Handwriting and the development of critical thinking

Call deadline: September 30, 2026

The new National Guidelines for the Curriculum - Kindergarten and First Cycle of Education (2025), which will come into force in the school year 2026/2027, devote ample space to writing, and specifically to cursive. They highlight its importance for the development of motor, perceptive, and cognitive skills, as well as reasoning and thought processes, aiming for the completion of the acquisition of its instrumental function—and thus the automation of the graphic gesture—by the end of the third grade of primary school. What emerges is a profound re-evaluation of handwriting in all its components and a significant recognition of its potential. In fact, handwriting is a generative act that involves the active engagement of the writer and requires a cognitive effort that facilitates the transition from short-term to long-term memory, enabling the retention of learned information. Furthermore, the short intervals imposed by the rhythm of handwriting support the selection, rethinking, revision, reflection, formulation, and cohesion of the text, as also demonstrated by studies on the benefits of manual note-taking in conceptual reformulation. It is therefore believed that an adequate learning of writing skills from the beginning of schooling, as advocated in the Guidelines, can enable the acquisition and consolidation of fundamental cognitive skills.

This issue of Graphos therefore aims to present the most current updates on the pedagogy, didactics, and learning problems of writing, also in relation to the development of critical thinking.

Contributions may be: theoretical-foundational, epistemological-methodological, theoretical, and practical; historical-pedagogical and educational; didactic-methodological, with reference to the principles and models of teaching handwriting, as well as the design of plausible teacher training pathways; implementation-oriented, with reference to the issues of implementing and managing educational and inclusive interventions in the face of identified problems in the teaching-learning processes of writing; theoretical, empirical, or experimental, from the perspective of empirical research and reflection on interventions aimed at improving teaching professionalism regarding the didactic-methodological processes of written language as it changes alongside cultural processes.

Additionally, as with all issues, the journal includes a section dedicated to open-theme contributions that fall within the broad and plural field of educational sciences.