Colleagues,
A January 22nd AlphaPlus (Canada) blog entitled
"Does writing with our hands help us to learn better?"
mentions that there is some research evidence to answer this question. You'll find the blog at http://alphaplus.ca/en/alphaplus-blog/archives/3715.html Some findings suggest that handwriting is better than keyboarding but there is not enough to warrant a conclusion. Let's not give up handwriting just yet, however. Both because it may help people learn better and because, as the over 400,000 people who lost electricity in my state's recent "snowmageddon" would tell you -- most of whom no longer have manual typewriters I would guess -- we still sometimes need to write by hand.
I am cross-posting this to the Reading and Writing CoP with this question: Do adult teachers of writing teach their students how to write by hand (only), by keyboard (only) or both?
David J.Rosen
djrosen123@gmail.com
Comments
I darned near aced one of the hardest regurtitory exams I ever took, because I had spent the previous week re-typing the questions and answers to the course's weekly quizzes on my manual Smith Corona typewriter.
I've watched students copy a spelling word five times and then have *no clue* how to spell it when I took away the prompt.
I think that what "helps" is an activity that lends itself to the brain processing and rehearsing the desired chunk of knowledge. When I'm typing or handwriting, I can't write as fast as I think, so I'm rehearsing the knowledge as I'm writing, to recall that next word. I think pretty fast, so even typing is slowing me down... but I think an important element is that the process of producing the text can't be interfering with the processing of the information.