Very interesting entry, much food for thought. The comparison of computer code to a language (Logo as Latin) is catchy but also seems extremely reductive.
But have the effects of Latin been studied thoroughly? The higher SAT scores is evidence or suggestion of transfer and the studies cited in the Papert review do not seem definitive. It mentions three studies. Thorndike 1924 studied the effect of the study of one subject for one year (can this be definitive?). Detterman 1993 has very, very little to say about Latin (the citation in the review leads one to believe the article focused on Latin). Lave 1988, a book focused mathematics, also has very little to say about Latin (pages 24 & 34, the latter another reference to Thorndike’s studies through a secondary source).
80 years later perhaps the Thorndike studies could be conducted better?
Today Latin itself can be taught in different ways (look at the variety of approaches in textbooks from the Cambridge series to Lingua Latina per se illustrata by Ørberg) for different lengths of time. Which approach, which length of time has been studied?
Perhaps the verdict is still out?
Thanks for the entry. It gives me more to think about.
Erick Wilberding
Reblogged this on Sugar Labs @ NDSU and commented:
For the transferability of coding to really work, learners can’t just be using computational thinking in other contexts, they also need to be coding in contexts other than the programming class. That’s why we have been arguing for a “smarter computing culture” in which opportunities to program are broadly available.
That would be one way to put it. That was the general education vision of some computer scientists before CS became highly professionalized. Many of my students (English majors) would benefit significantly from computational thinking and some coding knowledge, and it is hard to imagine what major wouldn’t have some disciplinary / professional application of computational thinking and coding.
Kevin, you say that teaching coding to young children and youth in K-12 schools would be beneficial to them later on during college and afterwards. Question I have is whether learning coding in K-12 does indeed teach computational thinking and that thinking transfer to other domains of knowledge and experience.
Handwriting matters — but does cursive matter? The research is surprising. For instance, it has been documented that legible cursive writing averages no faster than printed handwriting of equal or greater legibility. (Sources for all research are listed below.)
Further research demonstrates that the fastest, clearest handwriters are neither the print-writers nor the cursive writers. The highest speed and highest legibility in handwriting are attained by those who join only some letters, not all of them – making only the simplest of joins, omitting the rest, and using print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes disagree.
Reading cursive matters, but even children can be taught to read writing that they are not taught to produce. Reading cursive can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five- or six-year-olds, once they read ordinary print. (In fact, now there’s even an iPad app to teach how: named “Read Cursive,” of course — http://appstore.com/readcursive .) So why not simply teach children to read cursive — along with teaching other vital skills, including some handwriting style that’s actually typical of effective handwriters?
Educated adults increasingly quit cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37 percent wrote in cursive; another 8 percent printed. The majority — 55 percent — wrote a hybrid: some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive. When even most handwriting teachers do not themselves use cursive, why mandate it?
Cursive’s cheerleaders sometimes allege that cursive makes you smarter, makes you stunningly graceful, adds brain cells, instills proper etiquette and patriotism, or confers other blessings no more prevalent among cursive users than elsewhere. Some claim research support, citing studies that consistently prove to have been misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by the claimant.
So far, whenever a devotee of cursive claims the support of research, one or more of the following things has become evident when others examine the claimed support:
/1/ either the claim provides no traceable source,
or
/2/ if a source is cited, it is misquoted or is incorrectly described (e.g., an Indiana University research study comparing print-writing with keyboarding is perennially misrepresented by cursive’s defenders as a study “comparing print-writing with cursive”),
or
/3/ the claimant _correctly_ quotes/cites a source which itself indulges in either /1/ or /2/.
What about signatures? In state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!)
Questioned document examiners (these are specialists in the identification of signatures, the verification of documents, etc.) inform me that the least forgeable signatures are the plainest. Most cursive signatures are loose scrawls: the rest, if they follow the rules of cursive at all, are fairly complicated: these make a forger’s life easy.
All writing, not just cursive, is individual — just as all writing involves fine motor skills. That is why, a few months into the school year, any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from the print-writing on unsigned work) which of 25 or 30 students produced it.
Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring.
SOURCES:
Handwriting research on speed and legibility:
/1/ Arthur Dale Jackson. “A Comparison of Speed and Legibility of Manuscript and Cursive Handwriting of Intermediate Grade Pupils.”
