"New research from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) suggests that handwriting practice refines fine-tuned motor skills and creates a perceptual-motor experience that appears to help adults learn generalized literacy-related skills "surprisingly faster and significantly better" than if they tried to learn the same material by typing on a keyboard or watching videos."
"After six learning sessions, everyone in the video watching and type-writing group had learned the Arabic alphabet and could identify each of its 28 letters. However, people in the handwriting group—who used pen and paper to write each letter during their learning sessions—gained the same level of proficiency after just two learning sessions."
Replace handwriting with any other activity. It is probably the same. Doing something helps learning faster than just watching.
No, according to the link the hand-writers learned Arabic much faster than the learners typing on keyboards. Handwriting Arabic facilitated faster learning of the language than typing it out.
This comports with my personal language learning experience, for what that's worth. I couldn't say whether it translates to other subjects.
Yeah but he is still right when you go under surface level : learning to write is basically learning to draw specific shape that have specific meanings.
It is not surprising that peoples learn to recognise those shape faster when they actually had to learn to draw them instead of just pointing (typing) to use them.
But I don't think it makes any kind of real difference to achieving proficiency level for reading/thinking/writing the language. Recognising the glyphs is a small part of learning a language, you learn grammar, vocabulary, sentence construction, idioms, mostly by repeated exposure and chances are the vast majority of it is from reading ; it wouldn't be very efficient to learn by hand writing everything...
This is specific to the act of learning a language, where writing out the characters with intentionality will obviously have more carryover to memorizing the forms of such characters.
When the learning tools are detached from the subject at hand - as is the case in most college classes where basic literacy is a given - it's hard to see how one particular tool could possibly be better than others.
Purely anecdotal based on my own experience, typing information does very little for me but hand-written notes vastly improve my ability to retain information.
I agree the act of writing things out helps. But I strongly disagree this is specific to handwriting. Typing things out has the same effect.