As Queensland students return to school for Term 4, we are likely to hear renewed calls to get students “off screens” and back to pen and paper. Handwriting is often invoked in these debates, with neuroscience offered as evidence that traditional writing methods are better for learning.
There are good reasons to preserve handwriting in schools. But we need to be careful about what the research actually tells us.
One of the most widely reported studies in this area was published in 2024 by F. R. Ruud Van der Weel and Audrey Van der Meer. Using high-density EEG, the researchers found substantially more extensive patterns of brain connectivity when participants were handwriting than when they were typing.
It is an interesting finding and adds to a growing body of research suggesting handwriting engages the brain differently from keyboarding.
But there is an important detail that is often lost when the study is invoked in debates about screens: the participants were not writing with pen and paper. They were writing with a digital pen directly onto a touchscreen.
That matters enormously if the research is being used to argue that students should abandon digital devices and return to paper.
The study also involved 36 university students, rather than school-aged children. It tells us something useful about differences between handwriting and typing, but it does not demonstrate that children learn better when writing on paper.
What might actually matter?
The neuroscience points towards the value of the physical act of writing. Handwriting involves fine motor movement, letter formation, visual feedback and spatial organisation. The hand, eye and brain are working together as ideas are physically generated and arranged.
In other words, writing may support thinking because the physical generation and spatial organisation of ideas creates a rich sensorimotor-cognitive loop.
That is quite different from saying paper makes us think better.
For schools where students already use touchscreen laptops or tablets with digital pens or styluses, this distinction is important. A student handwriting in OneNote is still handwriting. So is annotating a source, circling evidence, drawing arrows between ideas, sketching a diagram or constructing a concept map.
The fact the writing surface happens to be glass rather than paper does not somehow turn these activities into keyboarding.
There may still be very good reasons for teachers to use paper. It can reduce distraction, alter the pace of a lesson, support particular classroom routines or simply be the most effective medium for a particular task. These are legitimate pedagogical and classroom-management decisions.
But handwriting neuroscience does not, by itself, provide a strong argument for abandoning digital devices.
We need to move beyond “screens versus paper”
This is part of a broader problem with debates about “screen time” in education. Treating all screen use as equivalent tells us very little about the quality of learning taking place.
A student passively scrolling through material, typing copied notes and handwriting annotations on a tablet may all technically be “using a screen”, but these activities place very different cognitive demands on the learner.
The more useful questions are about what students are doing with technology. Are they generating ideas or merely transcribing information? Are they annotating, connecting, questioning and creating? Is technology supporting worthwhile cognitive effort, or displacing it? And what purpose is the teacher trying to achieve?
These questions are less satisfying than a simple rule about screens. But teaching rarely operates well through simple binaries.
As Term 4 begins, perhaps we can move beyond “paper good, screens bad”. The evidence gives us a strong reason to preserve handwriting, particularly when compared with keyboarding. It gives us a much weaker reason to privilege paper over digital writing in every circumstance.
That distinction also matters for inclusion. For some students, digital ink, adjustable interfaces, accessibility tools and multimodal ways of working make learning more accessible rather than less human.
The challenge is not to choose between paper and screens.
It is to choose the right form of writing, for the right learner, for the right learning purpose.
