in 2006, only 15% of students wrote their essay in cursive, with the remainder writing in block letters, according to the College Board. And there has even been some reporting that cursive responses were scored higher than the others. Were the readers cursive-biased, or do children who are comfortable with cursive better able to express complex thoughts (as some academic studies suggest)?
All I can hope is that by the time Andy takes the SATs, keyboards are built into the system.
I think you are a wonderful writer.
a new fan
I spent some time looking into the SAT issue because I earn my bread teaching handwriting to the people who wash out from the programs “guaranteed to work” — the kids who cry over “Handwriting without Tears” and so on.
The Educational Testing Service (ETS) — which develops, administers, and scores the SAT— tells me that the difference between score averages for SAT-takers who used cursive and those who didn’t amounts to … (wait for it … ) a fraction of one point on this couple-of-thousand-points exam. They believe that, if the difference results from anything but chance, it probably reflects the fact that schools which teach more about reading and math also tend to teach cursive a bit more often than those schools with less strong reading and math courses. (As one ETS staffer put it to me: “If the same schools dropped their cursive courses and started requiring the students to learn to make ice cream instead, the reporters would probably look at that fraction of a point and call it ‘proof’ that you can increase your SAT score by making ice cream.”)
So that fraction of a point doesn’t look like anywhere near enough of a reason to insist on writing the cursive alphabet at any stage: particularly when you consider the research (JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, May/June 1998 issue) which established that the fastest and most legible handwriters most often tend to join only some letters, not all of them (they use only the very easiest joins, skipping the rest), and/or to use print-like (not cursive) letter-shapes wherever the printed and cursive form of a letter “disagree.” (Article title: “The relationship betwen handwriting style and speed and legibility” — authors: Steven Graham, Naomi Weintraub, and Virginia Berninger.)
Judging from this and other similar research (and judging also from my own experiences as a former “incurable handwriting washout” turned handwriting improvement specialist and World Handwriting Contest director), if we want speed with legibility for all handwriters we need to stop making 100%-joined writing the ultimate and obligatory goal of a handwriting program.
Kate Gladstone
founder, Handwriting Repair handwriting instruction/improvement service
director, World Handwriting Contest
http://www.learn.to/handwrite
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