Is math by hand better than math by keyboard?

Sorting books this afternoon, I came across Tahir Yaqoob's What Can I Do to Help My Child with Math When I Don't Know Any Myself? and found this passage:

The actual process of using your muscles to write something is a powerful long-term memory aid. The more that you write out things (and in different ways), the more your long-term memory will be etched out. It is not good enough simply to read and think (although this is important for reviewing large amounts of material shortly before taking an exam, but only if you have done the long-term ground work). Writing out full solutions to problems in math is especially important compared to other subjects, whether it is part of reviewing for exams or whether you are learning new material.

Writing things out can also help you to understand difficult problems. For example, if you see a fully worked solution to a problem in a textbook, but don't understand one or more of the steps, try simply writing out the solution yourself. You may be surprised that while you are doing that, you suddenly understand something that you didn't before. Sometimes the brain has a strange way of working. Despite its enormous capacity , the. brain can really benefit from an external "scratch pad." When you come across something that you don't understand, sometimes just writing out the steps in a brief form can make a great deal of difference.

What Can I Do to Help My Child with Math When I Don't Know Any Myself? Paperback – February 7, 2011 by Tahir Yaqoob - p133

I've always found this to be true, both for C. and for me. I don't know why. One of these days I'll get around to reading The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, which I hope will explain the phenomenon.

The OECD report on students and technology (Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection) found that using the computer for drill was associated with reduced achievement:

The decline in performance associated with greater frequency of certain activities, such as chatting on line at school and practicing and drilling, is particularly large (Figure 6.6). Students who frequently engage in these activities may be missing out on other more effective learning activities. Students who never or only very rarely engage in these activities have the highest performance.

Given my experience, the "other more effective learning activities" these students are missing may be drilling by hand.

handwriting and grades and the wisdom of the crowd

Even legible handwriting that's messy can have its own ramifications, says Steve Graham, professor of education at Vanderbilt University. He cites several studies indicating that good handwriting can take a generic classroom test score from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile, while bad penmanship could tank it to the 16th. "There is a reader effect that is insidious," Dr. Graham says. "People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting."
How Handwriting Boosts the Brain by Gwendolyn Bounds | WSJ | October 5, 2010

I absolutely believe that. And I doubt teachers can turn this bias off. Cognitive biases can't be turned off at will.

Grades and grading are a mess. Probably for writing especially.

Speaking of writing and grades, I had a thought the other day. It's not possible, under the current system, for teachers to grade papers according to an objective standard. An A paper for one teacher is a B paper for another teacher is a C paper for a third.

In theory, a testing company can achieve 'rater reliability' by dint of extensive training sessions, although Todd Farley's account of his experience in the industry makes me wonder.

But is training-up individual graders to apply the same standards as their colleagues (even if it's possible) the best approach?

Maybe not.

Any teacher can (or should be able to) correct a paper's grammar, punctuation, and spelling. I assume teachers are going to agree on grammar, punctuation, and spelling far more often more than they disagree.

Beyond that, however, I'm not sure you actually want a uniform response across teachers. "Writing" as a profession or a business obligation means writing for an audience of more than one reader, and the individuals who make up that audience don't necessarily agree amongst themselves that you've said what you've said or that you've said it well. Writers learn from these disagreements.

Maybe students would also benefit from a 'diversity' of reader reaction?

If I had my druthers, I would scrap the letter-grading of writing altogether, apart from scoring punctuation, grammar, and spelling, simply on grounds that the letter-grading of student writing is simply too inconsistent to be credible.

I would experiment with some kind of Intrade or Wisdom of the Crowd approach. Farm papers out to a bunch of readers who read quickly and check off a thumbs-up or thumbs-down option. Something simple. Then give everyone the results for everyone.

Students would receive a kind of polling or survey result instead of a grade: a rough sense of how well their papers worked for an audience compared to papers written by their peers.

Of course, students would need to be able to read the work of their peers to see what kind of paper produced what kind of global response.

Or -- here's a thought -- perhaps schools could create an extensive set of exemplar student papers that have been 'voted on' by a large number of instructors. As a teacher of freshman writing I would kill to have such a resource myself.

I don't know whether a system along these lines would offer useful or 'actionable' information to students.

But I think it might.

