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(If in doubt, google search "pen and paper vs technology". The list is EXHAUSTIVE)
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The studies showed that students of all ages, from elementary school to college, tend to absorb more when they’re reading on paper than on screens, particularly when it comes to nonfiction material.
Clinton’s analysis, published earlier in 2019, is now at least the third study to synthesize reputable research on reading comprehension in the digital age and find that paper is better. It was preceded by a 2017 review by scholars at the University of Maryland and a 2018 meta-analysis by scholars in Spain and Israel. The international analysis arrived at nearly the same numerical conclusion as Clinton’s study. Paper beat screens by more than a fifth of a standard deviation.
Why students don’t read as well on screens is a fascinating question. Some experts think the glare and flicker of screens tax the brain more than paper. Others argue that spatial memory for the location of a passage or a chart on a physical paper page can help a student recall information. Digital distraction and the temptation to browse or multi-task is an obvious problem in the real world.
https://hechingerreport.org/evidence-increases-for-reading-on-paper-instead-of-screens/ |
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“When we write a letter of the alphabet, we form it component stroke by component stroke, and that process of production involves pathways in the brain that go near or through parts that manage emotion,” says Virginia Berninger, a professor emerita of education at the University of Washington. Hitting a fully formed letter on a keyboard is a very different sort of task — one that doesn’t involve these same brain pathways. “It’s possible that there’s not the same connection to the emotional part of the brain” when people type, as opposed to writing in longhand, Berninger says.
Writing by hand may also improve a person’s memory for new information. A 2017 study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology found that brain regions associated with learning are more active when people completed a task by hand, as opposed to on a keyboard. The authors of that study say writing by hand may promote “deep encoding” of new information in ways that keyboard writing does not. And other researchers have argued that writing by hand promotes learning and cognitive development in ways keyboard writing can’t match.
Also, a lot Berninger’s NIH-funded work found that learning to write first in print and then in cursive helps young people develop critical reading and thinking skills.
Slowing down and writing by hand may come with other advantages. Oppenheimer says that because typing is fast, it tends to cause people to employ a less diverse group of words. Writing longhand allows people more time to come up with the most appropriate word, which may facilitate better self-expression.
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A recent study by Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) addressed potential differences in laptop versus longhand notetaking. College students watched 30-min TED Talks on specialist topics that were not common knowledge. They received either laptops or notebooks, and were instructed to take notes using whatever strategy they normally used. Immediately after watching the lecture, they had to answer factual-recall questions and conceptual-application questions. The results indicated that both types of note takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, while longhand note takers performed significantly better on the conceptual questions. The authors suggested that laptop note takers might engage in less extensive cognitive processing than longhand note takers. From this study it seems that using traditional pen and paper is preferable over traditional laptop use, using the keyboard, when taking notes.
Furthermore, Penketh (2011) argued that handwriting and drawing involve similarly complex skills in translating three-dimensional shapes onto a flat plane. In both, there is the need for visual processing and sensory integration (vision, touch), and this is combined with manual dexterity (skilled hand movement) required to put pen to paper, including eye-hand coordination.
Thus, because of its rich sensory-motor nature the involvement of drawing may have a beneficial effect on the learning process in general. Therefore, rich sensory-motor experiences seem to facilitate learning. In general, rich learning experiences will combine images that include shape patterns (occipital), tones and words (temporal and frontal), emotional connections (from the limbic system), and not the least movements (sensory-motor areas and the cerebellum) (Basar, 2004). Whenever movements are included as part of learning, more of the brain gets stimulated, resulting in the formation of more complex neural networks. Thus, it seems that keyboards and pens bring into play different underlying neurological processes. This may not be surprising since handwriting/drawing is a complex task that requires the integration of various skills. Sensory-motor information for the control of (pen) movement is picked up via the senses, and because of the involvement of the senses they leave a wider mark on establishing pathways in the brain, resulting in neural activity that governs all higher levels of cognitive processing and learning.
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