Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information according to a fascinating article recently published in The New York Times.
The article includes findings from many eminent psychologists and neuroscientists including Stanislas Dehaene of the Collège de France in Paris and Karin James at Indiana University, whose studies have shown increased brain activity in children writing by hand compared to those who type or trace.
And in further research two psychologists, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles, have reported that in both laboratory settings and real-world classrooms, students learn better when they take notes by hand than when they type on a keyboard…writing by hand allows the student to process a lecture’s contents and reframe it — a process of reflection and manipulation that can lead to better understanding and memory encoding.
We believe that handwriting should be kept as a crucial part of the National Curriculum.