Mark Helprin on writing by hand

In the Wall Street Journal's Word Craft series:

This brings up Levenger, which sells "tools for writers." The fewer tools the better, and they need not be costly or complicated. Whether you use a pencil, a pen, an old typewriter or something electrical is largely irrelevant to the result, although there is magic in writing by hand. It's not just that it has been that way for 5,000 years or more, and has engraved upon our expectations of literature the effects associated with the pen—the pauses; considerations; sometimes the racing; the scratching out; the transportation of words and phrases with arrows, lines and circles; the closeness of the eyes to the page; the very touching of the page—but that the pen, not being a machine (it does not meet the scientific definition of a machine), is a surrender to a different power than those of mere speed and efficiency.

In short, a pen (somehow) helps you think and feel. And although once you find a pen you like you'll probably stick with it the way an addict sticks with heroin, it can be anything from a Mont Blanc to a Bic. The same for paper. There are beautiful, smooth, heavy papers, but great works have been written on ration cards, legal pads and the kind of cheap paper they sell in developing countries—grayish white, almost furry, with flecks of brown and black that probably came from lizards and bats that jumped into the paper makers' vats.
Skip the Paris Cafés And Get a Good Pen by Mark Helprin

I can't help but feel there's something to this, although I don't write by hand myself. Still, I started out writing by hand, and that may be what matters. Temple told me that older architects who'd learned to draw by hand before switching to CAD continued to make good drawings. It was the younger architects, she said, who sent her blueprints with two-foot wide passageways for cattle and the like. They had never learned to draw, and their CAD drawings were severely flawed.

I don't generally give a lot of credence to intuition, but in this case my intuition coincides with a century-old belief in the value of good handwriting (at least a century). Seeing as how our predecessors seem to have known more than a few things we've forgotten, the fact that they valued fluent and beautiful handwriting strikes me as one more reason not to simply assume that "keyboarding" is to writing what washing machines are to doing your laundry in the creek.

But of course I could be completely wrong. Maybe one of these days I'll get around to reading The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture.

In the meantime, I'm going to see what Lifehacker and the Wall Street have to say about it:

• Why You Learn More Effectively By Writing Than Typing by Melanie Pinola 22 JANUARY, 2011 8:00 AM
• A Defence of Writing Longhand
• How Handwriting Boosts the Brain By GWENDOLYN BOUNDS October 5, 2010 WSJ

A few years ago, I used Betty Dubay's Write Now to try to improve C's handwriting as well as my own. My printing improved quite a bit.



image from WSJ

today's factoid

All but five states no longer require the teaching of cursive handwriting in public elementary schools.
With Pen in Hand, He Battles On
By GENA FEITH | September 3, 2012, 4:38 p.m. ET

Another executive decision from central administration.

Oh well. It's not as if handwriting matters, or anything.

Is Handwriting Causally Related to Learning to Write?

The contribution of handwriting to learning to write was examined in an experimental training study involving beginning writers with and without an identified disability. First-grade children experiencing handwriting and writing difficulties participated in 27 fifteen-min sessions designed to improve the accuracy and fluency of their handwriting. In comparison to their peers in a contact control condition receiving instruction in phonological awareness, students in the handwriting condition made greater gains in handwriting as well as compositional fluency immediately following instruction and 6 months later, The effects of instruction were similar for students with and without an identified disability. These findings indicate that handwriting is causally related to writing and that explicit and supplemental handwriting instruction is an important element in preventing writing difficulties in the primary grades.

Is handwriting causally related to learning to write? Treatment of handwriting problems in beginning writers.
Graham, Steve; Harris, Karen R.; Fink, Barbara
Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 92(4), Dec 2000, 620-633

palisadesk on joined manuscript vs cursive

The research actually shows that "joined manuscript" is both faster and more legible than cursive, especially at maximum speed. It doesn't degenerate into a scrawl or scribble the way the "loopy" styles do.

Kate Gladstone is the handwriting go-to guru, her website Handwriting Repair has a ton of resources on the topic. She recommends a number of the italic and quasi-italic styles, which have always been dominant in the UK and Australia.

It's untrue that traditional cursive will eliminate, or prevent, b-d reversals and other such anomalies. I've had a number of students who consistently made b-d errors in cursive -- "The bog is darking," and so on -- even though the letters did not look anything alike. Kids with graphomotor output issues have a terrible time learning traditional cursive writing, and their writing always looks like chicken tracks despite their best efforts. Italic and manuscript-style joined cursive, a la "Handwriting WIthout Tears" yield better results.

they do what they do

A teacher friend told me her district is not going to teach cursive handwriting any more. The children entering Kindergarten next year won't be able to write cursive script, and they won't be able to read cursive script. Their parents' love letters will be as indecipherable to them as 1960s shorthand is to me.

