Essential
- Children who are trained with a pencil and paper better assimilate new letters and new words.
- Almost all the children who had learned with a computer, had not properly carried out the exercise on the letter sequences.
- The study also shows that children who had more freedom during hand learning had achieved better results.
Keyboards whether physical or tactile are increasingly present in our daily lives, and it is the same for children and their school environment. The researcher Joana Acar of the University of the Basque Country (Spain) wanted to determine if the little ones learn better by using paper and pencil or with a keyboard. Result: 5 -year -old children learn reading and writing better by writing by hand.
She details her discovery in an article published in the review Journal of Experimental Child Psychologyone May 2025.
Children learn better with pencil and paper
To compare the effects of manual learning and on the keyboard on children, researchers brought together 50 students aged 5 to 6 already with reading skills. These young volunteers had to learn 9 letters from the Georgian and Armenian alphabets, as well as 16 pseudo-words invented by the team by combining these letters.
“The objective was to use letters and words completely unknown for children in order to guarantee their learning from zero. Indeed, the studies carried out so far used the alphabets of the culture of children; it is therefore difficult to determine to what extent they ignored the symbols presented”explains the main author Joana Achant in a press release.
Half of the small participants had to copy the new letters and new words in hand, the other half tapped them with a keyboard. All children then spent three tests to assess their knowledge: their ability to identify, write and pronounce letters and pseudo-words.
“The results clearly indicated that those who had manually trained had developed better skill. The difference was particularly clear with the pseudo-words. Almost all those who had learned on computer had not correctly carried out the exercises on the sequences of letters. Our work therefore confirms that the graphomotor function is essential to the memorization of letters and structures of words“Adds the expert.
Learning: you have to leave a little freedom
Researchers also discovered that to promote learning, children must be offered a certain freedom. Each of the paper and keyboard groups had also been divided into two sub-groups. Thus, among the students working with a pencil, some were invited to follow the marked benchmarks of small points (technique with low variability) while the others had no reference: they could copy the letters and words freely on a blank page (great variability). The little ones who worked on a computer had either to use a compulsory font (for example, Tahoma) or several.
By analyzing the results, the team found that the young people of the group “hand writing” were much more competent than the others at the end of the exercise. However, differences were observed between the subgroups. The students who had been freely trained, obtained the best results. “So we have concluded that, even if tracing is useful for children at the beginning, once they are able to perform more or less small and precise movements, it is advisable to go to free writing. However, which is most obvious is the need to favor manual practice in learning processes. They learn better with hand movements: technological tools should therefore be used in addition”concludes Joana Achana.
