Domtar’s Project Learning Curve Focuses on Handwriting
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With a new school year starting, Domtar Corp., Montreal, Que., Canada, has unveiled Project Learning Curve, an effort to increase focus on handwriting and the research that shows how much it benefits students. As part of Project Learning Curve, Domtar has been working with software developers on an app. that helps connect a digital pen to a computer, allowing teachers to measure students' progress.
With the app., teachers can track how long students spend on handwriting, or set classroom goals for students, such as writing enough characters to cross the Golden Gate Bridge. It's a fun way to encourage students to spend more time handwriting, to engage both students and parents, and to help teachers monitor the progress being made at home.
Parents and teachers can learn more about Project Learning Curve and watch a short video online. Anyone with the Anoto pen can also download the free app. Information on where to buy the pen and where to download the application is also available online.
"A growing body of research underscores the importance of handwriting and the brain development it stimulates, yet a growing number of classrooms have eliminated handwriting from the curriculum because of the greater availability of technology," said Paige Goff, Domtar's VP of sustainability and business communications. "Project Learning Curve illustrates how print and pixels can complement each other in the classroom, giving students the best chance of success."
Researchers have found handwriting helps students learn, remember, express ideas, and perform better in a variety of ways. Consider:
- Experts at Indiana University conducted brain scans on pre-literate children ages 4 to 6 to determine whether printing letters, tracing them, or typing is the most effective method in the learning process. The children tried each method, and then received a functional MRI scan in a device designed to look like a spaceship. The results? If children wrote by hand, the experts saw neural activity in three areas of the brain that was far more enhanced. These areas get activated in adults when they read and write.
- Good handwriting can play a role in classroom performance. It can take a generic classroom test score from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile, while bad penmanship could tank it to the 16th, said an education professor at Vanderbilt University in a recent Wall Street Journal article
- A Florida International University researcher found a similar link. She looked at students' grades on fine motor writing tasks in pre-K and their grades in elementary school. Those who did well on fine motor tasks had an average GPA of 3.02 in math and 2.84 in reading, a B grade. Those who struggled with fine motor tasks had an average GPA of 2.30 in math and 2.12 in reading, the equivalent of a C.
- Handwriting can also help older students. Psychologists at Princeton and UCLA 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. This difference does not necessarily stem from the distracting effects of computers. Rather, writing by hand allows students to process a lecture's content and reframe it. This process of reflection and manipulation can lead to better understanding and memory encoding, according to a recent New York Times article
- An article in Psychology Today titled Why Writing by Hand Could Make You Smarter highlights similar findings. A professor at the University of Washington, for example, studied children in grades two, four, and six, finding they wrote more words, faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand and not with a keyboard.
"Educators have noted that even after calculators were invented, schools continued to teach math," Goff said, referring to a recent gathering in Washington for National Handwriting Day. "Why should parents and teachers treat handwriting any differently?"
