Review and Critique of Research Paper
✏"Take The Pencil Out Of The Process" ✏
By Leslie Broun
"Which is more important - being able to write the answer or knowing the answer?"
In this article, Leslie Broun discusses the challenges and obstacles faced by students who struggle with handwriting. Although, her main focus is on students with Autism she also includes students with all types of disabilities in her research. According to Broun, students struggle with handwriting for many different reasons. For Autistic and Aspergers students researchers have found significant differences and abnormalities in parts of the brain that interfer with the act of handwriting. For other learners, handwriting difficulties could be caused by learning disablilities like Dysgraphia or Dyscriptia. Sometimes it is even caused by stress, anxiety, the ability to think of letters and words on demand or physically a student could have weak motor skills that prohibit them from writing.
Broun believes that being forced to hand write is the most significant impediment to academic success. The student's quality and quantity of response is diminished when they are expected to demonstrate what they know with paper and pencil. Often times, intellectual and cognitive processing take a backseat to the effort involved for some students to write.
My views have definitely changed over the years on this topic. When I first started teaching I was a strong advocate for all of the reasons why students should write and not use a keyboard. In the past, I would have agreed that it cost too much, it made the students too lazy, being able to print is more important, it wouldn't be fair to other students, etc. After teaching so many students over the years who have struggled and have never shown improvements with handwriting my opinion has completely changed! I became so tired and frustrated (myself) teaching students who struggled daily with handwriting. Watching how it affected every area of their learning as well as their attitudes towards school and class activities. The implementation of technology at the time was not common. I truly felt so bad for these students and at a loss as to how I could help them.
My belief now is that teachers must provide students with all the materials and strategies needed to promote learning. Whatever they need to show what they know is what we need to provide them. We cannot let obstacles like lack of funding stop us from helping our students. I plan to use the UDL principles for learning now and throughout the rest of my teaching career.
The following video is discussed in Broun's article: "A Child's Voice" - This video is about a young girl named Carly Fleischmann ( a non-verbal student with Autism) who uses a keyboard to not only write but to communicate.
Today our culture revolves around technology, ie. texting, snapchat, twitter, google, facebook, messenger,etc. Learning how to use a keyboard is an essential skill in many ways. Most people spend the majority of their time on a computer - not writing! It maybe important to know how to write our name and some other personal information about ourselves but technology is the future and we need to prepare our students to live in this world.
According to Broun, there should be early substitution of the keyboard for students experiencing difficulty with graphomotor skills. I really like that she outlines steps that educators should take before deciding if a student should begin using a keyboard. I agree that its important to know for sure that a particular child needs the keyboard before its actually given to them.
Some of the information we must gather and teach includes:
* Observe and evaluate student's abilities to form letters and numerals.
* Ascertain how the student relates to the computer.
* Is the student able to match?
* Is the student able to identify letters?
* Does the student have a sight vocabulary?
* Letter location skills.
* Hand over hand guidance at the very beginning.
* Student needs to observe the cause and effect relationship of hitting a key.
* Font size and type is important.
* Teaching the vocabulary of keyboarding is important.
The following are some Keyboard sites to help teach about keyboarding:
The following is a game that can be used to teach keyboarding.
I believe the most important thing to remember from this article is that handwriting is not an essential component of literacy. The thought process is the most important element. The writing process does not start when a pencil hits the paper, it begins way before than. Learning to use a keyboard can open up many doors for many of our learners. As teachers, we need to always find a way to support our students and provide them with whatever they need to succeed!
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