Thinking Through a Digital Deliberation, Part 4: Handwriting, Typing, and Fluency

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2016 Summer Institute in Digital Literacy

Today, I head to Rhode Island for the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy, and next Thursday I lead a “Digital Deliberation” session on “typing vs. handwriting.” In my first post for this series, I shared an overview of the debate. Then, in the second post, I look at handwriting curricula and typing tools. The third post explored the rhetorical approaches that proponents and opponents of handwriting and keyboarding both take. Today, I take one more dive into the deliberation, specifically trying to discern what — if anything — we can make claims about when it comes to students’ writing fluency, and what we can reasonably expect of them when handwriting as compared to typing.

I close this part of my inquiry and deliberation delving deeper into a point that Seán McHugh posed in his own blog post about typing vs handwriting, though I want to look at it in a different manner. His idea was this:

In other words, when you can touch-type, the cognitive load of writing and thinking at the same time are lessened and free up working memory for thinking—a bit like cycling a bicycle—once the effort required for remaining balanced, and changing gears et cetera are automatic, you can spend more time noticing/enjoying where you are going. The same idea applies to things like decoding in reading via ‘sight words’, this frees thinking space for understanding instead of decoding. The absence of effort in one frees cognitive space for the other…

In short, he equates fluency in touch-typing with gains in the composition process in the same manner that we know gains in fluency for readers will lead to better comprehension. This makes a good deal of sense, and is also backed up by all the research that he summarized. I thank him for contributing that part of his thinking so I could use it to further this deliberation.

So, to elaborate on the idea of writing fluency: in a NAEP report entitled NAEP 1996 Trends in Writing: Fluency and Writing Conventions, writing fluency is described as “a writer’s facility with language both in terms of the development and organization of ideas and in the use of syntax, diction, and grammar” (4-5). Much like a reader develops fluency (speed and accuracy) as well as prosody (performative measures such as volume, tone, and expression), so, too, must a writer develop these skills.

Returning to McHugh’s point above (and summary of the research), touch-typing frees up the cognitive load in our brains so we can focus on the composing process at the level of words, phrases, and clauses in a manner that, for many writing tasks, is superior to handwriting. Again, common sense would dictate that the words can flow more quickly with touch-typing when doing simple transcription tasks. Also, it seems that touch-typing also allows us to focus on higher-order concerns in the composing process.

This is not to say that we cannot, with handwriting (or cursive), compose intelligent, elaborate, and emotionally-rich written texts. Of course we can, and anyone who has his or her own writer’s journal, or enjoys the art of calligraphy or simply prefers to write by hand, can attest to this. What it does suggest, however, is that “handwriting vs. typing” — regardless of neuroscience or nostalgia, is a moot point.

Students must learn both how to touch-type for purposes of transcription (copying from their own handwritten texts or other texts) and composition (creating their own, original written products) in order to be fully literate in today’s world.

Back to the Standards

Because the CCSS offers no clear direction about how much writing a student at any grade should do in one sitting — a composition process that, much like reading well, requires both fluency and prosody as writers — I am going off the writing samples in Appendix C,  as representative samples of fluent writing, completed in one sitting. And, at the moment, I am not even looking at the quality of the writing or the commentary provided about how those pieces compare to the standards. I am, indeed, just looking at word counts and assuming that students produced those texts in “one sitting.”

In the table below, I provide a simple summary of the word counts of these pieces (I copied and pasted the selections into Word) so we can think carefully about this question of writing fluency as it compares to the time that it will take. For what it’s worth, the three kindergarten pieces, both first grade pieces, and the argument piece for the second grade sample and the third grade narrative were handwritten. Also, some of the older grades had pieces where handwritten, too. Thus, I started looking at arguments that were done as on-demand that were “on-demand” or noted to have been written in one sitting (and, I assumed, typed).

Grade Word Count
4 408
6 1026
7 473
10 719
12 582

In order to build this out further, I needed some reasonable estimation of how many words a child might compose based on age. After much searching — both through Google and the academic databases — the most concise document that I could find is this “Curriculum-Based Measurement: Written-Expression Fluency Norms” created by Jim Wright of Intervention Central who, in turn, had built it based on research from Gansle et al (2006) and Malecki & Jewell (2003). Take a moment to click on those fluency norms, and then take a look at Utah’s keyboarding standards, which was one of the few curriculum guides that, again, offered any kind of specificity in terms of the number of words a student should be able to produce at any one “sitting” of writing time.

