Here we have a classic tale of dualing educational research reports. It starts with Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington Professor of Educational Psychology, publishing a study that shows second, fourth, and sixth grade children (with and without handwriting disabilities) “were able to write more and faster when using a pen than a keyboard to compose essays.”
Two of my favorite bloggers Chris Dawson and Karl Fisch (see blogroll), highlighted dualing studies regarding the impact of 1:1 initiatives/computers on writing.
To sum up:
Karl highlights a recent report – provides his usual thoughtful comments – and sums up with the following:
So the article itself, and the NSBA blog post based on it, appear to be a little misleading. I also think that their definition of writing is too narrow. As the chair of the English Department at Rutgers states, writing/composing in the 21st century is a very different endeavor, and the power of the keyboard is not simply to process words, but also images, audio and video, and the resulting connections to others and their ideas that you can make. I don’t think we can make a broad statement on pen versus keyboard based simply on typing the alphabet, writing isolated sentences, or writing ten-minute essays on a certain prompt. My concern is that someone just skimming the NSBA blog might assume the research – and the NSBA itself – is saying something it really isn’t, and will apply this to older students as well as younger. That, I think, would be a mistake.”
Conversely, Chris reports…
As I watched videos yesterday and talked with colleagues about “writers’ workshops,” I saw a lot of kids spending a lot of time writing and rewriting. It was all by hand. Laborious writing, revising, and rewriting with paper and pencil, followed by peer editing, teacher feedback, and more rewriting. While this process is incredibly important, I couldn’t help but wonder if an infusion of technology might not allow the kids to focus more on the writing and less on the writing by hand.
Perhaps I’m missing something important here in terms of the actual, tactile act of writing – feel free to talk back and let me know if I am. However, when Google Apps, Word, and plenty of other tools allow easy tracking of revisions and have built-in facilities for editing and review, wouldn’t it make sense for students to not only be practicing writing every day, but also be practicing it using 21st Century tools? Don’t get me wrong: we all need to know how to write (as in paper and pencil). But for projects devoted to clear, written expressions of thoughts, ideas, and research, dispensing with writing by hand allows far more time to be spent on content once students have mastered basic keyboarding skills.
When was the last time you hand-wrote a document at work? And then revised it, rewriting it by hand? Even the staunchest handwriting advocates can’t argue that editing isn’t easier on a computer. Let’s pretend for a minute that every kid from the 5th grade onwards could have a laptop (it doesn’t matter if it’s a Classmate, an OLPC XO, or a MacBook; just assume they always have a laptop at their disposal). According to researchers from the University of Southern Maine (Maine has one of the largest 1:1 programs in the country):
The first in a series of studies aimed at evaluating Maine’s pioneering laptop program, Maine’s Middle School Laptop Program: Creating Better Writers concludes that the use of laptops improves scores on writing skills assessments, that more frequent use is linked to higher scores, and that writing skills of laptop users transfer to writing without a laptop.
Anyone else with a different perspective on “what works” ?
Joel
