“If it’s online learning, why do I need a pencil?”
By the time my kids were in school, they were no longer teaching cursive. I’m not sure when the decision was made to suspend teaching cursive, but I do recall thinking that it seemed like a loss – one that could not be replaced with a keyboard – which was clearly the direction things were headed.
My own recollection from early education is that learning to write cursive seemed daunting and tedious at first but, as I picked up speed and fluidity, I made gains in assembling thoughts, constructing sentences, and strengthening composition. It turns out that there’s some pretty good evidence that handwriting plays an important role in learning – one that extends to adult learners too.
A 2014 New York Times article described research into how handwriting and typing engage learning in different ways.[1] In studies comparing laptop and longhand note-taking, participants taking notes by hand performed better on certain conceptual questions. One possible explanation was that typing encouraged more verbatim transcription, while handwriting encouraged participants to process and reframe ideas in their own words.[2] These findings are useful, though later replication attempts have had mixed results, and they don’t mean handwriting is always superior for every learner or task.
Handwriting appears to do more than record information; it helps cement it. In a study by Longcamp and colleagues, adults learned unfamiliar, letter-like characters either by writing them by hand or by typing them. Learning new characters through handwriting led to better recognition than learning through typing.[3] The authors proposed that the graphic motor plans acquired through handwriting contribute to recognition, so the movement of forming a character becomes part of what is remembered. Typing, by contrast, is a simple keypress based on matching two visual forms, which gives the learner less to hold onto.
In online learning, I often include printable study guides, worksheets, or guided notes to reinforce what learners encounter on screen. For an anatomy module, for example, an online labeling interaction might be paired with a printable diagram that learners label by hand. Other activities might ask learners to finish a sentence, paraphrase a concept, or use a new term in context. These materials add development time, but they also give learners another way to work actively with the content. Sometimes the pencil still earns its place!
References
Konnikova, M. (2014, June 2). What’s lost as handwriting fades. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html
Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note-taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159–1168.
Longcamp, M., Boucard, C., Gilhodes, J.-C., Anton, J.-L., Roth, M., Nazarian, B., & Velay, J.-L. (2008). Learning through hand- or typewriting influences visual recognition of new graphic shapes: Behavioral and functional imaging evidence. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(5), 802–815. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2008.20504
