Dear Colleagues,
While reading an article on "What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades” by Maria Konnikova, New York Times, June 3, 2014, it occurred to me that someone should be doing the same kind of research on drawing. The article indicates that “ 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. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters - but how.” Like many of you I feel that freehand drawing is doing more for our thought processes than we know about. We realize that drawing involves the motor control areas of the brain but there isn’t much detail beyond that. The handwriting researchers were able to see differences in brain functions between tracing, printing, and cursive. The cognitive parsing of drawing hasn’t been dealt with in this way. It should be to confirm how drawing and thought interact, and to guide its instruction and application. One of the studies cited is:
1. Dev Neuropsychol. 2006;29(1):61-92.
Early development of language by hand: composing, reading, listening, and speaking connections; three letter-writing modes; and fast mapping in spelling.
Berninger VW1, Abbott RD, Jones J, Wolf BJ, Gould L, Anderson-Youngstrom M, Shimada S, Apel K.
Author information:
1Department of Educational Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, 98195, USA. [log in to unmask]
Abstract
The first findings from a 5-year, overlapping-cohorts longitudinal study of typical language development are reported for (a) the interrelationships among Language by Ear (listening), Mouth (speaking), Eye (reading), and Hand (writing) in Cohort 1 in 1st and 3rd grade and Cohort 2 in 3rd and 5th grade; (b) the interrelationships among three modes of Language by Hand (writing manuscript letters with pen and keyboard and cursive letters with pen) in each cohort in the same grade levels as (a); and (c) the ability of the 1st graders in Cohort 1 and the 3rd graders in Cohort 2 to apply fast mapping in learning to spell pseudowords. Results showed that individual differences in Listening Comprehension, Oral Expression, Reading Comprehension, and Written Expression are stable developmentally, but each functional language system is only moderately correlated with the others. Likewise, manuscript writing, cursive writing, and keyboarding are only moderately correlated, and each has a different set of unique neuropsychological predictors depending on outcome measure and grade level. Results support the use of the following neuropsychological measures in assessing handwriting modes: orthographic coding, rapid automatic naming, finger succession (grapho-motor planning for sequential finger movements), inhibition, inhibition/switching, and phonemes skills (which may facilitate transfer of abstract letter identities across letter formats and modes of production). Both 1st and 3rd graders showed evidence of fast mapping of novel spoken word forms onto written word forms over 3 brief sessions (2 of which involved teaching) embedded in the assessment battery; and this fast mapping explained unique variance in their spelling achievement over and beyond their orthographic and phonological coding abilities and correlated significantly with current and next-year spelling achievement.
PMID: 16390289 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Best to all,
Chuck
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