Which Makes the Better Writer: the Hand or the Keyboard? Age Is a Part

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: we talk with an expert on children and handwriting. RS: Virginia Berninger is an educational psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. She tells us about a study which found that children sometimes do a better job as writers when they compose the words by hand than when they type them on a keyboard.

VIRGINIA BERNINGER: "And this was a chance to follow over two hundred children -- it was about two hundred forty -- longitudinally, once a year for five years. And I looked comprehensively at writing development. And what we found, which was very surprising to us, is that they wrote longer essays, they wrote the words faster. And, in the paper just published, they wrote more complete sentences in fourth and sixth grade when they were writing in handwriting by pen than when writing on keyboard.

"And then a colleague of mine, Dick Hayes at Carnegie Mellon University, who kind of started the field of cognitive research and writing, he analyzed the data independently of me, and found out that the children expressed more ideas when they were writing by pen than [when] they were writing by keyboard." RS: "What does that tell you about teaching and learning?" VIRGINIA BERNINGER: "Now that we've done some brain research with writing, and we've found what other people have done, there's reason to believe that when you write by hand, handwriting, you engage the thinking parts of the brain differently than when you do the keyboarding. "At least, and I want to make this very, very clear, we qualify our findings to the ages we studied, or the grade levels. We studied children in second, fourth and sixth grade. We think this may all change and even out during adolescence. But at least in the developmental stages of learning to write, there was this advantage of writing by pen.

"There's one other aspect to this: In five years of following these children who were normally developing, we discovered eight of them that would meet our research criteria for a specific writing disability. And, at least in the U.S., the focus is on reading disabilities, and they're not identifying and serving children with writing disabilities to nearly the same extent that they are with reading disabilities. So I have a lot of parents who e-mail me, leave voice mail, write, very concerned, and come see me." AA: "And you're talking about, for example, dysgraphia, the inability to -- " RS: "Dyslexia. Or is it conceptual?" VIRGINIA BERNINGER: "Well, with writing disability, it can affect any aspect of the writing process. But when we talk about dysgraphia, those are the handwriting and spelling problems. And, yes, I would say those are the ones that are not getting identified and served, and parents are very frustrated about this. Because what the schools are doing, they see a child with a writing problem like handwriting or spelling, and they just give him a laptop as an accommodation.

"And what we're trying to educate them about is they have to do more. They still should help them with their handwriting. They can teach them how to use laptops. But they need to continue to teach them what we call the transcription process and also the transfer to composition. They need a comprehensive, explicit writing instruction where they learn to express ideas as well as spell words and have handwriting instruction and keyboarding instruction, even when they have those writing disabilities." AA: "You know, I'm fascinated by this connection between, or apparent connection between handwriting and idea formation, the idea that if you're actually committing your ideas to paper the old-fashioned way with a pen -- or, I assume, a pencil -- that maybe you're actually thinking more deeply or more creatively than if you're just typing away, as we do, on a keyboard, on a computer." VIRGINIA BERNINGER: "Right, and remember, we're not generalizing to adults. We didn't study adults, and as a researcher I have to restrict my conclusions to the age of the children I studied. So we're just saying from approximately eight years to about twelve years -- or seven to twelve, let's say -- that these findings apply. And we're not saying we shouldn't be teaching keyboards or using computers. We're just saying we should still teach the handwriting." RS: The findings appear in the journal Learning Disability Quarterly. We'll talk more next week with University of Washington educational psychologist Virginia Berninger. She's given us a list of instructional resources for writing which you can find at our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster. AA: We'd be glad to pass on your questions to Professor Berninger. Just click on the Contact Us link at the bottom of the page. And that's WORDMASTER for this week. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.