A nation-wide study of more than 500 Australian primary school students in Year 2 examined their specific attitudes toward writing on paper compared to writing using a computer.
The research, led by Dr Anabela Malpique, senior lecturer in literacy from the School of Education at Edith Cowan University (ECU), in collaboration with colleagues from the Writing for All research group, also looked at how primary school-aged students feel about writing more generally.
“In the digital age, it is critical to gain insights into how beginner writers feel about writing as they navigate the unique challenges of composing both paper and computer-based texts,” Malpique says.
The purpose of the study was to determine whether young children’s general attitudes towards writing, and specific attitudes towards both paper and computer-based writing, could significantly predict children’s writing outcomes.
Handwritten national exams don’t exist in Australian primary schools anymore.
“Students are required to complete online literacy and numeracy tests from Year 3 – so it’s important to understand the difference in their writing performance between paper-based and computer modalities,” Malpique says.
The researchers found that children held very positive attitudes toward both handwriting and keyboarding formats, but only their handwriting attitudes significantly predicted the success of their paper-based work.
“Keyboarding attitudes did not show a similar link to computer-based writing performance,” Malpique says.
“Teachers should focus on developing both psychomotor skills and positive motivational beliefs to support emerging writers in the digital age,” Dr Anabela Malpique suggests.
When children hold negative attitudes, lack interest and self-belief towards handwriting and their handwriting skills, their motivation to write and the quality of their handwritten texts are of a lower standard than children who hold positive attitudes toward handwriting.
“Contrastingly, specific attitudes towards writing computer-based texts did not make a unique or statistically significant contribution in predicting computer-based compositional quality and productivity,” she says.
The study highlighted that keyboarding automaticity is a more powerful predictor of digital writing success than student motivation.
“We also interviewed children and learned that they value writing using paper and pencil as well as using computers.
“However, despite holding more positive attitudes towards using computers for writing, they felt more capable of writing texts using paper and pencil.
“Children associated handwriting with physical fatigue and digital writing with technical difficulties, such as struggling to locate keys,” Malpique explains.
Children’s comments offered additional insights, with negative attitudes related to the physical effort of writing using a pen or pencil (for example, “hurts my hand” or “get tired doing it”) and a lack of knowledge of letter position on a keyboard and difficulties with typing and coordination (so, “harder to find letters” and “it will be harder because, um, instead of doing a word you have to look down”).
In October last year, EducationHQ posted a story on a neuroscientist and educator, who shared that how children learn to write can profoundly influence how they learn to think.
Dr Ragnar Purje, an adjunct senior education lecturer at CQUniversity, believes teaching children to hold a pencil correctly does far more than improve penmanship – it helps shape their brains for thinking, storytelling and lifelong learning.
“Handwriting isn’t just about neat letters,” Purje said.
“It’s a brain-building exercise. When children learn to write by hand using the correct technique, they’re wiring their brains for creativity, critical thinking and communication.”
Purje said that decades of research show that handwriting activates the brain in ways typing does not.
Studies using brain scans, he said, have found that writing by hand sparks more complex neural activity, strengthening the areas linked to language, memory and problem-solving.
“Typing on a keyboard doesn’t stimulate the same learning pathways,” Purje said.
“When a child writes by hand, they engage fine motor muscles, visual recognition and cognitive control all at once.
“That process builds stronger mental connections and a deeper understanding of language.”
Malpique recommends a balanced approach to teaching writing in primary classrooms.
“Teachers should focus on developing both psychomotor skills and positive motivational beliefs to support emerging writers in the digital age,” she suggests
The new ECU study forms part of a research project investigating student and contextual-level factors contributing to the development of paper and computer-based writing in early primary education.
Click here to read the paper, ‘Motivation to write in the digital age: examining early primary students’ attitudes towards paper and computer-based text composing’.
