Remember when we wrote in More Urban Myths about Learning and Education that replacing handwriting with typing might not be such a smart move in early education? That myth—about how it supposedly doesn’t matter whether kids learn to write by hand or type—just got another solid rebuttal. A new study in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology backs it up with some serious data.

Fifty 5-year-olds were taught unfamiliar letters and words through different methods: some copied them by hand, some traced them, and others typed them, either in one font or in several. Then they were tested on what they actually learned. Spoiler: the kids who used their hands, not keyboards, came out on top. Handwriting helped them better remember letters, link them to sounds, and spell the words they’d learned. Typing just didn’t do the trick, not even when the font varied.

The researchers were testing two big ideas. One: that the motor action of writing helps embed letters and words in the brain (the “graphomotor hypothesis”). Two: that variability—seeing and creating slightly different versions of letters—helps learners recognise and generalise what a letter looks like (the “variability hypothesis”). It turns out that both matter, but the graphomotor side packed the bigger punch. Typing didn’t engage the same visual and motor systems, and that meant weaker learning.

If this feels like déjà vu, it should. The first time we pointed this out, the reaction was often “Sure, but kids are digital natives now” – something we debunked in our first Urban Myths book – or “They’ll type more than they write, so get them started early.” But this study, like several before it, shows that skipping handwriting might delay or even harm the foundational steps in reading and writing. It’s not just about nostalgia for pens and paper—it’s about how the brain wires itself when learning to read.

So what now? The answer isn’t to ban keyboards from classrooms. But we should stop pretending that handwriting and typing are interchangeable, especially in the early years. They’re not. And if we want to give all kids a fair shot at literacy, we might need to pick up the pencil again—before we hand them a tablet

Abstract of the study:

Recent research has revealed that the substitution of handwriting practice for typing may hinder the initial steps of reading development. Two hypotheses for the detrimental effect of typing are (a) reduced graphomotor activity and (b) reduced variability in the visual letter forms. However, previous studies were mostly limited to letter learning and primarily employed the visual identification of letters as a learning index. The current experiment investigated the impact of graphomotor action and output variability in letter and word learning using a variety of tasks. A total of 50 prereaders learned nine letters and 16 pseudowords made up of these letters across four learning conditions: copying the letters/words by hand, tracing the letters/words, typing the letters/words on a computer with several fonts, and typing with a single font. Posttest tasks included naming, writing, and visual identification of the trained letters and words. Results showed that children in the handwriting groups (i.e., trained through hand-copying or tracing) achieved higher accuracy across all posttest tasks compared with those in the typing groups. These outcomes illustrate the importance of handwriting experience in learning alphabetic and orthographic representations, favoring the graphomotor hypothesis. Thus, educators should be cautious about replacing pencil and paper with digital devices during the period of children’s reading acquisition.