Ed. D. Dissertation, University of Arizona, 1970: on-line at http://www.eric.ed.gov/?id=ED056015
/2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. “The Relation between Handwriting Style and Speed and Legibility.” JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, No. 5 (May – June, 1998), pp. 290-296: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542168.pdf
/3 Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer. “Development of Handwriting Speed and Legibility in Grades 1-9.”
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 92, No. 1 (September – October, 1998), pp. 42-52: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542188.pdf
WOW,Kate! What a crisp (and withering) reply to advocates of retaining cursive writing in the elementary school curriculum. Thanks for taking the time and providing the sources.
Thanks to you, Larry, for caring what’s correct. Various advocates of cursive handwriting — including too many of the legislators who introduce or consider bills to mandate cursive — tell me that they do not care whether or not the research supports their misquotations thereof, because they have such good feelings about cursive that they believe any statement they make in defense of cursive to be intrinsically valid. I wish I understood how they reach that conclusion.
The part that I don’t understand is this: when they know they’re short on facts, why would they suppose that their feelings would do just as well? It gets especially strange when — as often — their claims about “what research supports in cursive” include claims that cursive is necessary for thinking logically and accurately.
What is worse: in about half the states where feelings about cursive have been purveyed in the legislators as “facts” (by citing research which has been quietly changed to suit the claims made), the bills to mandate cursive are voted into law despite published evidence that the underpinnings of the bills have been falsified during the legislative testimony and/or media campaigns made to support the bill.
For example, below are published exposés of the undue commercial influences and outright misrepresentations involved in North Carolina’s recent (2013) passage of the same bill now being considered in South Carolina. The bill currently before the SC legislature is nearly word-for-word identical to the NC bill, which passed with a large majority although factually erroneous “support” had already been publicly revealed to be based on untruthful information supplied — to the NC legislator introducing the bill — by a cursive textbook company’s sales representative whose territory is North and South Carolina —
Thanks for sending more examples of legislators passing laws that are more symbolic than evidence-based. Goes on all the time. Cursive fits the bill for them.
What gets interesting is when the symbolic value is paraded in the absence of whatevepr it purports to symbolize. E.g., the many cursive-ites who claim that they want cursive required in school “because it is an art” oppose school requirements for _actual_ art programs. The many cursive-ites whose “research” claims include assertions that cursive instills standard Englishgrammar, spelling, and punctuation, and who further assert that cursive conferred these advantages on them, write those claims — almost uniformly — in significantly non-standard English.
As an elementary student in the mid-80’s, I was one of those who learned Basic. That was back when computers were going to revolutionize education, and all kids were supposed to learn to code and we were going to dump cursive (sound familiar?) because we’d only be keyboarding. So I learned to code. I have yet to see that transfer to anything else other than some of the programming logic I use when I have to program various aspects of assistive tech software – assigning actions to buttons and folders, etc. Yet here we are again, and some of the teachers in my district wonder how I, as a district tech specialist, can be so unenthusiastic about coding at the elementary level and why I steer them towards multimedia projects or other, more technology-integrated projects.
In the meantime, I am stuck with
10 Print “XXX XXX XXX”
20 Goto 10
30 Run
forever embedded in my brain.
I wondered whether I would ever hear from someone who had learned BASIC, and here you are. Thanks so much for taking the time to comment on your experience.
Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice 
Very interesting entry, much food for thought. The comparison of computer code to a language (Logo as Latin) is catchy but also seems extremely reductive.
But have the effects of Latin been studied thoroughly? The higher SAT scores is evidence or suggestion of transfer and the studies cited in the Papert review do not seem definitive. It mentions three studies. Thorndike 1924 studied the effect of the study of one subject for one year (can this be definitive?). Detterman 1993 has very, very little to say about Latin (the citation in the review leads one to believe the article focused on Latin). Lave 1988, a book focused mathematics, also has very little to say about Latin (pages 24 & 34, the latter another reference to Thorndike’s studies through a secondary source).
80 years later perhaps the Thorndike studies could be conducted better?
Today Latin itself can be taught in different ways (look at the variety of approaches in textbooks from the Cambridge series to Lingua Latina per se illustrata by Ørberg) for different lengths of time. Which approach, which length of time has been studied?
Perhaps the verdict is still out?
