“Desirable Difficulty” With Handwriting

“Does handwriting matter?” asks Maria Konnikova in this New York Times article. Not very much, seems to be the consensus in many schools, with keyboard proficiency getting much more emphasis and no Common Core penmanship mandate beyond first grade. But new psychological and neurological evidence suggests that handwriting is directly linked to deeper learning. “Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand,” says Konnikova, “but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information.”

This was demonstrated in a 2012 study by Karin James of Indiana University. Pre-literate children were asked to reproduce a letter in one of three ways: typing it on a computer; tracing the letter guided by a dotted outline; and drawing it on a blank paper. Each child was then put in a brain scanner and shown the letter again. Those who had drawn the letter freehand showed lots of activity in three areas of the brain that are activated when adults read and write. Children who had traced or typed the letter showed almost no activity in these areas. 

James believes the difference has to do with the messiness inherent in free-form handwriting. “This is one of the first demonstrations of the brain being changed because of that practice,” she says. “When a kid produces a messy letter, that might help him learn it.” Striving to imperfectly reproduce the letter is much more helpful than merely seeing it or seeing others write it. James’s research suggests that the effort and perceived imperfections of writing by hand engage the brain’s motor pathways – hence the learning benefits.

Research on older children by Virginia Berninger of the University of Washington produced similar results: those who wrote by hand showed more neural activity in the key areas, produced more words more quickly, and expressed more ideas. And research by Pam Mueller of Princeton and Daniel Oppenheimer of UCLA has shown that college students learn better when they take notes by hand than when they use a laptop. It appears that writing by hand allows them to process a lecture’s ideas and reframe them – “a process of reflection and manipulation that can lead to better understanding and memory encoding,” says Konnikova.

“What’s Lost As Handwriting Fades” by Maria Konnikova in The New York Times, June 3, 2014, http://nyti.ms/1t3cmsY

From the Marshall Memo #566