Food for Thought: The Importance of Handwriting

Dear all,

It feels like an eternity ago but in reality it is only a few weeks I wrote about the importance of reading. Today this Food for Thought will begin with a few insights into writing. I want to share these with you because in our age of technology the importance of writing can be lost as we type/ thumb on so many of our devices. These articles are for all of us to read because i believe it is important that as ISHCMC teachers we understand the whole story from EE2 through to upper secondary school. in today's world of education you never know when skills that should be developed in lower primary school may be needing teaching in upper secondary as they have to hand write exams in a legible form.

Also as we gaze into the future and AI I wonder whether the ability to hand write and therefore demonstrate personality through our writing style and formation of letters will be something that might be used to differentiate humans from machines. Yes, I know that machines can produce perfect hand writing but by being perfect and consistent they give away that they are a machine. Isn't it our imperfections as humans that will eventually stand us a-side from AI. Can a machine be made that is programmed to be imperfect? (Food for Thought all on its own)

This first article was sent to me recently about the right time to teach the mechanics of handwriting successfully for our students, The Stages of Hand Grip for Writing. As I said in the introduction we should all be cognizant of these developmental skills because there are many older students who write terribly and often it is because they have not been taught the mechanics of writing at the right age.

"As a teacher and educator, I am very concerned about the push down of handwriting.  It is scary to see the wide spread practice of teaching three and four year olds to write before they are physically ready.  I wanted to share a few developmental pieces I have regarding the development of the hand grip.

As you look at the physical developmental picture of a child’s capacity to hold a writing instrument, think of the practices in your classroom or with your child.   While we all know every child’s readiness is individually based – for most four year olds,  the fine localized movements required to write effectively have not developed.  Looking at Stage Four, we see that many children will not develop this until age 6.  In countries like Finland, Switzerland and Sweden, children are not formally taught to write until seven years old.  This allows for the vast differences in readiness."

This article, Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths raises questions not about the importance of handwriting, because it recognizes that research shows it has an important part to play with cognitive development, but whether it is worth teaching cursive.

"I should make it clear I’m not referring to handwriting itself, often seen as synonymous with cursive. There is ample evidence that writing by hand aids cognition in ways that typing does not: It’s well worth teaching. And I confess I’m old-fashioned enough to think that, regardless of proven cognitive benefits, a good handwriting style is an important and valuable skill, not only when your laptop batteries run out but as an expression of personality and character. I should also say that cursive is a perfectly respectable, and occasionally lovely, style of writing, and children should have the opportunity to learn it if they have the time and inclination. My eldest child loves cursive and has the most elegant handwriting, in which I take great pride. And I love a good Victorian copperplate as much as anyone."

To conclude this week's Food for Thought here is an interesting piece of research which questions the use of taking notes on a laptop as apposed to writing on paper. It is certainly Food for Thought for all secondary school teachers and particularly those teaching the IB Diploma. The research was entitled  The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard. Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking by Pam A. Mueller, Daniel M. Oppenheimer. 

Here is the abstract from this research:

"Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning."

Digging a bit deeper I found this article, from Journalist research that refers to this research and provides a good synopsis of its conclusions. These conclusions certainly have implications for how we are expecting our students to record their understanding of our teaching.

The study’s findings include:

• "In all three experiments, students who took notes on laptops wrote significantly more words than those who took notes longhand. In the first, those who typed wrote an average of 309 words compared to an average of 173 words for those taking notes longhand.

• In the first experiment, there was no difference between laptop users and longhand note-takers on factual recall questions. However, on conceptual-application questions, laptop users performed significantly worse. Two countervailing forces appeared to influence this result: Students performed better when they could take more notes, which they did when using laptops, but they also performed better when the notes contained less verbatim content, which was the case for longhand note-takers. The benefits of taking more notes when using a laptop was seemingly outweighed by the propensity to “mindlessly transcribe.”

• In the second experiment, participants using laptops were explicitly instructed not to simply transcribe the lecture — “Take notes in your own words and don’t just write down word-for-word what the speaker is saying.” Despite these instructions, those typing notes were much more likely to take down phrases verbatim than longhand note-takers.

• The third experiment tested students a week after viewing the lectures. The researchers wanted to see if the more extensive notes taken by laptop users helped when reviewing the subject material before the test. Among those students who were not given the opportunity to study notes before the test, there was no difference between those who took notes by laptop or longhand. However, when students were allowed to review their notes for 10 minutes in advance of the test, those who took longhand notes performed better on both factual and conceptual questions.

• The findings of the third experiment appear to undermine the “external storage” hypothesis — that the greater quantity of notes taken by laptop users should help when reviewing material before a test. This may provide evidence that longhand notes have superior external storage as well as superior encoding functions. However, it is also possible that, because of enhanced encoding, reviewing longhand notes simply reminded participants of lecture information more effectively than reviewing laptop notes did.

The authors conclude that “laptop use can negatively affect performance on educational assessments, even — or perhaps especially — when the computer is used for its intended function of easier note taking…. For that reason, laptop use in classrooms should be viewed with a healthy dose of caution; despite their growing popularity, laptops may be doing more harm in classrooms than good.”

I think there is lots of Food for Thought in the above post.

Have a good Sunday,

Adrian

An addition that I have just stumbled upon doing afternoon TED surfing. This links to the idea of what it means to be human but related to writing poetry. Good article, 

Was this poem written by a computer or human?

"One of his takeaways from this experiment is that it’s actually not about whether computers can write decent poetry. Instead, it’s about forcing us to question what we believe it means to be human.

In other words, when you thought that a poem was written by a human, what about it made you think it was crafted by a flesh-and-blood writer?

“This has led me to understand that ‘human’ is not a cold, hard fact,” says Schwartz in his talk. “Rather, it’s something that’s constructed with our opinions and something that changes over time.”

So, as we design different forms of artificial intelligence, he adds, “we shouldn’t only be asking ourselves, ‘Can we build it?’ But we should also be asking ourselves, ‘What idea of the human do we want to have reflected back to us?’“