“With the prevalence of typing and touchscreens,students may have fewer opportunities to practise handwriting,which can affect the development of fine motor control and muscle memory required for writing.”
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Former education ministerSarah Mitchell touted plans to move the HSC online in a bid to better prepare students for the workforce,but they were quickly shut down by her replacement Prue Car last year,who wanted to stick to pen and paper.
Academic master Molly Simpson at Oxley College in the Southern Highlands said while the HSC was an “old fashioned” exam,she said the focus on handwriting skills meant students thought about the concepts covered in class when taking notes.
“We have a particular emphasis on handwriting class notes. We started to see very competent typists with a verbatim transcript but no idea what happened,” she said.
“The power of handwriting is that it slows us down,we’re paraphrasing,summarising,organising the material.”
A decade ago,a strong HSC student could write a 1400-word HSC essay in 40 minutes,but Simpson said that’s now closer to 1000 words. She said some estimates had said it took 20 years to perfect handwriting.
Her school targets struggling students in the early years of high school because year 12 was too late to turn things around.
“We have a specialist team to get them up to speed where they need to be,” she said.
Kinross Wolaroi School’s head of English Serena Lewis said they had noticed students who were in years 5 and 6 during pandemic lockdowns,who were now in years 8 and 9,struggled with handwriting.
“We’re seeing a decline in their handwriting,they have missed some important stuff in primary school,” she said.
English classes at her school were predominantly laptop-free zones. The school asked students to handwrite essays in a bid to get them to practice.
Physiotherapist Susan Tran,who specialises in hands,said she was seeing more suffering with writer’s cramp.
“I have definitely seen an uptick in writers’ cramp – especially in high school kids,” she said.
“As soon as they start writing they get these cramps and lose control of the pen,there is this muscle overload.”
She equips them with a splint,which is a removable cast which supports the thumb.
“When you don’t have enough control with the pen,your body ends up putting extensive pressure through the wrist instead,” she said.