Analysis: Laptops and tablets are essential tools for study, but it's worth questioning whether a pen and notebook are better for lecture notes
Laptops, tablets and smartphones have become a common feature of daily life across society, but in particular for third level students who require the use of technological devices for the purposes of their studies, as well as for their personal use.
Standing at the front of a lecture theatre, the lecturer is no longer met with a sea of faces, but a sea of laptops instead. Only a handful of students appear to handwrite their notes now, with most opting to take notes using their laptops, tablets or smartphones. It feels rather disconcerting, as you begin to wonder whether students are diligently typing notes about your lecture, or searching online for Oasis tickets instead. You also begin to wonder about the impact of this evident decline of handwriting on students’ learning.
In recent years, digital devices have started to replace the basic pencil and paper once used for handwriting. And the question is frequently asked – is handwriting really that important to teach anymore? Do we even need it, in an age of laptops, tablets and smartphones?
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A review of literature in the area suggests that the answer to this question is a resounding ‘yes’. Handwriting remains an important developmental skill for young children to master. Studies indicate that because handwriting tasks demand integration of the motor and visual processing systems, handwriting fosters children’s early literacy skills (Clarke et al., 2014). Children showing competency in handwriting skills therefore, have more sophisticated letter knowledge, phonological awareness and spelling competence (Puranik et al., 2011)
While the act of first learning to write can be a very effortful procedure, with repetition and practice, handwriting becomes automatic and fluent, with children expecting to reach fluency by around 14 years of age (Tucha et al., 2006). And while unquestioningly an arduous and complex skill to master, the act of learning to handwrite in itself, appears to come with many added benefits. Learning to write requires the child to carefully practice the reproduction of the shape of each individual letter. This repetition and practice in turn provides children with critical opportunities to develop the procedural knowledge that will enable them to identify letter shape, stroke order and direction.
Learning to type or to keyboard on the other hand, does not provide such opportunities. When children type, the motor program in operation is not related to the letter shape. Instead learning to type involves encoding the letters of the words, finding the correct key and then moving a finger to that key (Bouriga & Olive, 2021).
Read more: How homework sessions of up to 15 minutes could add up for students
So is handwriting something only children need to do? A recent French research study (Bouriga & Olive., 2021) suggests not. The study investigated the cognitive effort of handwriting and typing of undergraduate students, and involved two experiments. Experiment one assessed the cognitive effort needed by students when undertaking handwriting and typing copying tasks. Cognitive effort is defined by the researchers as the amount of working memory capacity or resources needed for copying, and in the case of this study, cognitive effort was measured by reaction times to secondary auditory signals.
The students were asked to perform a task using a pencil and paper as well as a keyboard and a computer. Throughout the task, students were required to respond to auditory probes that would enable researchers to calculate reaction times, and in turn, to reveal the cognitive effort related to the primary task (handwriting or typing).
Findings of the study showed that students had longer reaction times, indicating more substantial cognitive effort when typing than when handwriting. Important to note in relation to this finding however, is that none of the participating students had received formal typing training and therefore typing was likely be less automatised. This could mean that students had to ‘spend’ more cognitive effort on determining the correct keys, fingers and movements instead of being able to directly retrieve this information from the long-term memory.
Read more: Why handwriting is good for your brain
In the second experiment, the researchers asked the participating undergraduate students to perform a short-term memory task that required them to type or write by hand to recall words in the manner that they had been presented to them. Confirming the findings of the first experiment, typing was shown to be more effortful than handwriting, allowing for less resources to be allocated to memorising the words. Significantly, this shows that overall handwriting led to better recall than typing.
And while the debate regarding whether better recall ultimately leads to better learning outcomes, or whether note-taking in any form is important at all is for another day, the question is perhaps still worth asking: What does this mean for teaching and learning at third level?
Laptops, tablets and smartphones are part of the landscape now, and they are essential tools for study in most cases. But perhaps the question regarding note-taking in class by using a pencil and paper or by using typing is worth a discussion with students. While computers will be used to write assignments, maybe we can take a moment to wonder about whether our use of laptops, tablets and smartphones in class is leading to the additional consumption of valuable cognitive resources, resources that could be better spent elsewhere.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
