Which Makes the Better Writer: the Hand or the Keyboard? Age Is a Part

"05 October 2009
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: we talk with an expert on children and handwriting.

RS: Virginia Berninger is an educational psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. She tells us about a study which found that children sometimes do a better job as writers when they compose the words by hand than when they type them on a keyboard.


VIRGINIA BERNINGER: "And this was a chance to follow over two hundred children -- it was about two hundred forty -- longitudinally, once a year for five years. And I looked comprehensively at writing development. And what we found, which was very surprising to us, is that they wrote longer essays, they wrote the words faster. And, in the paper just published, they wrote more complete sentences in fourth and sixth grade when they were writing in handwriting by pen than when writing on keyboard."

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