DailyDirt: Should Touch Typing Replace Cursive?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Kids today are bombarded with technology -- touchscreens, keyboards, Xbox controllers, and various gesture-based user interfaces are all competing against the lowly pencil and paper. Sure, finger painting and crayons are still all the rage with toddlers, but once kids get a little older, those activities might not be as attractive as a game of Angry Birds or Mario Kart. Is there any evidence that typing and touchscreens will hinder kids from learning? Here are a few links that seem to point to an association between handwriting and better learning.

• What are kids missing out on if they don't learn how to write in cursive? Some brain scans show that more grey matter is activated when writing in cursive, and some studies suggest that handwriting leads to being more expressive (compared to typing). [url]
• Only a handful of states require teaching cursive in schools. Keyboard skills may be increasingly necessary to enter essays into computer-based standardized tests, so teaching cursive isn't as critical to doing well on tests.... [url]
• It might be better to take notes with handwriting, rather than on a laptop. Students taking notes on laptops are more likely to record lectures verbatim and not actually digest any of the material as they took notes (even when warned not to do so!), and even though students typing their notes could take down more information, it didn't help them retain any more of it. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: common core, cursive, education, handwriting, learning, standardized tests, typing