How Does Writing By Hand Improves Your Cognitive Skills

This generation has given us many technological advancements but it’s snatching away our fundamental skills of processing information. We are currently living in a world where keyboards have taken control over writing. We spend plethora of time in front of computing devices without even realising our cognitive skills are fading away bit by bit.

With the development of technology, we are saying sayonara to our trusty old pen and paper. This topic is controversial in many schools and colleges regarding the use of laptops in classrooms for note taking. Many professors consider laptop and internet are a distraction and contributes to students being less attentive and shows lack of interest during lectures.

Researchers Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer in their paper “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking” they discovered that longhand note taking students performed better than the other group who took notes on their laptops. Their research shows that the students who took notes using a laptop had diminished memory comprehension and performed worse on the conceptual questions.

During this research series of experiments were conducted in classroom. Students were divided into random groups and were informed to take notes on the lectures either through handwritten notes or via a laptop. Notes were retained with the lecturers and it was announced that test will be conducted after a week. When the students were back, they were given 10 minutes to revise from their respective notes and test was conducted on the same topics.

Later, the papers were corrected in a lenient manner and found out that students with handwritten notes had better answers than their counterparts with notes on their laptop. The students who took notes on laptop performed remarkably worse.

Another research “The effect of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children” by Karin H, James and Laura Engelhardt, found out that both children and adults who used writing as their primary means of note taking showed significant brain activity of neural processing regions compared to the ones who took notes on laptops.

One might think that writing and typing are one and the same, but these researches prove that they make significant impact on human brain. For instance, typing could be done faster without processing the information, But handwriting requires you to twist and curve your fingers and hand in order to imprint the necessary shape and size of a character on a paper. By doing this one tends to recite the words and sentences in your mind which is twice the amount the information that you are processing when compared to mindlessly typing without any recitation in mind.

Students who took notes by laptop focused more on verbatim transcription rather than digesting the information. Whereas students who took longhand notes recited those words while writing.

Even though the longhand notes had fewer lines of information they were able to recall more than any other group. It is evident that typing can result in abundant information, but writing helps recall abundant information.

This phenomenon is not only applicable to students but other worldly professions which involves digital processing of information. It could negatively affect our performance in strong conceptual understanding and critical thinking.

Hence the research proves the common saying “Quality over Quantity” is important than “Quantity over Quality”