Thanks for the entry. It gives me more to think about.
Erick Wilberding
And your comment, Erick, gives me more to think about as well.
Reblogged this on Sugar Labs @ NDSU and commented:
For the transferability of coding to really work, learners can’t just be using computational thinking in other contexts, they also need to be coding in contexts other than the programming class. That’s why we have been arguing for a “smarter computing culture” in which opportunities to program are broadly available.
Thanks for your comment, Kevin. So do you mean coding across the curriculum?
That would be one way to put it. That was the general education vision of some computer scientists before CS became highly professionalized. Many of my students (English majors) would benefit significantly from computational thinking and some coding knowledge, and it is hard to imagine what major wouldn’t have some disciplinary / professional application of computational thinking and coding.
Kevin, you say that teaching coding to young children and youth in K-12 schools would be beneficial to them later on during college and afterwards. Question I have is whether learning coding in K-12 does indeed teach computational thinking and that thinking transfer to other domains of knowledge and experience.
Handwriting matters — but does cursive matter? The research is surprising. For instance, it has been documented that legible cursive writing averages no faster than printed handwriting of equal or greater legibility. (Sources for all research are listed below.)
Further research demonstrates that the fastest, clearest handwriters are neither the print-writers nor the cursive writers. The highest speed and highest legibility in handwriting are attained by those who join only some letters, not all of them – making only the simplest of joins, omitting the rest, and using print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes disagree.
Reading cursive matters, but even children can be taught to read writing that they are not taught to produce. Reading cursive can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five- or six-year-olds, once they read ordinary print. (In fact, now there’s even an iPad app to teach how: named “Read Cursive,” of course — http://appstore.com/readcursive .) So why not simply teach children to read cursive — along with teaching other vital skills, including some handwriting style that’s actually typical of effective handwriters?
Educated adults increasingly quit cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37 percent wrote in cursive; another 8 percent printed. The majority — 55 percent — wrote a hybrid: some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive. When even most handwriting teachers do not themselves use cursive, why mandate it?
Cursive’s cheerleaders sometimes allege that cursive makes you smarter, makes you stunningly graceful, adds brain cells, instills proper etiquette and patriotism, or confers other blessings no more prevalent among cursive users than elsewhere. Some claim research support, citing studies that consistently prove to have been misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by the claimant.
So far, whenever a devotee of cursive claims the support of research, one or more of the following things has become evident when others examine the claimed support:
/1/ either the claim provides no traceable source,
or
/2/ if a source is cited, it is misquoted or is incorrectly described (e.g., an Indiana University research study comparing print-writing with keyboarding is perennially misrepresented by cursive’s defenders as a study “comparing print-writing with cursive”),
or
/3/ the claimant _correctly_ quotes/cites a source which itself indulges in either /1/ or /2/.
What about signatures? In state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!)
Questioned document examiners (these are specialists in the identification of signatures, the verification of documents, etc.) inform me that the least forgeable signatures are the plainest. Most cursive signatures are loose scrawls: the rest, if they follow the rules of cursive at all, are fairly complicated: these make a forger’s life easy.
All writing, not just cursive, is individual — just as all writing involves fine motor skills. That is why, a few months into the school year, any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from the print-writing on unsigned work) which of 25 or 30 students produced it.
Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring.
SOURCES:
Handwriting research on speed and legibility:
/1/ Arthur Dale Jackson. “A Comparison of Speed and Legibility of Manuscript and Cursive Handwriting of Intermediate Grade Pupils.”
Ed. D. Dissertation, University of Arizona, 1970: on-line at http://www.eric.ed.gov/?id=ED056015
/2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. “The Relation between Handwriting Style and Speed and Legibility.” JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, No. 5 (May – June, 1998), pp. 290-296: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542168.pdf
/3 Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer. “Development of Handwriting Speed and Legibility in Grades 1-9.”
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 92, No. 1 (September – October, 1998), pp. 42-52: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542188.pdf
Zaner-Bloser handwriting survey: Results on-line at http://www.hw21summit.com/media/zb/hw21/files/H2937N_post_event_stats.pdf
Background on our handwriting, past and present:
3 videos, by a colleague, show why cursive is NOT a sacrament:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURSIVE —
TIPS TO FIX HANDWRITING —
HANDWRITING AND MOTOR MEMORY
(shows how to develop fine motor skills WITHOUT cursive) —
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
handwritingrepair@gmail.com • HandwritingThatWorks.com
WOW,Kate! What a crisp (and withering) reply to advocates of retaining cursive writing in the elementary school curriculum. Thanks for taking the time and providing the sources.
