In recent months, I’ve mentioned at least once that we’ve seen a sharp increase in the use of tablets and other screens in classrooms since the onset of the pandemic. Many districts pushed 1:1 device initiatives during that time, so the capabilities here have shifted dramatically in the last 5 years. Even in grade levels where tablets are typically not in use, we’ve seen an increase in the use of whole group screens, i.e. videos, with Kindergarten and primary students. In some classrooms, we’ve seen students watching a story on a video instead of listening to the teacher read aloud or reading physical books themselves. In other classrooms with tablets, students engage in activities that involve tapping or typing to identify words and letters. A 2024 study published in The Journal of Experimental Child Psychology set out to determine what best practice in this area should be for students learning to read. The study compared unfamiliar letter and word acquisition using 4 modes of training: handwriting, tracing, typing using multiple fonts, and typing with a single font. The idea here was to see whether physical or digital modes were most effective at helping kids learn letter forms and words.
Why This Study?
Learning letter forms and sounds and how they appear in words is critically important because it’s foundational for other literacy skills. It helps kids decode better and spell words more accurately, but it also builds a body of data in the child’s brain around orthographic forms — the combinations of letters that are possible when constructing words. Given enough time and exposure, we all develop an understanding of where letters can appear in words and which combinations of letters are possible.* This helps us accurately select or discard options for spelling and pronunciation when we read and write. Having a robust body of knowledge around orthographic forms is a strong predictor of fluency in reading. All of this also improves the visual processing required to read. Given the importance of these skills, if there’s a mode of learning them that works better, that’s the mode we should be using.
The Results
The study looked at 50 Kindergarten-aged children with a mean age of 5.4 years. These were Basque children in Spain who already knew 20 Spanish letters and their sounds. They were then taught unfamiliar letters and words using non-Spanish alphabets (Georgian and Armenian) using the four modes listed above and then given a post-test to measure learning in letter/sound acquisition and orthographic form acquisition. Several studies have confirmed that handwriting letters leads to better rates of sound-letter learning**, but the acquisition of orthographic forms –the actual shapes of the letters — has not been as widely examined, so that’s an important dimension of the study.
The study came to two overall conclusions:
- Handwriting (hand copying) letters and words formed with those letters was most effective at building sound letter correspondence and orthographic understanding, and
- Typing letters and words might actually hinder children from developing these critical reading skills.
The specific details about the findings are really interesting:
Students trained via hand copying named letters more accurately than those who were typing-trained by quite a lot (92.3% vs.75.5% accuracy, respectively) and hand copying groups had higher letter-naming accuracy than tracing groups, also by a fair amount (99.1% vs. 85.5%, respectively). The two typing groups had roughly the same accuracy (75%) in letter naming. Hand copying, then, is the most effective mode of learning for this skill.- Not surprisingly, the two handwriting groups wrote the new letters with greater accuracy than the two typing groups by a very wide margin (64.5% vs. 27.7% accuracy, respectively). This makes sense because asking a child to practice writing a letter by writing the letter is about as parallel a condition as you can get, pedagogically. So if we want kids to write letters accurately, they need to actually write the letters.
- Both handwriting methods (tracing and copying) resulted in better word naming accuracy than either typing group (71.9% vs. 37.9% accuracy, respectively). Again, a big difference.
- Words trained in the handwriting groups were written with much greater accuracy than words trained in the typing groups (69.2% vs. 7.8% accuracy, respectively). The difference in accuracy here is really striking and maybe more so when we consider that the Georgian and Armenian alphabets look like a cross between Cyrillic and Greek, so when we are talking about unfamiliar letters and words, they are very unfamiliar and not something a Spanish-speaking Basque child trained in Roman letters would have seen in everyday life prior to the study.
Nowhere did typing outperform handwriting as a mode of learning, and the extent to which handwriting outperformed typing is large, ranging from a 13.8% to a 62.1% better accuracy.
The researchers noted that there is something in the act of handwriting letters and words that consolidates orthographic understanding — it solidifies that database of word forms and letter combinations far better than typing. The wide ranges in accuracy between handwriting and typing groups led them to further conclude that typing letters and words may be hindering this specific literacy learning for students. They don’t suggest eliminating tablets and screens entirely, but they do believe that the data demonstrate that abandoning handwriting in favor of tablets must be approached with extreme caution.
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*If you play Wordle or do crossword puzzles or other word games, you subconsciously access this body of knowledge every time you formulate a guess.
**And a further study from 2021 found that kids who take notes by hand remember more than those who type their notes on a tablet or laptop. There’s definitely something beneficial in handwriting.