Keeping some handwriting practice is a very good exercise for the brain,” she says. “It is the equivalent of doing maintenance work on a busy road.”

“I think we should have at least a minimum of handwriting in primary school curricula simply because it is so good for the developing brain,” she says.

Norway, many schools stopped teaching cursive writing, instead opting for pupils to write and read on an iPad, a trend van der Meer hopes to change through her research.

In a study published last January, van der Meer and her co-author Ruud van der Weel looked at brain scans of 36 young adults enrolled in university who performed writing tasks. The students were asked to write Pictionary words using a digital pen on a touchscreen device or typing them on a keyboard. The participants’ brain activity during each task was captured through electroencephalogram (EEG) techniques.

“The human brain evolved to process sensory and motor information through evolution,” she says, “those same sensory and motor processing brain regions are now involved in higher cognition.”

Adults also benefit from the labor-intensive nature of handwriting. A study involving 42 adults learning Arabic found that participants who learned letters by writing them down by hand were quicker to recognize them, had an easier time naming them, and were better at sounding the newly learned letters out compared with people who were asked to learn the new characters by typing or by just looking at them.

“Holding a pen with our fingers, pressing it on a surface, and moving our hands to create letters and words is a complex cognitive-motor skill that requires a lot of our attention,” says Mellissa Prunty, reader in occupational therapy at Brunel University London who has researched the relationship between handwriting and learning. “This deeper level of processing, which involves mapping sounds to letter formations, has been shown to support reading and spelling in children, Prunty says.

So, does technology have a role toplay in teaching writing? Sure. Manyteachers, for example, report successwith blogging and online journ-aling, which help kids collaborateand motivate them to improve theirwriting because students see them-selves as “real” writers with an actualaudience

Note taking isan effective memory and learningaid because it prompts students tothink about their learning; it’s moreeffective when done by hand; andyoung writers, even those withlearning disabilities, aren’t wellserved by moving too quickly tokeyboarding.

a study of 15 childrenin Indiana (James & Engelhardt,2012) who were asked to write, trace,or type letters while having theirbrains scanned found that writingletters activated more regions of thebrain than typing letters—in par-ticular, visual processing centersat the heart of perceiving letters.

Moreover, digital devicesmay tempt students to think aboutother things besides learning, likeformatting or messages from friends

The laptop seems like a perfect tool for taking notes.After all, most people can type faster than they canwrite and thus should be able to capture more ofwhat’s being said with less effort. Yet therein liesthe problem. As it turns out, note taking isn’t sup-posed to be easy—nor a transcription of classroomdiscourse. It’s more important that learners activelyengage in learning by considering the essence ofwhat a speaker is saying and including that essencein their notes

One study from 20years ago (when computer notes would have beenan unaffordable oddity) tested college students tosee if taking notes supported retention of factualknowledge (Beeson, 1996). It did: the note-takinggroup scored better than a group who took no notesduring the lecture, but later wrote essays about whatthey’d learned. The note-taking group also out-scored a control group who reviewed the materialbut did no writing at all. In short, we’re more apt toremember stuff we take notes on

According to Beesleyand Apthorp’s meta-analysis (2010), showing stu-dents how to take effective notes is strongly cor-related with better achievement.

Keyboarding and tech skills are a necessity, but handwriting matters, too. You can offer your students the best of bothworlds by giving them opportunities to do both. “This is not handwriting versus technology. There is a place for bothof those,” Dinehart says. “Handwriting serves a purpose, particularly for young children.”

Kids with better handwriting have “better reading grades, better reading scores on the SAT, and better math scores,both on the SAT and as it relates to grades,” says Dinehart

Many studies have linked handwriting fluency with compositional skill. Research by Virginia Berninger, a professorof educational psychology at the University of Washington, found that handwriting instruction improves firstgraders’ composition skills, and a 2007 study published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology found thathandwritten essays were two years ahead of typed essays, developmentally

A 2014 study found that college students who took notes by hand demonstrated better conceptual understanding andmemory of the material than students who took notes using a laptop. Researchers suspect the same may hold true foryounger students. . .

Research shows that writing by hand also activates the parts of the brain that are involved in memory, impulsecontrol, and attention. Anecdotal evidence and research strongly suggest that writing by hand “moves informationfrom short-term to long-term storage,”

Keyboarding doesn’t “light up” the literacy sections of the brain in the way handwriting does.

Keyboarding and word processing are viewed as essential skills; handwriting is not.

Digital devices are more and more replacing traditional handwriting (Longcamp et al., 2006; Kiefer et al., 2015), and as both writing and reading are becoming increasingly digitized in the classroom, we need to examine the implications of this practice (Mangen and Balsvik, 2016; Patterson and Patterson, 2017)

Even though maintaining handwriting practice in school is crucial, it is also important to keep up in the ever-developing digital world. Children should receive handwriting training at school to learn to write by hand successfully, and, at the same time learn to use a keyboard, depending on the task at hand. The present study shows that the neural connectivity patterns underlying handwriting and typewriting are distinctly different. Hence, being aware of when to write by hand or use a digital device is crucial, whether it is to take lecture notes to learn new concepts or to write longer essays.

The present study did not find evidence of such positive activation patterns when using a keyboard.

hroughout the matrix there is evidence for widespread theta/alpha coherence results (in red) particularly between areas parietal-right, parietal-mid, and parietal-left and between areas central-right and central-left. These connectivity patterns are further illustrated in Figure 3B revealing a concentration of no less than 32 significant clusters (see Figure 4 for details) for handwriting, but not for typewriting

A Geodesic Sensor Net (GSN; Tucker et al., 1994) with 256 evenly distributed electrodes was used to record EEG activity from the participant’s scalp at 500 Hz. The signals were amplified using a high-input EGI amplifier (Picton et al., 2000).

The participants used a digital pen to write in cursive by hand directly on the touchscreen, and a keyboard to typewrite the presented words.

to typing on a keyboard (Van der Meer and Van der Weel, 2017). We concluded that the involvement of fine and intricate hand movements in notetaking, in contrast with pressing keys on a keyboard that all require the same simple finger movement, may be more advantageous for learning (Van der Meer and Van der Weel, 2017).

Also, brain research shows that it is not just any motor activity that facilitates learning, but that accurately coordinating the complex hand movements while carefully shaping each letter when using a pen, is crucial (Pei et al., 2021

We urge that children, from an early age, must be exposed to handwriting activities in school to establish the neuronal connectivity patterns that provide the brain with optimal conditions for learning.

When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard, as shown by widespread theta/alpha connectivity coherence patterns between network hubs and nodes in parietal and central brain regions.

Brain electrical activity was recorded in 36 university students as they were handwriting visually presented words using a digital pen and typewriting the words on a keyboard.

As traditional handwriting is progressively being replaced by digital devices, it is essential to investigate the implications for the human brain.

The present findings revealed increased connectivity for handwriting over typewriting,