Thanks to you, Larry, for caring what’s correct. Various advocates of cursive handwriting — including too many of the legislators who introduce or consider bills to mandate cursive — tell me that they do not care whether or not the research supports their misquotations thereof, because they have such good feelings about cursive that they believe any statement they make in defense of cursive to be intrinsically valid. I wish I understood how they reach that conclusion.
Thanks for follow-up comment, Kate. My hunch is that you do know why legislators defend cursive with feelings rather than facts.
The part that I don’t understand is this: when they know they’re short on facts, why would they suppose that their feelings would do just as well? It gets especially strange when — as often — their claims about “what research supports in cursive” include claims that cursive is necessary for thinking logically and accurately.
What is worse: in about half the states where feelings about cursive have been purveyed in the legislators as “facts” (by citing research which has been quietly changed to suit the claims made), the bills to mandate cursive are voted into law despite published evidence that the underpinnings of the bills have been falsified during the legislative testimony and/or media campaigns made to support the bill.
For example, below are published exposés of the undue commercial influences and outright misrepresentations involved in North Carolina’s recent (2013) passage of the same bill now being considered in South Carolina. The bill currently before the SC legislature is nearly word-for-word identical to the NC bill, which passed with a large majority although factually erroneous “support” had already been publicly revealed to be based on untruthful information supplied — to the NC legislator introducing the bill — by a cursive textbook company’s sales representative whose territory is North and South Carolina —
http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2013/04/24/cursive-writing-bill-linked-to-zaner-bloser/
http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/04/25/2850278/senate-approves-cursive-instruction.html
http://www.bluenc.com/about-cursive-bill#comment-154356
tinyurl.com/hw-esquire-01
tinyurl.com/hw-ravitch-01
tinyurl.com/hw-ravitch-02
tinyurl.com/hw-BlueNC-01
tinyurl.com/hw-BlueNC-02
tinyurl.com/hw-ncpolicywatch-01
tinyurl.com/hw-ncpolicywatch-02
tinyurl.com/hw-ncpolicywatch-03
Thanks for sending more examples of legislators passing laws that are more symbolic than evidence-based. Goes on all the time. Cursive fits the bill for them.
What gets interesting is when the symbolic value is paraded in the absence of whatevepr it purports to symbolize. E.g., the many cursive-ites who claim that they want cursive required in school “because it is an art” oppose school requirements for _actual_ art programs. The many cursive-ites whose “research” claims include assertions that cursive instills standard Englishgrammar, spelling, and punctuation, and who further assert that cursive conferred these advantages on them, write those claims — almost uniformly — in significantly non-standard English.
Thank for the comment, Kate.
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.
Thanks for re-blogging post on cursive writing and coding.
Reblogged this on The Tech-Enabled Educator Network.
Thanks for re-blogging Cursive Writing and Coding.
Pingback: Goodbye Cursive~Hello Coding: Conflicts over Sc...
As an elementary student in the mid-80’s, I was one of those who learned Basic. That was back when computers were going to revolutionize education, and all kids were supposed to learn to code and we were going to dump cursive (sound familiar?) because we’d only be keyboarding. So I learned to code. I have yet to see that transfer to anything else other than some of the programming logic I use when I have to program various aspects of assistive tech software – assigning actions to buttons and folders, etc. Yet here we are again, and some of the teachers in my district wonder how I, as a district tech specialist, can be so unenthusiastic about coding at the elementary level and why I steer them towards multimedia projects or other, more technology-integrated projects.
In the meantime, I am stuck with
10 Print “XXX XXX XXX”
20 Goto 10
30 Run
forever embedded in my brain.
I wondered whether I would ever hear from someone who had learned BASIC, and here you are. Thanks so much for taking the time to comment on your experience.
Reblogged this on From experience to meaning… and commented:
There is also a #mustread second part, check here!
Thanks for re-blogging post on coding.
Pingback: Cursive Writing and Coding: Conflicts over Scho...
Pingback: To Code or Not to Code? – Education & Technology