Handwriting: A formative art or vital tool?

PROVO — At the beginning of the school year, Lance Vandermark asked his second grade class what kind of handwriting they wanted to strive for this year.

Did they want to have cruddy kindergarten penmanship or write like sloppy second graders?

One boy said that he had a brother in college, and he wanted to have handwriting like his.

Now when the students turn in their final writing drafts, Vandermark asks if they think they used their "super-neat college handwriting." If not, he has them practice certain letters again.

"They think it's a blast and it gets them focused on how they are writing," said Vandermark, who teaches at Sunset View Elementary in Provo.

But over the years, schools have focused less on handwriting. Most early-grade elementary school classes spend 25 to 50 minutes on handwriting instruction a week — as much as some schools used to spend every day on penmanship, said Kathleen Wright, national product manager at Zaner-Bloser, one of the nation's largest handwriting curriculum publishers. Schools have more pressure and time constraints due to the emphasis on high-stakes testing ushered in by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, meaning there isn't as much time to focus on handwriting.

Some schools have already given up on teaching cursive and more may follow in the coming years as the new state-led Common Core standards, set to be implemented by 44 states (including Utah) in the 2014-15 school year, do not require students to learn cursive and do not mention handwriting as part of the curriculum at all. Currently, the Utah curriculum does specify that students should learn how to write legibily and fluently.

Research has shown that learning to write letters by hand is an important part in language development and helps children learn how to read faster and better, said Karin Harman James, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Indiana University who has done extensive research on the topic.

The demand for students to know how to write well remains, as 80 percent of the work students do in the classroom is still done by hand, said Steve Graham, professor of education at Vanderbilt University.

Advantages to handwriting

Earlier this month, students at Reid School, a private school in Salt Lake City, sat down and practiced their handwriting skills. Kindergartners practiced writing the lowercase letter "r" and corrected their teacher when she modeled the letter and wrote it too tall or backwards. Students in the upper-level writing class practiced writing the cursive lowercase "l".