Here, then, is my best attempt to combined Wright’s version of Gansle et al’s WPM of handwriting with a parallel match to Utah’s WPM of typing at the same grade level. I then compare that number to the average number of words in those samples from Appendix A and, finally, try to calculate an average sitting time for a student composing a text of that length, by keyboard, with the Utah standards. Please note that the Utah standards max out at 25 WPM in fifth grade and then suggest that, beginning in sixth grade, students “will demonstrate correct keyboarding techniques while increasing speed and maintaining accuracy.” For sake of this argument, then, I am adding 5 WPM each year until they make it to 12th grade and are fluent at 60 WPM.

Also, note that Wright’s fluency norms only go up to sixth grade, at which point the range could be from 44-72 (and this is just for total words written per minute, not counting errors). I am going to top out the students at a max of 80 WPM for no other reason than, based on my own experience, I don’t know that I can be in a state of “flow” while writing and pump out more than that. And, as you may recall from my earlier post, I tested myself a few times and I ranged between about 70 and 73 WPM. I’ll assume, however, that we can get our high school students to be accurately composing their written expression at 80 WPM, max.

So, what do we have?

Grade* Word Count Utah Typing Standard WPM Wright’s Fluency Norms (by spring) Wright’s Fluency Range (by spring)
4 408 20 46 30-62
6 1026 30* 58 44-72
7 473 35* 66 (No rates reported, but adding 6 WPM from 6th grade) No rates reported
10 719 50* 80 (No rates reported, but assuming that students top out at this level) No rates reported
12 582 60* 80 (No rates reported, but assuming that students top out at this level) No rates reported

OK, so one more table, now condensed a bit and adjusting for time. How long would “one sitting” be for our hypothetical, Common Core exemplar students, using a keyboard and allowing for a straight-on composing process (no time for planning, organizing, reorganizing, revising, or editing… just putting words onto the screen in a coherent manner).

Grade* Word Count Utah Typing Standard WPM Time Needed to Meet the Standard and Compose This Many Words (Rounded Up) Wright’s Fluency Norms (by spring) Time Needed to Meet the Standard and Compose This Many Words
4 408 20 21 Minutes 46 9 Minutes
6 1026 30* 35 Minutes 58 18 Minutes
7 473 35* 14 Minutes 70 (Estimate) 7 Minutes
10 719 50* 15 Minutes 80 (Estimate) 9 Minutes
12 582 60* 10 Minutes 80 (Estimate) 8 Minutes

Conclusions (For Now)

I will leave any more deliberation to my readers — and the participants in this week’s institute — but for the moment I will leave with some questions:

  • Are these times realistic given the time we have devoted to writing instruction in our school days and adequate access to computers?
  • Are they realistic given the time our students’ attention spans and ability to compose in on-demand or very short time frames?
  • How much more time do we need to allot in terms of allowing students to actually go through a writing and revising process that, even under ideal circumstances, would mean that they are not writing at the maximum WPM throughout?

Tying all of this together, I share the voice of one more teacher, Terri Fortmeyer.

I just wanted to let you know what we do at our school – North Muskegon Elementary. As a 3rd grade teacher for 16 years, we’ve had many of the same discussions about cursive and keyboarding skills. Currently, we teach cursive during our first semester so students are able to read any cursive they may encounter as well as have a cursive signature. We do not, however, spend large amounts of time on learning cursive letters – maybe 15 min. at the end of the day when students winding down for the day. We also begin teaching keyboarding skills during the second semester of second grade and more consistently during all of third grade. We notice that by fourth grade, students are able to read and write cursive as well as type at a decent speed so that they can begin to move away from paper/pencil writing. Last year I started teaching fourth grade and except for my on-demand assessment pieces and writer’s notebooks, my students drafted, revised, and edited on netbooks computers . . . and they preferred it.

So, what can we learn from Terri’s experience — as well as this entire series of blog posts? What is the state of handwriting and typing in our classrooms? I’ve got to tie all of this together into a 30 minute presentation before Thursday, so I hope that I will have some more ideas by then. And, as always, I appreciate your comments, questions, and insights.