My friend thinks dropping cursive is a bad idea, but no one asked her. No one asked the parents, either, or the taxpayers. District administrators made the call, and that is that. They are the deciders.^*

Meanwhile some children will undoubtedly suffer in ways the deciders have failed to consider:

Cursive longhand helps some people in a way few would think about. I am dyslectic to the point that I had to depend on others to read to me for many years. Over 50 years ago I received an engineering degree, and went on to a successful career supervising the design and construction of several big-ticket projects.
With my dyslexia pattern I would never print "dog" as "god" but I could, even today, print "dog" as "bog" and not know the difference, even if someone pointed it out to me. I do not make these mistakes when writing in longhand. I hope the schools continue to teach this method of writing to the dyslectic students.
R.W.
Ridgefield, Wash.
July 16, 2011

^* I don't use the word "decider" as a slam against President Bush. Deciders is an excellent word.

Chris can spell!

update: Here is Mary Damer on masked deficits & poor spelling in high-performing students.

Some of you who've been reading and writing ktm from the beginning may remember Chris's "psychotic" spelling as a 4th grader.

Well, great news: Chris can spell. I suspect he's still not spelling as well as I probably did at his age, but his spelling is completely 'within the realm,' if you know what I mean, and you probably do.

I've been thinking lately about the issue of how much you can learn about writing (and spelling) just from reading, and I think the answer is that you can learn a great deal ultimately. I say that with the caveat that school reading needs to be guided by a teacher and needs to be systematically increased in difficulty.

Those conditions have been true for Chris, who has taken all Honors and AP courses in high school, and who says he's done all the reading in his classes. The reading load in Honors/AP courses is pretty hefty, the books are quite difficult, and a teacher leads the way.

We worked our way through Megawords Grade 6, which helped tremendously, and Chris's high school reading and writing took him the rest of the way.

His handwriting still stinks, however, although it's better than it was. (Takes me back to our summer adventures with Write Now. Chris's handwriting didn't improve, but mine did.)

the Megawords posts at ktm, the sequel

from the "blooki" index:

• Megawords & sounding out by syllables & spelling research
• The Saxon Math Of Spelling
• Being Your Child's Frontal Lobes
• Great Moments In World History
• Summer Supplement Time
• Summer Supplement Time Part 2
• How To Spell
• How To Spell Part 2
• MoreSpelling
• Liveblogging The Spelling Bee
• teaching spelling through morpheme and book recommendations
• spell check
• bad spelling on job applications

Jean on ergonomics

Here's another thought: ergonomics is important when you're using a keyboard all the time. How many kids who type everything are using a keyboard designed for smaller hands? How many of them sit with proper posture, with their arms held at a good angle? The number approaches zero, right?

If a child spends hours a day, for years, typing in bad positions with ill-fitting equipment, he's being set up for repetitive stress injuries that will not go away.

I speak from experience, since my husband is a software engineer. He started programming when he was 10, and of course never heard the word ergonomics. By the time he was 23, he had severe tendinitis in both arms, which he's now had for over 10 years (though it's improved with attention to ergonomics and physical therapy).

I'd bet that schools that require students to type everything or use laptops all the time don't give a second's thought to the physical consequences of constant keyboard and mouse use.

handwriting, part 2

Vicky S:

Here's another side of it: kids who can't write cursive can't read it either. Ask a student who has never learned cursive to read a handwritten paragraph. You'll see what I mean.

When my older son (who writes in cursive) did spelling tests at his new school in 4th grade, and they exchanged papers to grade them, not one person in the class could read his words (and his cursive is quite good).

Susan S:

Another problem, along with lack of practice, is the fact that some schools allow keyboarding papers as early as 4th grade. Thats what happened to my son. They gave him a choice so he chose the computer.

I finally realized in middle school that he couldn't write a legible paragraph. He was dependent on the computer and spellcheck. I had to spend a year forcing him to handwrite summaries for me and he complained mightily because his hand hurt after a sentence or two. It took a few weeks for him to relax with the pen or pencil and pop off a paragraph. This is ridiculous for kids about to go into high school English followed by the ACTs.

I also had to re-teach him certain letters in upper and lower case. No teacher corrected his mess when he was doing extended response in class, something they do a lot to prepare for state tests.

Oh yeah, and rarely did he come home with lined paper. He had idea how to use it.

