University of Iowa researchers hopeful for reading gains from state cursive standards

IOWA CITY — Younger and younger kids in today’s tech-savvy world are texting, typing, and even transcribing messages, notes, and schoolwork — threatening the time-honored tool of old-fashioned handwriting.

Cursive, specifically, has faded from desks across elementary classrooms — compelling the Iowa Board of Education last month to, both figuratively and literally, put it in writing. The 2024 Iowa Academic State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy explicitly include “produce cursive writing” in the second- and third-grade “writing foundations” standards.

And University of Iowa experts say their research suggests that could be a good thing — to the extent that a focus on cursive gets kids focused on handwriting.

“Handwriting can be an effective way for students to learn important early reading and writing skills,” according to UI associate professor Shawn Datchuk, who directs the UI-based Iowa Reading Research Center, highlighting handwriting’s ability to teach kids letter names and sounds, spelling, and word comprehension.

Iowa is eager for early-reading help, given 33 percent of the state’s fourth-graders in 2022 performed at or above the national proficiency level and 64 percent performed at or above the national “basic” level, according to the Nation’s Report Card. Iowa’s average fourth-grade reading scores haven’t varied significantly of late, but their difference from the national average has — dropping from 11 percentage points better in 1994 to 2 percentage points better in 2022.

Iowa’s fourth-grade average reading score in 2022 was 218, the lowest since at least 1992, when it was 225.

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The ‘long-forgotten art in schools’

Despite research clearly linking handwriting with success in early reading and other academic performance metrics, Datchuk told The Gazette handwriting is becoming a “long-forgotten art in schools.”

“There's an old saying, ‘reading, writing, and arithmetic’,” he said. “I think writing, for whatever reason, has not been a priority area.”

Support for his argument that it should be comes from research involving two types of memory — working and long-term — and a student’s ability to learn. Because writing and reading are cognitively demanding, the skills involved — like generating ideas and communicating them in writing and decoding and interpreting vocabulary in reading — compete for a limited amount of working memory resources.

The more fluency students have in foundational skills — like handwriting — the more tasks are performed using long-term memory, freeing up working memory resources for other aspects of producing or consuming composition.

“The shifting of letter knowledge (e.g., letter identification and formation) from working memory to long-term memory is likely one of the key reasons handwriting instruction improves reading,” according to Datchuk. “Specifically, handwriting helps facilitate the storage of alphabetic knowledge — shape, formation, name, and sound of letters — that can also be used to learn how to read.”

Handwriting puts learners on level playing field

Reasons handwriting has lost its footing in American reading instruction involve both societal shifts and an undervaluing of the cognitive benefit for kids. Because while some see handwriting more like drawing — rather than reading — handwriting differs in that it requires knowledge of the alphabet and use of the same cognitive tools employed in reading.

From the societal perspective, academic standards in many states have become too eager to pivot from printing and handwriting by the end of first grade to tech-based work on a computer or other digital tool, according to Datchuk.

Not only does sticking with handwriting benefit brain development, Datchuk said, it keeps elementary learners on a socioeconomically-level playing field for longer.

“When you think about practicality, portability, and expensive technology, if a student breaks their tablet, their iPad, if a student breaks their Chromebook, that's a problem,” he said. “And the schools just don't have access to the budget to replace those consistently.

“When we talk about a kid who breaks a pencil, you just got to sharpen it,” he said. “You just got another pencil.”

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Cursive standards are guideposts, not law

Although Datchuk and his colleague UI education professor Leah Zimmermann haven’t researched the benefit of cursive instruction specifically, he suggested its tie to another benefit of handwriting — personal connection.

“I think that there is an emotional resonance with handwriting that isn't easily set aside,” he said. “So what I mean by that is, when I write my mom a birthday card, I don’t type it up and then hit print, and then send her the print.”

A person’s personal style of handwriting carries with it decades of memories and cognitive growth starting with the first time he or she wrote their name or the word “mom.”

“As I think about why handwritten notes, and then handwriting in general, have national and international resonance is because of that,” he said. “It’s our deeply personal fingerprint, so to speak, on our cognition and in our physical development.”

Iowa lawmakers in recent years tried — but failed — to pass a bill that would have required proficiency in cursive reading and writing by the end of third grade. The standards that instead were adopted by the Department of Education serve as guideposts, according to Datchuk, not law.

“They’re a set of benchmark standards for what is expected across those grade levels,” he said, noting this is the first time cursive is included. “In fact, handwriting was really only mentioned previously at the early elementary grades to help students with what they call print production — so that they're printing something with their hands. And then it quickly shifts toward technology tools or use of keyboard typing.”

So Iowa’s standards involving cursive writing — following states like California, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma — could prove the research on reading development and answer an open question.

“The research is less clear on what are the specific benefits for handwriting with print versus handwriting with cursive,” he said. “That’s a little bit more murky.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com