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Thinking Through a Digital Deliberation, Part 3: What is Gained, What is Lost

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2016 Summer Institute in Digital Literacy

In less than two weeks, I head to Rhode Island for the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy. One main item on my agenda is to lead a “Digital Deliberation” session on “typing vs. handwriting.” So far, I’ve shared some initial thoughts on the debate, as well as a look at some particular concerns with curricula and web-based tools.

In this post, I want to look at “what is gained” and “what is lost,” as well as to bring in the voices of teachers. As with many of the great debates in education, there are many opinions on the matter… and most of them are based in nostalgia and some basic surveys, (though not necessarily in deep, substantive qualitative or quantitative data).

Voices in the Media

Of the responses that I got to my last blog post, a few of them pointed to articles in the popular media that discuss studies done with neuroscience and fMRI images that show positive correlations between handwriting and other functions, studies that suggest good handwriting is tied with academic achievement, and the neural pathways that are activated by cursive as compared to touch-typing. Look at a few of the headlines and, using some very basic critical discourse analysis, see if you can spot a trend.

If you need a hint, scroll down to the word cloud below, which is comprised of all the text that I copied/pasted from these articles:

Representative Language from Cursive Writing Articles (Word Cloud Created with Wordle.net)
Representative Language from Cursive Writing Articles (Word Cloud Created with Wordle.net)

Just as a side note, here are two pieces produced by National Public Radio and its affiliate, WNYC, that I left out of the word cloud.

So, what is the narrative that dominates the media? Well, it certainly has something to do with our children, their brains, and the powerful effects of cursive writing.

Also, I finally ran across two state-level curricula for handwriting, from Kansas and Utah. Why I didn’t find it last week when searching for handwriting curricula, I have no idea. Utah, coincidentally, has curriculum for keyboarding, too. There also appear to be some other handwriting/legislative updates documents on this site, sponsored by Zaner-Bloser (who also offer a handwriting curriculum).

Voices of Teachers

As you might imagine, it seems like the voices of teachers are a bit more even-keeled.

In 2012, my NWP colleague and creative teacher-leader Kevin Hodgson noted the ways in which his sixth graders struggled with the task:

… they began to type and I was curious to see their skills at the keyboard. It wasn’t so great. Some students took almost 45 minutes to write a single paragraph. Most were hovering over their keyboards (ergonomic alert!) with a single finger jabbing at keys, their eyes darting from paper to computer. When I asked how many had ever used any kind of keyboarding system, only a few raised their hands. Most of the programs were online games.

Hodgson concludes, “We don’t do our students any service by leaving out keyboarding from the school curriculum, and the ideal age is around second grade.”

Also, another NWP colleague (and Spartan!), Rachel Huntley, responded to my last post via FB with these thoughts:

As a Kindergarten teacher, I teach both handwriting (letter formation, placement, shape, etc) in conjunction with typing. I support the fact that to create digital composition beginning in 3rd grade, it benefits my students to be more familiar to keyboarding from the start. I have (and continue) to try new programs, apps, websites to facilitate this.

Those are two voices that jumped right into the conversation last week. A little more searching yielded a few other teachers with positive things to say about the need for keyboarding (with a healthy overall balance focused on handwriting as well). For instance, Jacqui Murray, a K-8 technology teacher, describes a lesson in which she asks her students to use the scientific method to measure their handwriting WPM as compared to typing WPM, all within a discussion of the school’s keyboarding curriculum. There is also this article from Education World about the importance of teaching proper keyboarding technique.  Finally, Gary Stager posted a literature review from a deceased colleague, Steve Shuller, which was written in 1989. The concluding section of Shuller’s report: “There is widespread agreement that elementary school students need keyboarding skills.”

Conclusion (for now)

As I continue to prepare for the Digital Deliberation session, I am still trying to figure out exactly how I will frame the debate. One thing is for sure, we can always look to Finland for some answers. There are many ideas for me to consider as I prepare a 30 minute, interactive talk on the topic… but I look forward to the challenge, as well as your continued comments, questions, and links to other resources.


