By MARIA KONNIKOVA, JUNE 2, 2014
Credit Michael Mabry |
Does handwriting matter?
Not very much, according to many
educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states,
call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade.
After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard.
But psychologists and
neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the
past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader
educational development run deep.
Children not only learn to read more
quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better
able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just
what we write that matters — but how.
“When we write, a unique neural
circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a
psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. “There is a core recognition of
the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in
your brain.
A 2012 study led by Karin James, a psychologist at IndianaUniversity, lent support to that view. Children who had not yet
learned to read and write were presented with a letter or a shape on an index
card and asked to reproduce it in one of three ways: trace the image on a page
with a dotted outline, draw it on a blank white sheet, or type it on a
computer. They were then placed in a brain scanner and shown the image again.
The researchers found that the
initial duplication process mattered a great deal. When children had drawn a
letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain
that are activated in adults when they read and write: the left fusiform gyrus,
the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior parietal cortex.
By contrast, children who typed or
traced the letter or shape showed no such effect. The activation was
significantly weaker.
Dr. James attributes the differences
to the messiness inherent in free-form handwriting: Not only must we first plan
and execute the action in a way that is not required when we have a traceable
outline, but we are also likely to produce a result that is highly variable.
That variability may itself be a
learning tool. “When a kid produces a messy letter,” Dr. James said, “that
might help him learn it.”
Karin James, a psychologist at Indiana University, used a scanner to see how handwriting affected activity in children's brains. Credit A. J. Mast for The New York Times |
Our brain must understand that each
possible iteration of, say, an “a” is the same, no matter how we see it
written. Being able to decipher the messiness of each “a” may be more helpful
in establishing that eventual representation than seeing the same result
repeatedly.
“This is one of the first
demonstrations of the brain being changed because of that practice,” Dr. James
said.
In another study, Dr. James is
comparing children who physically form letters with those who only watch others
doing it. Her observations suggest that it is only the actual effort that
engages the brain’s motor pathways and delivers the learning benefits of
handwriting.
The effect goes well beyond letter
recognition. In a study that followed children in grades two
through five, Virginia Berninger, a
psychologist at the University of Washington, demonstrated that printing,
cursive writing, and typing on a keyboard are all associated with distinct and
separate brain patterns — and each results in a distinct end product. When the
children composed text by hand, they not only consistently produced more words
more quickly than they did on a keyboard, but expressed more ideas. And brain imaging in the
oldest subjects suggested that the connection between writing and idea
generation went even further. When these children were asked to come up with
ideas for a composition, the ones with better handwriting exhibited greater
neural activation in areas associated with working memory — and increased
overall activation in the reading and writing networks.
It now appears that there may even
be a difference between printing and cursive writing — a distinction of
particular importance as the teaching of cursive disappears in curriculum after
curriculum. In dysgraphia, a condition where the ability to write is impaired,
sometimes after brain injury, the deficit can take on a curious form: In some
people, cursive writing remains relatively unimpaired, while in others,
printing does.
In alexia, or impaired reading
ability, some individuals who are unable to process print can still read
cursive, and vice versa — suggesting that the two writing modes activate
separate brain networks and engage more cognitive resources than would be the
case with a single approach.
Dr. Berninger goes so far as to
suggest that cursive writing may train self-control ability in a way that other
modes of writing do not, and some researchers argue that it may even be a path
to treating dyslexia. A 2012 review suggests that cursive may be
particularly effective for individuals with developmental dysgraphia —
motor-control difficulties in forming letters — and that it may aid in
preventing the reversal and inversion of letters.
Cursive or not, the benefits of
writing by hand extend beyond childhood. For adults, typing may be a fast and
efficient alternative to longhand, but that very efficiency may diminish our
ability to process new information. Not only do we learn letters better when we
commit them to memory through writing, memory and learning ability in general
may benefit.
Two psychologists, Pam A. Mueller of
Princeton and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of
the University of California, Los Angeles, have reported that in both
laboratory settings and real-world classrooms, students learn better when they
take notes by hand than when they type on a keyboard. Contrary to earlier
studies attributing the difference to the distracting effects of computers, the
new research suggests that writing by hand allows the student to process a
lecture’s contents and reframe it — a process of reflection and manipulation
that can lead to better understanding and memory encoding.
Not every expert is persuaded that
the long-term benefits of handwriting are as significant as all that. Still,
one such skeptic, the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, says the new research is, at the very
least, thought-provoking.
“With handwriting, the very act of
putting it down forces you to focus on what’s important,” he said. He added,
after pausing to consider, “Maybe it helps you think better.”
Maria
Konnikova is a contributing writer for The New Yorker online and the author of
“Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.”
This article originally appeared The New York Times here.
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