Cursive Is Not Dead Yet

The national education standards, Common Core, aimed to kill the teaching of cursive. But is not dead—just wounded.

Yesterday, I did a radio interview on WHO in DesMoines. WHO bills itself as the “America’s #1 Audio Company.” I remember fondly listening to WHO over the three years when I lived in Iowa many years ago. The Justin Brady Radio Show people had read one of my articles on why teaching cursive to children is valuable, and they wanted to explore things further. As many people know the Common Core standards did away with the teaching of cursive, presumably because it is not relevant in the digital age where children write by tapping a screen or keyboard.

My state of Texas, notable for doing its own thing, has refused to endorse Common Core, but still the state did not require the teaching of cursive. Now Texas mandates the teaching of cursive. In accordance with the state's new school guidelines, second graders will be taught how to write cursive letters before advancing to third grade, where they'll be expected to "write complete words, thoughts and answers legibly in cursive writing leaving appropriate spaces between words." When students get to fourth grade, they'll be required to write all of their assignments in cursive.

Justin Brady wanted to know what I thought about all this. My first reaction was this: “If we don’t need to teach cursive, why do we need to teach printing by hand?” Cursive is just a refinement of printing letters. Why don’t we just show them pictures of the letters and teach them to punch a key for the letters? In fact, that may well be the next educational “reform.”

We teach printing so kids can more easily learn their ABCs. We could teach ABCs by showing children which letters to tap on a screen. Maybe in some states that think they are so progressive, the teaching of printing letters will be on the way out. However, the reason learning to print letters by hand matters is that it demands mental engagement. A child has to think about the structure of each letter, and in the process of thinking about how to draw it, learns and remembers what the letters look like. Hand printing is an example of the “production effect” principle that benefits memory. We remember things better if we reproduce the learning, either by drawing, writing, or telling. One of the fundamental but unheralded principles of learning is that the best way to remember anything is to think about it.

Learning cursive builds on this principle and provides additional benefits. Cursive has two special advantages over printing: it promotes a higher-level mental development, and it can nurture a child’s emotions and motivation for learning and achievement.

Brain Development

Cursive should be easy to learn once one knows how to print letters, because there are many good books explaining the slight modifications needed to turn printed letters into script. But cursive demands more hand-eye coordination, a change in brain wiring that creates the mental infrastructure for many later uses in real life. Hand-finger dexterity becomes crucial in later life if a child wants to play a musical instrument, excel in sports, manipulate tools, or even master a computer keyboard. In my blog post that Justin had read, I had described how writing in cursive activated many more areas of brain than mere printing. It is training the brain to recruit neural resources to solve problems.

Excelling at cursive does another important thing. The learner has to pay more attention and focus on what needs to be done to make each letter and attractive. To do a good job at cursive requires self-discipline. Who can argue that kids don’t need to learn focus and self-discipline? Our multi-tasking culture is teaching kids to be scatterbrained. All kids have some level of attention deficit.

Learning cursive successfully also incidentally programs the brain for the habit of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is a mental heuristic that enables a person to pay attention to the details of what is needed to improve a skill. If an adult wants to improve her golf game, she has to do more than just repeat a swing of the club. She has to think about what is the best way to improve the swing with each attempt.

Motivational Benefit

Learning to write cursive well has enormous motivational and emotional benefits. First, writing cursive is a form of drawing, and children naturally love to draw. The child happily takes ownership of their cursive creations, being proud of having a skill that generates such elegant writing. They can even develop a personal style, which is gratifying in their limited world that demands so much conformity. They discover that they have powers of mastery, which motivates them to do better in other school work. Of course, they also discover the practical benefit of cursive, which is that they can write much faster than printing, which helps them greatly in taking schoolwork notes.

In recalling my own childhood, I remember that I did not like school until the seventh grade. Before then I hated school and made poor grades. It may have been no accident that I started to like school and make all As in that year when I also had a couple months of penmanship class. I knew how to write cursive earlier, but penmanship taught me how to write cursive that was attractive, not perhaps as elegant as the script in the Declaration of Independence, but still something I created that I could be proud of. I still have attractive cursive today.

So, I say “hats off” to states like Texas that are restoring the hallowed place of cursive in elementary education. My only criticism is that second graders are not likely to have the brain development and hand-eye coordination required to create attractive cursive. Children need refresher instruction when they are older, as I was lucky enough to get in a couple months of the seventh grade. If a child does not learn to do cursive well, many of the emotional and motivational benefits do not occur. In fact, if their cursive is ugly and unreadable, the emotions are negative.

