Handwriting may not be a useless skill of the pre-digital age after all.
Peabody professor Steve Graham, along with a team of researchers from the University of Maryland, surveyed over 150 first- through third-grade teachers in a three-year study on school district handwriting curriculum requirements, teacher approaches to teaching handwriting and opinions on the importance of handwriting.
"We wanted to know if (handwriting) was being taught, and what teachers thought about it," Graham said.
The study was spurred by national assessments that have indicated two-thirds of children do not write well enough to keep up with their grade-level demands, and one of the contributing factors to this statistic is handwriting.
According to Graham's studies, handwriting affects readers and writers in different ways. For the reader, legibility often determines the opinion on the quality of work, and often a person's ideas may be devalued if his or her handwriting is poor.
For the young writer who may struggle with developing these motor skills, poor handwriting could cause him or her to avoid writing in general, and this may have negative schooling effects later on.
The teachers responded with the amount of time they spent teaching handwriting, and they expressed how much preparation they felt they had after graduating from their respective teacher-education programs.
The results from the study revealed 80 percent of school districts require teachers to teach handwriting, and 90 percent of teachers include it in the classroom. They also spend an average of 70 minutes a week focusing on handwriting, which is close to what academic experts recommend.
However the results also showed that one-third of the teachers taught handwriting once a week, meaning students learn in hour-long increments as opposed to including a 10 to 15 minute handwriting lesson once a day.
The study also revealed that the majority of teachers did not believe a student's handwriting affected his or her intelligence, self-esteem or state of mind. Teachers said they believed handwriting primarily affected the way students were able to keep up in class through note-taking.
"Those were two of the most important findings in terms of what teachers were doing and what teachers thought the effects of handwriting were," Graham said.
Previous studies have found gender and age also influence a person's handwriting. Literature for over the past 80 years says females most often have more legible handwriting than males because of a difference in motor skills.
Graham said he believes this may also be due to a demand effect since people expect girls' handwriting to be easier to read.
He also said a person's legibility in writing improves until around the third or fourth grade when it levels off or declines, while at the same time, fluency rises until the ninth or 10th grade.
A decline in legibility results from increase in speed of ability to write.
"The faster you write, the (greater the) likelihood that will have a detrimental effect on your legibility," Graham said.

Click here to hear a podcast of Graham explaining his research.