As more children are weaned on technology, researchers behind a new national study say handwriting instruction is paying the price.

According to the findings of academics from five American universities, nearly 90% of U.S. primary school teachers believe their college education didn't adequately prepare them to provide lessons in penmanship.

Not only do educators feel ill-prepared to teach handwriting, the study shows they are devoting less class time to doing so.

Teachers reported spending an average 70 minutes a week on cursive. This amounts to roughly 14 minutes per day --far shorter than the 45 daily minutes recommended in the 1960s and 1970s, and slightly less than the 15 minutes mandated in the 1980s.

Likewise in Canada, handwriting researcher Marvin Simner has documented cases in Toronto in which senior kindergarten classes spent just two minutes a day on letter-formation activities. And even then, he says the lessons were highly unstructured, casual and observation-based.

"It's my understanding that formal handwriting instruction, for the most part, has disappeared," said Mr. Simner, a University of Western Ontario psychologist and author of Promoting Skilled Handwriting.

According to Mr. Simner, the U.S. study's findings with regard to teacher preparedness are representative of a similar education deficit in Canada, where a focus on keyboarding skills has left kids' cursive bearing all the legibility of a doctor's prescription pad.

"If you look at the textbooks for teachers from the '60s or '70s, you would typically find an entire chapter devoted solely to handwriting instruction," said Mr. Simner. "By the '80s and '90s, that chapter was completely gone and all you had, by and large, were a few pages -- and in one book I came across, just a paragraph."

Steve Graham, one of the authors of the U.S. study, says one of the more "insidious" findings of his research was related to teachers' perception of penmanship as indicative of the quality of a student's work. Aside from producing assignments that were easier to read, children with good handwriting were thought to have better ideas and were ultimately rewarded with higher marks.

"Teachers are going to give lower grades for the same content if it's less legible," he explained. "Legibility influences judgments about the quality of what you write."

Mr. Graham, a professor of special education at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, says the concern is not necessarily that we are raising a generation of kids with sloppy writing so much as we are engendering a generation of kids who have no interest in writing -- with a pen or otherwise -- as a means of communication.

"Handwriting is only the tail of the dog," said Mr. Graham. "A lot of kids who have difficulty with this skill develop a dislike for writing altogether."

In Canada, some teachers are taking their handwriting educations into their own hands by enrolling in special courses that teach them the art of instructing cursive.

This year alone, Handwriting Without Tears -- a company whose curriculum is used by 100,000 students across Canada -- hosted 15 teacher workshops, primarily in Alberta and Ontario.

"[The instructor] asked how many people in the room had been formally taught to teach handwriting, and not one teacher put their hand up," said Patti Mitchell, an Ontario educator who in June took the workshop alongside fellow teachers in the Brant Haldimand Norfolk school board area.

"It's something there's been a need for ? With the curriculum being so heavy, somewhere handwriting has lost its focus."