Back in 2011, I’d moved to a new international school in Shanghai. The school had moved to 1:1 devices about a year before I joined and everyone was excited.
I picked up a final-year IB Business and Management class and was greeted by a bunch of glowing faces tip-tapping away throughout my lessons. They had laptops, and they used them. This was before social media became the distraction it is today, although games provided plenty of temptation. With screens facing away from me, a bit of circulating while I taught generally kept everyone on task.
And it looked good.
If someone popped into the lesson and saw a room full of students furiously typing, there was every chance they would conclude that plenty of learning was taking place.
The early evidence seemed to support that conclusion. In-class tests went well. Scores were decent. There were no obvious concerns.
Then came the mock exams.
By this point we had covered almost all of the course and spent considerable time preparing for the demanding final section of the Higher Level paper. These were strong students. They knew their stuff. I expected them to do well.
At the end of the 2 hour 15 minute exam, I stood outside the room shivering in the Shanghai January cold, waiting for them to emerge.
One by one they trudged out, shaking and rubbing their writing hands.
Barely any of them had finished. A few had not even reached the valuable strategy question we had spent so much time preparing for.
They knew the content. They knew how to answer the questions. But after around 18 months doing almost everything on laptops, many of them could no longer sustain handwriting at the speed the examination demanded.
Their handwriting stamina had gone.
The laptops went.
From then on, the lined paper and notebooks returned and we wrote by hand. There was remarkably little pushback from that class. They had just experienced, rather achingly, one reason why being able to write by hand still had value.
Thankfully, they all went on to do fine and secured the kind of grades they deserved…by hand.
I continue to tell students that story when they ask if they can type their notes instead of writing them. I often used to say that typing all year to then do an exam with a pen is like practicing basketball shots in order to prepare for a penalty shootout. It usually did the job.
But more than 15 years later, I now know there was more going on that I didn’t understand at the time.
The problem with typing seems to extend beyond what happens to our hands when we stop writing and appears to change what happens in our heads while we learn.
Slowing down
Typing is wonderfully efficient. For plenty of tasks, that is precisely why we should use it. I am typing this article. If I wrote it, you probably wouldn’t be able to read it, my handwriting is awful.
But efficiency is not necessarily what we want when students are learning something new.
When students can type quickly, they can record an extraordinary amount of what they hear. Sometimes almost verbatim. That feels productive because lots of information ends up on the page, almost identical to what has been said.
The problem is that relatively little (processing) has to happen to that information on the way there.
Handwriting introduces a constraint. Most of us cannot write quickly enough to transcribe everything somebody says. We have to decide what is important. We abbreviate. We summarise. We connect ideas. We translate what we hear into something we can get onto the page.
That slowing down can force additional processing.
Mueller and Oppenheimer’s well-known 2014 study found that students taking notes by hand performed better on conceptual questions than students using laptops. Laptop users recorded more words and were more likely to reproduce lectures verbatim. Their argument was that the apparent disadvantage of handwriting, its slowness, may actually be part of its advantage.
There is good reason to be cautious here. Subsequent attempts to replicate the original findings have produced much less decisive results. More recent reviews suggest that the effects depend heavily on the task, what students do with their notes afterwards and how note-taking is structured.
So the evidence does not currently justify a simple rule that handwriting is always better than typing.
The more interesting question is what each method makes the learner do.
Useful friction
We spend a lot of time in education trying to make things easier.
Sometimes we absolutely should. Poorly designed materials, unnecessary complexity and confusing explanations consume limited working memory without contributing anything useful to learning.
But there are other difficulties that we should be much more reluctant to remove.
The difficulty of having to retrieve something.
The difficulty of having to select the important information.
The difficulty of having to organise an idea before expressing it.
The difficulty of putting something into your own words.
These difficulties are often the work that makes learning happen.
Robert Bjork and Elizabeth Bjork describe the idea of ‘desirable difficulties’: conditions that can make performance feel harder in the short term while improving learning and retention over the longer term.
Handwriting may sometimes provide exactly this kind of friction.
Not because pens possess some magical property that laptops lack, but because the constraint can change what students have to do with the information.
If I can type every word you say, I can capture without selecting.
If I cannot keep up, I have to decide.
And it’s the deciding that requires thinking. And as Willingham puts it, “memory is the residue of thought.”
The device is not really the point
This also explains why banning laptops and handing everyone a pen would be a fairly crude response.
A student can copy mindlessly by hand.
A student can think deeply while typing.
The tool does not fix the thinking but the way the task is designed and carried out by the student does.
If students are typing, we can design tasks that require them to process rather than transcribe. Close the laptop and summarise the explanation from memory. Reduce a page to five sentences. Compare two explanations. Produce a diagram. Explain the idea to somebody else. Write down the three things worth remembering.
The same principle applies to handwritten notes.
The question is not really whether the student has a keyboard or a pen in their hand.
It is what the task requires their brain to do.
And then along came AI…
Which makes all of this considerably more interesting now.
In 2011 my students had laptops that allowed them to type faster than they could write.
Students today have tools that can remove the need to type at all.
A lesson can be recorded. Speech can be transcribed. Notes can be generated. Text can be summarised. Questions can be answered. Revision cards can be produced in seconds.
Every one of those tools can be useful.
But each also removes a potential point at which the learner might previously have had to select, retrieve, organise, summarise or generate.
We therefore need to become much more precise about where we want efficiency and where we want friction.
Technology should remove pointless effort, the extraneous load.
We should be far more careful when it removes the cognitive work that actually produces learning.
Back in Shanghai, I thought I had learned a lesson about hand muscles. And I guess I had.
But in addition, a more useful lesson is about brains. Sometimes slowing students down is exactly what allows them to think.
References and further reading
Mueller, P. A. and Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014), The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking, Psychological Science.
Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J. and 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.
Bjork, R. A. and Bjork, E. L., work on ‘desirable difficulties’ and the distinction between performance during learning and long-term retention.
I’m definitely old school when it comes to handwriting, always have been! I never liked the distraction of laptops and always felt that writing things down made you actually stop and think. Now I’ll try to slow things down just a touch more too.
Geography has that added bonus because we’re constantly giving students data through maps, graphs and other visuals, and asking them to transform that information into written analysis. Even if they don’t quite reach higher-order analysis and fall into the trap of describing what they see, there’s still been an important thinking process involved, they’ve had to interpret one form of information and translate it into another. 🌏