Writing by Hand Might Increase Learning, Improve Test Scores, and Help Students Make Connections.

This episode of Freakonomics discussed the topic of handwriting in the classroom, and the place it has in the modern lifestyle: Who Needs Handwriting? - Freakonomics Radio

ANNE TRUBEK: There’s some very solid research, and it’s called “the handwriting effect.” And that is: students who have more legible handwriting do score better on tests. And this will be true of high-stakes tests as well.

"That’s Anne Trubek. She is the author of a forthcoming book called The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting.

TRUBEK: I was a professor at Oberlin College and my focus was on the history of writing and writing technologies.

So Trubek says the “handwriting effect” research shows a correlation between good handwriting and good test scores.

Hearing Trubek, you might think she’s an advocate for continuing to teach cursive, and for stressing good penmanship. But you would be wrong.

DUBNER: So, in 2008 you wrote an article for Good magazine called, “Stop Teaching Handwriting.” Talk about that for a moment — why you wrote the article and whether that was the beginning of something for you or the middle or, I assume, not the end.

TRUBEK: Right, right. That’s a good question. I’d say it was — it was really the middle.  The impulse to write it came from watching my son, who was then I think in second grade, struggle quite a bit in school because he had poor handwriting.  And I was very aware that in my son’s adult life, handwriting was going to be a very small percentage of what he needed to do.  And yet, he was having to stay in every single day for recess of second grade because he got his Gs backwards.

DUBNER: What did that do to his feelings about school and feelings about learning generally?

TRUBEK: It was really detrimental. He really thought he was bad at school. I mean, I ended up actually transferring him to a private school and this was a lot of the reason why. And they said, “Oh, you know, ‘he’s school-damaged.’”  And it also worked on him cognitively so that he started to believe that he didn’t have any good ideas because the difficulty of technically being able to make a letter was transferred to a difficulty expressing himself.

DUBNER: So, you wrote this article that was influenced by your son’s trouble in school learning writing, but you made a broader argument that what?

TRUBEK: My argument was that elementary schools were putting too much emphasis on penmanship in their curriculum and that it should be de-emphasized given changes in technology and the idea that it was going to be preparing kids for the future was more questionable.

DUBNER: So what was the response like to your article?

TRUBEK:  It just went viral. And the comments were extraordinarily nasty and negative. A lot of it was, you know, sort of I’m a bad mother, if I really cared I would spend more time teaching my son how to write correctly or  things like that. And that I didn’t understand the importance of education and knowledge. And then there was a lot of, you know, “what’s next, we’re all going to have computer chips in our heads” sorts of slippery-slopes logic comments.

As Anne Trubek sees it, moving from handwriting to keyboarding is a good thing, if only because it doesn’t penalize people with poor fine-motor skills or other issues that make it hard to write with a pen and paper.

TRUBEK: There is a truly democratizing effect to having students move to keyboards.

Rather than putting so much effort into handwriting, we’re freed up to concentrate on what matters most — the words and ideas. But, some studies show that the act of handwriting is better for the brain than keyboarding. Also: that we express more ideas when writing by hand."

Handwriting work might be a critical part of the elementary classroom, but it doesn't have to be. Typing and other computer skills might be a more useful and essential part of a students education. However, this glosses over the critical part the writing by hand has on the learning process: taking the time to think about what is most important.

PAM MUELLER: Hi, my name is Pam Mueller. I just finished my Ph.D. in social psychology at Princeton.

"Mueller was a teaching assistant in an introductory psychology class.

MUELLER: Usually I would bring my laptop to class to take notes in case students had questions later. But one day I’d forgotten it, and I took notes in a notebook. And I thought I got so much more out of the lecture that day than I had out of any other lecture, and I told him that after class.

“Him” being Daniel Oppenheimer, the professor teaching the class.

MUELLER: A few days later, he had a similar experience at a faculty meeting where he was typing notes, realized he had written everything down, but had no idea what anyone was saying. So since we had these parallel intuitions, we thought we should test them scientifically.

 

MUELLER: What we found was that for factual questions, there was no difference between laptop and longhand note-takers — they did equally well. However, for conceptual questions, the longhand note-takers did significantly better, about a half a standard deviation better.

The laptop note-takers were able to write down much more information — about 50 percent more. But, the information didn’t serve them as well.

MUELLER: And this appeared to be due to the fact that the laptop note-takers took more verbatim notes, signaling that they were processing the content less than the longhand note-takers.

Now, why would that be? Mueller’s argument is that because handwriting is slower, you’re forced to decide as you go what’s worth writing down. And this gets your brain engaged in processing the information as you go.

MUELLER: And when you process something more deeply, it’s more likely to stick.

There’s also the possibility that taking notes by hand is just harder:"

MUELLER: There is such thing as a desirable difficulty, having a little bit of difficulty when you’re trying to learn something is actually beneficial and longhand note-taking might be just that for us.

The process of writing things down is more than about just showing your work. It's an essential part of the the learning process for most people. And it is about more than just taking good notes to look back at later: its about thinking deeply about something, fully understanding it, processing that, and then being able to write the most important things about it for you to remember.

So please, show your work.