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Thinking Through a Digital Deliberation, Part 2: Handwriting and Typing Curricula and Websites

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2016 Summer Institute in Digital Literacy

Later this month, I will help facilitate the fourth annual Summer Institute in Digital Literacy, at URI. As I noted in my last post, I will be leading a “Digital Deliberation” session on “typing vs. handwriting,” and in this post I want to build on Seán McHugh’s ideas about the practicality of teaching touch typing to a look at some of the websites and curricular options for these two options.

In short, I want to look at the evidence and rhetorical appeals each type of curriculum/website makes, and to match those claims up with some of the evidence that McHugh’s had shared. He concluded that “So to summarise: that’s handwriting at 22 WPM, hunt & peck at 27 WPM (about the same) and between 50-120 WPM for touch-typists,” making the point that the mechanical act of writing (whether by hand or by typing) is a proxy for the types of fluency that a writer can and should have. So, to start this curricular conversation, let’s begin with the one that dominates the conversation in the US right now: The Common Core ELA Standards.

According to the Common Core

First, I couldn’t find any reference to “cursive,” “typing,” type,” “keyboard,” or “keyboarding” in Appendix A, the document that is subtitled “Research Supporting Key Elements of the Standards.” “Handwriting” gets one mention, though oddly enough it is in the “Speaking and Listening” section (26). So, any curriculum for handwriting or typing that claims to be Common Core aligned is, from what I can tell, simply making up that endorsement. (If anyone can correct me on this — and can point out where this info is found in the CCSS — I would appreciate it.)

So, Dave Stuart Jr. notes that the 3-6 standards in the Common Core emphasize “keyboarding skills,” and have an increasing set of requirements for “one sitting”; in fourth grade, it is one page, and then two pages by fifth and three pages by sixth grade. Interestingly enough, by seventh grade, the keyboarding skills are left to the imagination, but the phrase “linking to and citing sources” enters standard six (which is, I think, a pretty important move for us to consider when we think about digital writing; that is, writing that truly utilizes the affordances of digital tools such as links and media).

At any rate, as Stuart reminds us, there is some “intentional ambiguity” in this standard, and it is tough to know what comprises a “page” and a “sitting.”The standards all read that students should have “sufficient command of keyboarding skills to type a minimum of X page(s) in a single sitting.” Thus, it is hard to know what constitutes a “sitting” — both in terms of time, fluency, and quantity. The CCSS certainly doesn’t reference any point about how much of this typing should be devoted to invention and brainstorming, actual drafting, substantive revision, and/or editing.

Given all of this, I will assume that it means drafting, and for simplicity’s sake, I used the Words Per Page Calculator, and I assumed an Arial, 12 pt, double-spaced page. The number of words it takes for just one page of typing: 275. Going back to the low end of McHugh’s estimates on what a proficient writer can do at the keyboard (and this is just drafting, or transcribing, not serious revision), a “sitting” could be anywhere along this range:

Typing Speed One Page (275 Words) Two Pages (550 Words) Three Pages (825)
25 WPM 11 Minutes 22 minutes 33 minutes
50 WPM 5.5 minutes 11 minutes 16.5 minutes
75 WPM 3.6 minutes 7.3 minutes 11 minutes

This is an amazing amount of “intentional ambiguity” in terms of the sheer amount of text that students would produce in a “sitting” (one student could type only one page in 11 minutes, another could type three pages). Let’s assume that the average 4th, 5th, or 6th grader falls somewhere just lower than the average of 58 WPM, say 50. How much time would they be allotted to write in any one sitting (during a normal school day, or under test conditions)? Can they reasonably get the writing done that they are expected to do? I am not sure that I know too many students who can fluently type in excess of 70 WPM (I tested myself a few times and I ranged between about 70 and 73 WPM).

Again, I can’t find any reference in the CCSS as to how much a student should really be able to produce in a sitting. So, I turned to the standardized assessments to see if, perhaps, they could shed any insight because, of course, what gets measured, gets treasured. After a half an hour of fruitless searching on both the PARCC and SBAC website, I can’t find any mention of exact times and expectations of what students should be able to compose, via keyboard, in any particular time frame. The SBAC has no time limit on test, though they note some estimated times and the PARCC has some limits. Still, I can’t tell how much time is allotted to any given writing task, let alone all of the tasks combined.

Thus, I don’t think that anyone — software developers or curriculum designers — can make any reasonable, empirical claim about what the Common Core “expects” in terms of writing proficiency, for either handwriting or keyboarding.

