Does handwriting help you learn?

It depends on who is writing and what for. For young children learning letters, there is brain-imaging evidence in favour of handwriting. For college note-taking, the well-known result that longhand beats laptops did not hold up when other researchers repeated it.

Updated

Young children and letters

James and Engelhardt (2012) had five-year-old children who could not yet read print, type or trace letters and shapes. They then scanned the children's brains while the children looked at those letters. Regions known to support reading became active after handwriting, but not after typing or tracing [1]. That suggests handwriting helps children start to read. It is one imaging study, so treat it as one data point.

Note-taking in college

Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) reported that students who took notes by hand did better on conceptual questions than students who typed on laptops. They explained it by laptop users copying the lecture word for word instead of putting it in their own words [2].

Two later attempts to repeat the result did not find the same advantage. Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson (2019) found that performance did not consistently differ between groups, including a group that took no notes at all [3]. Urry and colleagues (2021) repeated the first study with 145 students and found no relationship between typing or writing by hand and conceptual recall. Their combined analysis of similar studies did not show a significant effect either [4].

What this means for worksheets

Both lines of research are about the student doing the writing. Neither shows that a worksheet someone else filled in teaches you anything. The learning comes from working out the answer yourself, and a tool like Fillscribe saves the writing, not the thinking. If you want to learn from a worksheet, try it first and check it afterwards. The study guide shows how.

Sources

  1. James, K. H., & Engelhardt, L. (2012). The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 1(1), 32-42. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4274624
  2. Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science. doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581
  3. Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J., & Rawson, K. A. (2019). How much mightier is the pen than the keyboard for note-taking? A replication and extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014). Educational Psychology Review. doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09468-2
  4. Urry, H. L., et al. (2021). Don't ditch the laptop just yet: A direct replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer's (2014) Study 1 plus mini meta-analyses across similar studies. Psychological Science. doi.org/10.1177/0956797620965541