The young students in a gifted children’s program at Westmount Charter School in Calgary were struggling.
The students’ teachers “had long been ‘stumped’ in understanding why these little ones were struggling so much with putting their thoughts on paper,” says Hetty Roessingh, a professor emerita of the University of Calgary who was brought in to assist the teachers.
Roessingh suggested the kids needed to improve their cursive handwriting — a writing style that joins the letters in words — to better express themselves. She believed weak handwriting skills were distracting the students from thinking about their ideas and hampering their creativity.
“I worked with those teachers regularly over a long time,” said Roessingh, who co-led a research project on how handwriting and spelling skills affect student performance. “With direct, programmatic instruction, these kids made tangible improvements fairly quickly… They were bursting with ideas to write about. I think gifted kids thrive on mastery… this is part of the perfectionist profile.”
Gifted children are not the only kids who benefit from learning handwriting. Research shows that handwriting skills give children a leg up in the classroom by helping improve memory, expression and fine motor skills. But to unlock the benefits of handwriting, penmanship must be mastered.
“Whether playing piano or ice dancing, the creative, imaginative gifts [that kids] have cannot ‘unlock’ if they are struggling on technique,” said Roessingh, who sits on an advisory committee for Alberta Education.
“It does not have to do with pretty handwriting on the page,” she adds. “It has to do with handwriting as a cognitive tool, as a strategy for studying and remembering.”
Ontario re-introduced cursive writing to its curriculum for the 2023-2024 academic year after dropping it in 2006. Most provinces still teach cursive.
Many benefits
Handwriting benefits students in several ways. It activates the part of the brain responsible for reading more than typing does, a study of young children found. Another study showed students who take notes by hand score better on exams.
“You’re thinking as you handwrite, maybe you are identifying a key word or a main idea,” said Roessingh. “All those things mean that you are processing information more deeply.”
“With practice and motor repetition, [handwriting] gets encoded into our… motor memory. And when we have something in motor memory, it allows us just to do it without thinking about it,” said Stephanie Ellis, chief occupational therapist with the York Region District School Board in Ontario.
“That ability to be able to recruit a skill from our motor memory allows us to do things really efficiently.”
Bad handwriting can be detrimental to a student’s academic performance. Copy that is difficult to read receive worse grades, says Steve Graham, a professor at Arizona State University, who has conducted research in this area.
“It has a very strong impact on your judgment about the ideas contained in the paper,” he said.
His study showed that bad handwriting actually has a greater negative effect on students’ grades than spelling and grammar errors.
And bad handwriting can also interfere with a students’ ability to improve their writing skills.
If one’s handwriting can’t keep up with the train of thought, a writer will need to hold their ideas in their mind while their hand catches up, Graham says. They then have a greater chance of losing their train of thought.
“Until we master these skills, [bad handwriting has] the potential to interfere with things like planning and content generation, which results in poor writing,” he said.
Cursive has an advantage over block letters because it’s more fluid, which allows writers to better retain information, says Roessingh. “With every lift off [in print writing] you’re losing a tiny little bit of fluency and working memory capacity.”
For students with learning difficulties, such as dyslexia, cursive writing can be easier to write than block printing, said Ellis. “It helps them write more fluidly.”
Teaching teachers
It takes long-term commitment from teachers to improve student’s handwriting to the point that it benefits their reading and writing skills, says Roessingh.
School boards and teachers are responsible for getting the material to teach children what’s required in the curriculum. And programs for cursive writing can be expensive, she says.
Along with a team of Calgary-based calligraphists — people specialized in writing artistically — Roessingh is developing a free online resource to help teachers properly educate students on handwriting.
The York Region District School Board has developed workbooks and instructional videos teaching cursive writing for their staff, says Ellis. The instructional cursive programs can be necessary for students and teachers, she adds, since some educators didn’t learn cursive writing themselves.
Most classrooms have 19th-century writing tools, says Graham. As they adapt to new technology, writing will take up less space in the curriculum. AI tools and computer programs that fix grammar can assist in producing stronger texts, for example.
But that comes at a cost.
“[W]riting about something allows you to think about it,” said Graham. “If you take humans completely out of it, then you lose learning potential.”
But even as handwriting takes up a smaller portion of adult daily lives, the need for it will not disappear, Graham believes.
“People have asked me about the death of handwriting for 35, 40 years,” said Graham. “And it’s still out there.”
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