Still, the claims come from both the handwriting and typing curricular sites… let’s look at a few.

What the Handwriting Curricula/Advocates Emphasize

There are a number of handwriting curricula available (“handwriting curriculum” yielded about 504,000 results), and I delved just briefly into three of them: Handwriting Without Tears, Zaner-Bloser Handwriting, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Handwriting (full disclosure: HMH is the parent company of one of my publishers, Heinemann, though I have no direct relationship with HMH). Also note that I am only looking at commercially-published curricula, though there are many examples of homeschool and parochial school handwriting curricula. First, Handwriting Without Tears has a complete 111-page guide to the Common Core, and the crux of their argument is summed up in the first pages:

With the adoption of the Common Core State Standards, the emphasis and expectations placed on classroom note-taking and expository writing in grades K–5 is greater than ever.

The reality is that elementary students spend the majority of their day doing pencil and paper work.

Similarly, Zaner-Bloser has a 12-page white paper,  which discusses how handwriting primes the brain for literacy and serves as a foundation for school readiness.There are many, many references (and, I will be honest, I didn’t check them all).  HMH does not have a clear link to any details about their curriculum or any white papers to describe the program, though they do note the one goal to “Improve writing communication with rapid and fluent letter formation.” Still, the general tone of all this curriculum seems to include a clear connection to how fine motor skills and knowledge of print concepts are critical to students understanding how to write and, more importantly, how to write fluently.

What the Typing Curricula/Advocates Emphasize

The first site that came up in my Google search for “typing test” was, aptly, TypingTest.com (of about 8,400,000 results). On their “Touch Typing Benefits” page. In addition to the many images on the website that demonstrate a person casually, and happily, typing, this particular photo/graphic links to the five benefits gained from touch typing including speed, times, focus, comfort, and productivity.

Their claim, from gained when they had “over 15,000 people take a combined typing test and survey” showed that the average typing speed with a hunt and peck method was 28 WPM, while touch typing yielded 58 WPM. Other items of note include this claim, though it is not substantiated with any sources:

Touch typing will keep you focused. As your fingers know their way on the keyboard, they don’t need your attention any more. Instead, you can fully concentrate on what’s important – the text you are writing.

Similarly, “typing tutor” brought up about 4,580,000 results, though a quick look at the top ten of them yielded no typing tutor-type sites that discussed any research about the effectiveness of touch typing, nor why one should learn to touch type, as TypingTest.com did. It is, apparently, assumed that if you are using a computer, then you will want to learn how to type faster.

There was one unique site that made a claim about how typing is taught, The Typing Coach. It’s claim:

Screenshot from The Typing Coach (http://thetypingcoach.com/why/)
Screenshot from The Typing Coach (http://thetypingcoach.com/why/)

I didn’t see any other websites that made that specific claim and, from my own experience, I know that I do periodically take a glance at the keyboard to get “recalibrated.” If I had more time, I would like into the research on this, but I am out of steam for this week.

One final note: I found an interesting collection of links to touch typing sites and programs, which — despite the basic look of the site — appears to be updated regularly (showing updates from 5/25/16), though it did not have a link to The Typing Coach.

Conclusion (For Now)

So, my first caveat is that I didn’t even try to get a representative sample of various forms of handwriting and typing curricula. And, after that half an hour of scouring SBAC and PARCC, I gave up. Still, this blog post has been insightful for me (even if it took me three nights to write!). Most of the arguments that have been built here rely on the general idea that fluency is important, yet the way to achieve fluency can happen in two very different ways.

As a parent, I have always said that, of course, I want my children to know how to write (in this case, I mean “handwriting”) and how to type. Even that conversation brings up some tension in our home as we think about our two girls who are “all thumbs” with their phone-typing, and two of our boys who, at best, write in school only because they “have to.” Legible handwriting (let alone cursive) is a battle for nearly all our kids, one that my wife and I have, in all honesty, fight hard each September but then give up on as the school year progresses.

Where am I at in my “digital deliberation” after this week’s research? Well, tough to know… I know that I need to get my kids learning how to type, regardless of what the Common Core, the SBAC or PARCC, or any software package tells (or fails to tell) me. Next week, I will dive in to see what teachers themselves are saying about the debate by scouring some blogs… if you have an opinion on this (and a link), please share!


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