How Learning Cursive Might Improve Reading Efficiency and Hand-eye Coordination

When directing the writing by hand, the brain has to visually track rapidly changing positions of the pencil and control hand and finger movements. To learn such skills, the brain must improve its control over eye-movement saccades and the processing of visual feedback to provide corrective feedback. Both tracking and movement control require much more engagement of neural resources in producing cursive or related handwriting methods than in hand printing, because the movements are more complex and nuanced. Thus, learning cursive is a much greater neural activator, which in turn must engage much more neural circuitry than the less demanding printing.

The key to learning successful handwriting, whether cursive, italics, or calligraphy, is well-controlled visual tracking and high-speed neural responses to the corrective feedback. Scientists are now starting to study the mechanisms, but not yet in the context of education. Two recent reports, seemingly unrelated to each other or to cursive, examined visual tracking and found results that could have profound educational implications for both reading and hand-eye coordination training, as in learning to touch type.

Visual targets are fixed by saccades. One theory is that the eyes scan the target with a linked series of saccades, in this case the changes in cursive letter structure as the letters are being rapidly formed. We already know that the brain predicts eye movements based on what they see at each saccade fixation. This is how our visual world is made stable, even though the eyes are flicking around; otherwise, the image would jitter back and forth constantly. This suggests that visual image representation is integrated rapidly over many successive saccades. The degree of tracking speed, accuracy, and prediction error must surely influence how well the letters are transcribed during handwriting. The corollary is that the better one learns to write by hand, the better the brain is learning how to track visually.

Scientists used to think that these predictions were the source of error in estimating the position of seen objects. In handwriting, for example, the brain would assess the shape of part of a letter as you draw it and predict how and where the next portion of the letter should be added. Learning how to optimize the drawing then would be a matter of learning how to reduce prediction errors.

However, a new study tested the hypothesis that if localization errors really are caused by faulty predictions, you would also expect those errors to occur if an eye movement, which has already been predicted in your brain, fails to take place at the very last moment in response to a signal to abort the eye movement. The investigators (Atsma et al. 2014) asked test subjects to look at a computer screen and tracked eye movement fixation on a very small ball that appeared at various random positions. During this task, the brain must correctly predict where the eyes have to move to keep the eye on the ball.

The experiment ended with one last ball on the screen, followed by a short flash of light near that ball. The person had to look at the last stationary ball while using the computer mouse to indicate the position of the flash of light. However, in some cases, a signal was sent around the time the last ball appeared, indicating that the subject was NOT allowed to look at the ball. In other words, the eye movement was cancelled at the last moment. The person being tested still had to indicate where the flash was visible.

Subjects did not make any mistakes in fixation on the light location during the abortion test, even though the brain had already predicted that it needed to fixate on the ball. Most mislocations occurred when the flash appeared at the moment the eye movement began. Thus, the errors seemed to be associated with neural commands for eye fixation, not with saccade predictions. The application for handwriting learning is that the neural circuits that control target fixation may be a major factor in learning how to write cursive well. Surely, these circuits would be responsive to training, though that was not done in this experiment. It would seem possible that these circuits might be trained via learning cursive to provide faster and more accurate visual tracking, which should have other benefits—as in reading.

A related study of visual tracking in monkeys reveals parallel processing during visual search (Shen and Paré. 2014). Recordings from neurons in the visual pathway during visual tracking of targets in a distracting field showed that in the untrained state, these neurons had indiscriminate responses to stimuli. However, with training the neuronal function evolved to predict where the moving target should be in advance of the actual saccade. Results also showed that more than half the neurons learned to predict where the next two eye movements (saccades) needed to be, which obviously suggests that accurate tracking can be accelerated without loss of information.

In short, learning cursive should train the brain to function more effectively in visual scanning. Theoretically, reading efficiency could benefit. I predict that new research would show that learning cursive will improve reading speed and will train the brain to have better hand-eye coordination. In other words, schools that drop cursive from the curriculum may lose an important learning-skills development tool. The more that students acquire learning skills, the less will be the need for "teaching to the test."

"Memory Medic's" latest books are 

Mental Biology (Prometheus) and Memory Power 101 (Skyhorse).

Sources:

Atsma, J. et al. (2014). No peri-saccadic mislocalization with abruptly cancelled saccades.
Journal of Neuroscience, 15 April 2014. ttp://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/16/5497.full.html

Shen, Kelly and Paré, Martin. 2014.  Predictive saccade target selection in superior colliculus during visual search. The Journal of Neuroscience, 16 April 2014, 34(16): 5640-5648; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3880-13.2014