OKLAHOMA CITY (OBV) – The art of cursive handwriting will live on in Oklahoma thanks to a new law mandating that it be taught in public and charter schools.
Gov. Kevin Stitt signed House Bill 3727 into law this week.
HB 3727, written by Rep. Jason Lowe, D-Oklahoma City, and Sen. Kevin Matthews, D-Tulsa, requires public school districts across the state to teach cursive handwriting to students in third through fifth grade.
“I am very pleased that my legislation, House Bill 3727, is now law,” Lowe said. “Elementary students from 3rd through 5th grade will now benefit from learning to write in cursive. This important skill will help them in many ways throughout their lives. Learning cursive handwriting is proven to improve students’ neural and motor function, as well as their grammar, handwriting, and spelling. It can also assist them with reading historical documents.”
Twenty-four states across the nation require cursive handwriting instruction. Cursive handwriting became law in California in January, a few months after the California Legislature unanimously passed cursive handwriting instruction legislation and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law.
“I feel that children should be able to uniquely sign their name, read historical documents and understand what their grandparents and relatives have written in the past,” Matthews said.
The peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology published a study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology which found that cursive handwriting improves children’s ability to learn and remember.
The Norwegian study used high-density electroencephalogram (HD EEG) technology to analyze the brain electrical activity of 24 subjects – half young-adults, half 12-year-old children – as they were writing in cursive by hand.
“The use of pen and paper gives the brain more ‘hooks’ to hang your memories on. Writing by hand creates much more activity in the sensorimotor parts of the brain. A lot of senses are activated by pressing the pen on paper, seeing the letters you write and hearing the sound you make while writing. These sense experiences create contact between different parts of the brain and open the brain up for learning. We both learn better and remember better,” said NTNU Professor Audrey van der Meer.
Van der Meer lamented that some schools in Norway had jettisoned handwriting training and were exclusively teaching the alphabet on digital keyboards.
“Given the development of the last several years, we risk having one or more generations lose the ability to write by hand. Our research and that of others show that this would be a very unfortunate consequence of increased digital activity,” van der Meer said.
Psychology Today cited an fMRI study of handwriting and reading/writing skills in children and adults which found that “the mastery of handwriting is based on the involvement of a network of brain structures whose involvement and inter-connection are specific to writing alphabet characters” and that “these skills are also the basis for the development of more complex language activities involving orthographic knowledge and composition of texts.”
