Thesis on "Handedness Childhood Development of Dominant"

Thesis 4 pages (1619 words) Sources: 6 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Handedness

Childhood development of dominant handedness:

The role of educators and instruction in this development

Almost everyone knows an older individual who is or was naturally left-handed as a child but was forced to change his or her original inclination as a result of social pressure, usually in school. Although the days of forcing children to alter their natural hand dominance has changed, it is still essential that educators are sensitive to issues of 'handedness' when teaching writing. For example, "while most people naturally write from left to right, lefties move from right to left at first. The same goes for drawing circles: Righties do it counterclockwise and lefties clockwise, which is why they tend to reverse letters (like a, c, d, f, g, q, and s) that are made with a counterclockwise stroke" (Lang 2007). Teachers who are right-handed may not appreciate this and fail to tailor their instruction to suit the needs of children who show left-handed dominance. Left-handed children often have a greater tendency to 'smudge' their ink when learning to write, and teachers may penalize them for untidiness, which can be discouraging for the children -- although most children learn to compensate for this eventually. Finally, the tendency towards letter-reversal must be guarded against when evaluating left-handed printing, and should be monitored and corrected, but not viewed as a pejorative statement about the student's intelligence or ability to follow instructions.

It is very easy for right-handed teachers to overlook simple things that can make a great deal of difference, in terms of ease, for a student learning to write. According to one parent of a left-handed child, when her daughter was learning to print, "the teacher handed out practice notebooks that had the sample letters (the ones the students were to copy) down the left-hand side of the page... To print a letter, she'd have to look at the example, start copying it with her hand covering the sample, stop and lift up her hand to look at it again, and copy the next part. It was taking her forever" compared to her peers, and caused the girl a great deal of frustration (Pitman 2006). The girl began to have a negative view of writing and reading as a result. Her mother finally had to make a homemade practice sheets with letters down the right side of the page, which enabled the girl to keep pace with her peers. Had the teacher made this suggestion sooner, much grief could have been avoided. The mother also complained that the school used a right-handed mouse on all of the computers, as well as had children lead from their right foot in dance classes (Pitman 2006).

Pressure, even implied pressure, to switch student handedness can be unproductive, even damage a student's future success in school, according to some researchers, as it may lead to confusion. "Ambidextrous children are at a greater risk of slipping behind at school, new research by Bristol University has found. The researchers recommend testing pupils for;mixed-handedness,' as those children that had failed to become left or right-handed are more likely to progress slowly up to the age of 14" (Ward 2008, p.12). However, the recommendations of the study are somewhat ambiguous given that why the children were ambidextrous was in question -- are they experiencing difficulty because of a lack of accommodations or because of neurological hard-wiring that ambidextrous students tend to possess? Should teachers be more accommodating to students who seem genuinely ambidextrous rather than pressure children to choose?

Some neurological elements seem clearly at work in choice of handedness, and it is wise for teachers to keep abreast of the current research, as it may influence classroom approaches and pedagogy. One study found that children who exhibit a consistently right-hand preference are superior in motor performance to both left-handed and ambidextrous children of a similar age group. The ability to perform at a high level on skills of manual ability can translate into better performance when writing and in sports, which can result in higher self-esteem for right-handed children. Furthermore, "On further examination of fine- and gross-motor composite performance" the researchers " found that the left-handers are at a greater disadvantage than their mixed-handed peers in comparison with right-handers" (Gabbard et al. 1995, p.411). Yet the list of famous lefties in sports, arts, and politics is long -- including Martina Navratilova, Leonardo da Vinci, Bill Clinton, and the current U.S. President Obama.

Left-handedness hardly precludes success in many spheres, in other words. Yet left-handedness also is correlated to some developmental disorders, such as developmental coordination disorder (DCD). "Although the causes of DCD remain unknown, one potential explanation concerns issues surrounding cerebral lateralization of motor function. Left- or mixed-handedness is thought to sometimes arise because some insult or developmental difficulty brings about a partial or complete switch of specialization from the left to the right hemisphere, or vice versa... There is considerable evidence to suggest a link between handedness and various neurological and behavioral problems," as a result of this failure to switch to the left hemisphere and thus the right hand's dominance (Cairney et al. 2008).

In children, associations have been reported between handedness and a wide range of developmental disorders, not just DCD, but also language disorders like dyslexia, sensory and motor impairments, and even "socioemotional and psychiatric problems" (Cairney et al. 2008). Educators should thus be aware that they may need to be alert of the potential for left-handedness to be correlated to such disorders. They should watch for a constellation of conditions, including ADHD, that are associated with being a 'southpaw' (Cairney et al. 2008). Giving students with such corresponding scholastic difficulties added assistance that makes left-handedness easier to tolerate when learning writing, such as special pencils, pencil grips, and desks is critical to minimize frustration.

The neurological connections between left-handedness and thinking 'differently' in a way that can contribute to learning disabilities is given further support from evolutionary biology. While most animals within species have a preference for one digit or the other, usually the split between these literal southpaws and right-digit organisms is even. Except in humans where "there is a dramatic skew to the right, with only 10 to 12 per cent being left-handed. In 1972, Marian Annett of the University of Leicester, UK, suggested that this difference was caused by a gene or set of genes she dubbed the 'right-shift factor.' At some point in our evolution, she says, this shifted major processing tasks like speech function to the brain's left hemisphere, and somehow conferred bias to the right hand in the process. Although it has been tweaked here and there, this theory of the origin of handedness is still widely accepted" (Wolman 2005).

Annett also states that some people have lateral bias set so far to the left that they remain left-leaning or develop left-handedness as abnormality resulting from slight cerebral damage at birth or exposure to unusual concentrations of hormones in the womb. It should be noted, however, that even if left-handedness is abnormal, it cannot be 'schooled' out of a student and teachers should not try to correct this.

But not all scientists subscribe to this theory: Psychologist Stephen Christman has advanced a controversial new theory regarding common associations with left-handedness or right-handedness that suggests we all have some tendency to be ambidextrous to varying degrees. Handedness is a continuum, although most people show a preference that tends rightward. Christman said that more ambidextrous individuals tend to have a greater dialogue between the hemispheres of the brain, and may be more adept at certain tasks, such as playing music or doing several things at once for example, and less adept at other tasks. "Encoding of memories takes place in the left hemisphere, while recall happens in the right. Christman had subjects keep a… READ MORE

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