Most of the practice that he did receive in grade school was in the form of journaling. His own thoughts of "I love to play with my ball" are more critical at that time than learning to shape letters properly, apparently.

Cursive is important because they can't read it, like Vicki said. They can't read their parent's love letters or the Declaration of Independence. Cursive gives them more practice which helps to strengthen those small muscles in the hand. At some point, I agree that allowing them to choose is fine, but I would push it to high school. They have to be forced to write until it's fluid, something we of another age took for granted.

I could go on and on, but you get the point. It's another thing you must do at home and early or you'll have to remediate later.

Rocky:

I know a lot of kids who write a '4' the same way they would print a lowercase 'u', except with a longer tail. A '5' is written the same way as an 's', and a '9' is written starting from the bottom, then up, and a counterclockwise circle at the top.

I think they "discovered" this because no one showed them how to pick up the pencil to finish the 4, or to put the "little flag" on top of the 5, or to change direction when writing the 9.

And they hold their pencils the way little crabs would hold them! By the time they get to middle school it would need Total War to fix, and I would lose.

farmwifetwo:

It is dreadful. My friend who teaches at college level can't read their stuff... and as mentioned above.. ironically the typing is as bad or worse. They are never taught how to write a sentence... just told to write, from kindergarten on. I admit my grammar isn't the greatest... but atleast I know it isn't... they don't.

Last year (Gr4) my son's teacher taught them cursive. He told me they'll never see it again - he's taught 30yrs or so - BUT, he was going to give them a crash course in it. Now, my son had already had some cursive b/c OT sent some home. He can now read (ok) and write (messy but no worse than his printing) in it - gr 5.

Chem Prof gave me an idea, this summer when he's doing spelling words I'm going to add "write in cursive" to the instructions.

Thanks for the reminder.

Does the quality of a student’s handwriting affect SAT essay grading?

After reading chemprof on handwriting, I caught a thread on collegeconfidential that asked, How much does handwriting affect SAT essay grade?

I would say probably yes, because I agree with this comment:

Officially, it's like jgraider says. They're professional graders, handwriting quality is not one of the things being judged, so it has no effect.

Unofficially, essay grading is by its nature subjective. An essay where all the letters are beautiful and flowing will look better than an essay of chicken scratching, whether or not it's officially used as a criterion.

chemprof on handwriting

My students' handwriting is generally abysmal. A lot of them write like elementary school kids, and it impacts their ability to take notes, to solve algebraic problems, and to do well on exams.

The whole idea that they'll all just use computers so handwriting doesn't matter is baloney.

Absolutely.

you know you need a vacation when...

I've been pulling articles for the book proposal I'm working on, which has to do with impulsive/compulsive behaviors, and was in the midst of cutting and pasting a long interview with Jerald Block on the subject of videogames & Columbia, when I came across a page from Eric Harris's yearbook.

My first thought was, "Why can't the schools teach decent handwriting?"

things I wish I'd done

With C. headed to high school, it's too late for me to do some of the things I should have done:

• pay for lessons and/or CD to teach C. a second language to fluency
  

• teach C. good handwriting -- a must -- essential for writing straight columns of figures & solutions in math, for composing short and essay answers, and for not appearing stupid to the folks scoring SAT exams - NEWSWEEK article here - The Effect of Handwriting Upon Grading 1927
  

• teach C. the study method described in How to Double Your Child's Grades in School (Here is Carolyn's post summarizing the book's approach to reading & study.)
  

• teach C. to write paragraphs

The last two of these are going to have to happen anyway, so the fact that time has run out means only that we'll have to steal time from something else to do them.

Possibly video games.


books

handwriting
Write Now by Barbara Getty & Inga Dubay & Italic Handwriting Series at Portland State

organization
The Organized Student by Donna Goldberg & Jennifer Zwiebel

reading & studying
How to Double Your Child's Grades in School by Eugene M. Schwartz

spelling
Megawords by Kristin Johnson & Polly Bayrd

writing
Analyze, Organize, Write by Arthur Whimbey & Elizabeth Lynn Jenkins
Sentence Combining Workbook by Pam Altman
Writing Skills 2nd Edition by Diana Hanbury King (Susan S's find)
Sentence Composing for Middle School by Don & Jenny Kilgallon (high school & college, too)
Sentence Composing - Don & Jenny Kilgallon's web site


posts from ktm-1

The Organized Student:
getting the call in May
3-hole punch for packet world
accordion file for The Organized Student
Donna Goldberg on children's sense of time

How to Double Your Child's Grades in School:
an approach to reading that really works
an approach to reading that really works (notetaking & outlining)
the 3 building blocks of success

some books that changed Carolyn's life

a plea for better instruction in cursive handwriting

This man makes an excellent point.

