Do Kids Learn More By Writing Instead of Typing?

I taught my kids to print and to write in cursive, but I also encouraged them to compose on a keyboard.

When I was a teen, I learned to compose my work on the typewriter at a journalism camp, and I found it to be much more efficient. So having kids in the computer age, it seemed like a no-brainer to teach them to type so they could type their essays on the computer. Besides, writing things out in cursive seemed so time-consuming and old-school.

Now I’m rethinking my stance. A recent scientific study showed that kids learned more by reading and writing by hand than by reading and then composing on a keyboard. Apparently the extra time it takes to write something by hand instead of typing it gives the brain a chance to absorb everything better. This makes sense to me.

I”m curious: what do you think?