As technology begins to dominate the education field, is it all truly for the better?
With the increase in laptop and iPad use in high schools and college campuses alike, there has been a notable decrease in hand writing notes as opposed to typing them out or recording lectures.
I am a strong proponent of hand writing notes in class and, with this belief, I wondered if there was any research to back up my personal preference.
Besides the obvious distractions that come with using a laptop in class, such as Facebook or other social media sites, handwriting contributes much more to our learning than we think.
Therefore, we may be losing much more than pen and paper when we ditch the notebook for the net book.
Dr. Karin James, a psychologist at Indiana University, has contributed much to our knowledge on this topic through his research.
In one 2012 study, he found that children who had to hand write letters experienced brain activation in three crucial areas in the brain to learning, reading and writing.
On the other hand, children who typed the letters experienced significantly weaker activation in these same areas of the brain.
James attributes these differences to the messiness or personalization that is found in free-form handwriting. In the action of handwriting, we must plan and execute that particular action that will result in a product that is highly variable. Dr. James believes that this variability is a key learning tool for children learning to read and write.
With his studies, it is clear that we should not be eager to skip past handwriting for the keyboard in early education. “When a kid produces a messy letter,” Dr. James said, “that might help him learn it.”
These results were also seen in the studies of Virginia Berninger from the University of Washington. She demonstrated that handwriting and typing on a keyboard are associated with separate brain patterns with different end products.
Dr. Berninger found that children who composed text by hand produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard, and also expressed more ideas than their keyboard counterparts.
Brain imaging showed greater neural activation in brain areas associated with working memory, reading, and writing in children with better handwriting.
These studies highlight the importance of handwriting in early childhood, but what about those of us in college? Dr. Mueller of Princeton and Dr. Oppenheimer of UCLA have addressed the latter with their separate studies.
Both of these studies on college students concluded that, in both laboratory settings and real-world classrooms, students learn better when they take notes by hand than when they type on the keyboard.
Their research, taken from the journal Psychological Science, explains that “Laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.”
Personally I have tried both methods of note taking tested in the experiments, and have found that handwriting has led to quicker memory acquisition and better test results.
At the end of the day, this is largely personal preference, however, these studies, and their subsequent results, may give you something to think about.
I believe handwriting is increasingly undervalued in our society and that it should take a more prominent position in education. With these studies, and surely more on the way, I believe there needs to be a shift in education back to handwriting and away from the keyboard.
Next time you pick up your laptop to take notes, you may want to think again and go for the old pen and paper. Who knows, you may even see a GPA boost as a result.
Zach Heppner
Viewpoints Editor
About Post Author