While I'm on the subject of lousy instruction in cursive handwriting, I like this remedial handwriting program very much:



I tried it one summer with C. and me. Didn't manage to get through it, though my own handwriting improved quite a lot.

Maybe I'll get back to it one of these days.

Ed had an email from an old friend in France asking why it is that parents all over the Western world are locked in a permanent struggle to get schools to teach their children the fundamentals.

Good question.

A Barrier to Academic Achievement: Difficulty with Handwriting, and a Solution

According to a recent study, somewhere between 10% to 30% of children have difficulty learning to produce rapid, legible hand-written work(1). Handwriting difficulty is often linked with other problems such as attention deficit disorder. Poor quality of handwriting of children with handwriting problems seems particularly related to a deficiency in visual-motor integration. (2)

Children who do not acquire fluent, legible handwriting in the early years often experience far-reaching negative effects on both academic success and self-esteem.(1)

“Handwriting is one of the basic building blocks of good writing and plays a critical role in learning,” Graham, Currey Ingram Professor of Special Education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, said. “Young children who have difficulty mastering this skill often avoid writing and their writing development may be arrested. They also may have trouble taking notes and following along in class, which will further impede their development.”

There are three possible sources of children developing handwriting difficulties: a problem with the child, a problem with the teacher, or a problem with the curricula (and related materials).

In " How do primary grade teachers teach handwriting? A national survey",(3) the authors found that

Nine out of every ten teachers indicated that they taught handwriting, averaging 70 minutes of instruction per week. Only 12% of teachers, however, indicated that the education courses taken in college adequately prepared them to teach handwriting. Despite this lack of formal preparation, the majority of teachers used a variety of recommended instructional practices for teaching handwriting. The application of such practices, though, was applied unevenly, raising concerns about the quality of handwriting instruction for all children.

In a less-formal presentation of the national study data, Steve Graham is intereviewed:

Graham suggests that a return to consistent handwriting instruction, with an understanding of the challenges different children face, would not only result in more legible papers but also support overall learning across subjects.

“Teachers need to continue to teach their students how to properly form and join letters. We found that this sort of instruction takes place for 10 minutes or less a day in most schools, down from two hours a week in the 1950s,” Graham said. “At home, there are many things that parents can do to help their young children improve their penmanship. Activities such as identifying and tracing letters, forming letters from memory, copying words and playing timed games to see how quickly they can accurately produce written letters and words all go toward building this skill.”

There are two common handwriting approaches or curricula used in U.S. schools--one: traditional, based on the Palmer method, and two: "italicized" -- more flowing. The most popular of the former is Zaner-Bloser and the most popular of the latter is d'Nealian (developed by Donald Thurber).

There is very little research on the relative effectiveness and efficiency of each approach.

There is, however, a third way: Handwriting Without Tears.

I spent Friday and Saturday at a Handwriting Without Tears seminar. Handwriting Without Tears (HWT) was created in the 1970s by an occupational therapist as a remedial program, and over the decades, has grown into (1) a pre-K through 5th grade classroom curriculum and (2) a remedial program..

It works as a classroom curriculum because the letters are taught in logical order, the letter formation skills are taught to mastery, and the curriculum uses multisensory methods. The teacher watches for, and immediately corrects, errors in letter formation, and the curriculum includes frequent "Review and Mastery" opportunities.

It works as a remedial program because HWR's authors have structured remediation in small, precise steps.

I highly recommend Handwriting Without Tears.


1. Feder KP, Majnemer A. Dev Med Child Neurol. 2007 Apr;49(4):312-7.
2. Volman MJ, van Schendel BM, Jongmans MJ. Am J Occup Ther. 2006 Jul-Aug;60(4):451-60.
3. Graham S, Harris KR, Mason L, Fink-Chorzempa B, Moran S, Saddler B Reading and Writing 2008 21(1-2):49-69.

Elsewhere:

Handwriting Key to Learming, Newsweek, November 12 2007

LD Podcast: Dr. Steve Graham on writing development.

Interview with Steve Graham

Previous KTM Posts referencing Handwriting
Somewhere in a Well to Do District

Learning in a Castle of Fear

Speed Test