Spend Time With Your Family They Will Not Always Be There in Cursive
Should schools teach cursive handwriting? The question is an impressively polarizing one in the K-12 education earth.
One of the well-nigh widely cited criticisms of the Common Core State Standards is that they don't require teaching students to write in cursive.
Some states, such as Tennessee and California, have added cursive to the standards. Louisiana appears to accept gone the uttermost, mandating that students go instruction in cursive every year from the 3rd through 12th grades.
Proponents of teaching cursive say students demand to larn it to be able to read historical documents, such equally the U.S. Constitution. Without knowing cursive, students "will be locked out of doing inquiry with literary papers and archival collections," Valerie Hotchkiss, a library director at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote in the Chronicle of College Education in 2014. "They will not even be able to read their grandmother'southward diary or their parents' love letters."
Others say cursive helps students write faster than print, and that they demand information technology to develop a signature.
Applied science Took Priority
So why didn't the common-cadre writers include cursive? In a recent interview, Sue Pimentel, one of the lead writers of the English language/language arts standards, explained that the decision was about priorities—and that learning to use engineering took precedence.
"Nosotros idea that more and more of student communications and developed communications are via engineering science. And knowing how to use technology to communicate and to write was almost disquisitional for students," she said. "The idea is y'all take to pick things to put in there. .... It really was a discussion."
Anchor standard No. 6 for writing illustrates the tech focus, asking students to "use technology, including the Cyberspace, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others."
The decision to exclude cursive was also based on feedback from teachers, according to Pimentel.
"1 of the things we heard from teachers effectually the country—in some cases, obviously not all—was that sometimes cursive writing takes an enormous corporeality of instructional time," she said. "You could exist spending time on other things rather than students practicing cursive writing. It'southward really a matter of emphasis."
Pimentel points out that the K-five language standards do require students to "print all upper- and lowercase letters," so information technology's not every bit if handwriting is left out of the certificate entirely. She also notes that states had the power to add standards, and that adding cursive is "very legitimate."
"For states that added information technology, I have no qualms," she said.
Being able to read in cursive is of import, Pimentel says. Merely the writers didn't remember it was a place teachers should spend a lot of fourth dimension and energy.
"Ane of the things nosotros were thinking is that if nosotros put cursive writing in, there would be all this practice of forming your messages," she said. "Simply if nosotros didn't accept it in there, it wasn't that teachers wouldn't teach it, it's that information technology wouldn't have [as much] emphasis."
Looking at the Research
But what does the research say about cursive? Does it dorsum the decision non to specifically crave information technology in the standards?
In discussing this outcome, people often conflate handwriting overall—which could be in whatsoever script—with cursive.
According to Steve Graham, a professor of educational leadership and innovation at Arizona State Academy, who has studied writing didactics for more than xxx years, research has shown benefits for didactics and practicing handwriting generally.
Existence able to handwrite quickly makes information technology easier for people to go their ideas on paper. Students who struggle with handwriting "may have to devote other cognitive resources to this depression-level task, which takes away from other college-level aspects of writing similar thinking about how you're going to organize a text," he said.
Having good handwriting also helps students in school, where teacher surveys have shown the majority of writing is still done on newspaper. "A reasonable amount of inquiry suggests if your handwriting is not very legible, people will course opinions about the quality of what you say," said Graham. "The more legible paper will get higher scores for writing than the less legible paper of the same quality."
There's also some research that suggests people remember things amend when taking notes by hand, rather than with a word processor.
Piffling Divergence Between Print and Cursive
So what almost cursive specifically? Are there reasons to write in cursive rather than impress?
Not really, says Graham.
While many people say that cursive writing is faster than printing because the author doesn't have to elevator his or her pencil from the paper, the enquiry bears that out to be only minimally true.
"Today's cursive scripts are non these flourishing things of yesteryear," he said. "They're really elementary. ... If you expect at the data [on speed for print and cursive], it doesn't look that different."
People also say that print is easier to read than cursive, simply again Graham says the enquiry isn't definitive on this either.
"There's not a lot of difference betwixt how legible the two scripts are and how fast they tin be produced," he said.
Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, confirmed that print-versus-cursive finding in a 2013 article for the National Association of State Boards of Education. "No articulate research evidence supports one being meliorate than the other," she wrote.
However, Berninger has as well shown that printing, cursive, and keyboarding actuate different brain patterns, and that in some cases, students with sure disabilities may struggle with print but practise well with cursive.
According to a 2014 New York Times article, some researchers say cursive "may even be a path to treating dyslexia."
Teach 1 or Both?
The question still remains as to what'south best practice for full general classrooms.
As Graham sees it, given the many time constraints teachers have, there's actually no reason to teach more than one handwriting mode.
"Schools are beingness asked to teach typing. Should they also exist asked to teach manuscript and cursive?... We want students to be fluent and legible in at least one of these—which 1 doesn't make that much difference."
Having students larn both, he said, "seems to exist inefficient and a waste of time. ... Which ane of those y'all teach, that ought to exist upwards to the schools and teachers." While U.S. students traditionally begin learning to write with print messages (equally the common cadre requires), they very well could start with cursive—every bit young students do in many European countries.
Berninger, on the other hand, said there's a adept instance for educational activity both print and cursive.
"Teaching BOTH of these handwriting formats has advantages, including learning to recognize and write letters despite small variations in alphabetic character forms sharing the same name," she wrote in the NASBE commentary. "Consider all the fonts figurer users can cull from for word processing. Apple's Steve Jobs was an achieved calligrapher before he became a pioneer in technology tools to support writing—and that is ane of the reasons we take and then many font styles to choose from in computer writing!"
Paradigm: Students practice both printing and cursive handwriting skills at the Mountaineer Montessori School in Charleston, W.Va. —Bob Bird/AP-File
Education Week library interns Laura Zollers and Teresa Lewandowski contributed to this post.
Related stories:
- Pinnacle to Make a Case for Educational activity Handwriting
- Tennessee to Add Cursive Writing to Land Standards
- Louisiana to Require Didactics Cursive All the Manner Through 12th Class
- Indiana Cursive Bill Gets a Fifth Get-Circular
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A version of this news article first appeared in the Curriculum Matters blog.
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Source: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/why-dont-the-common-core-standards-include-cursive-writing/2016/10
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