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Before artificial intelligence (AI) could summarise lectures, most students took notes by hand. But an expert says manual note-taking is an important way for the brain to learn new information.
According to Dr Kitty Yeung Kit-yu – a registered educational psychologist in Hong Kong – the act of writing helps our brains grow.
Benefits of writing by hand
If you try to type out your teacher’s every spoken word, you won’t learn very much, Yeung said. Automated note-taking tools do even less for the brain.
Writing by hand is slow. So it forces the brain to digest and paraphrase ideas in real time. This process forces you to think more deeply and remember what you’re writing. As you do this, your brain is also being trained to solve problems and think critically.
“Handwriting forces students to stop, process and actively digest what a professor is saying,” said Yeung, who is also a specialist in child development and special educational needs (SEN) research.
“As you write, your mind actively processes the words, which in a way helps you recall them,” she said.
For young learners, this is important for their reading skills.
Yeung pointed to research that found that children who practise writing by hand had better reading skills compared with those who relied on keyboards. This shows that learning to read is connected to learning to write.
On a physical level, handwriting also trains the hands to make small, precise movements.
“Typing lacks this entirely ... You don’t practise flexing the wrist ... [changing] pressure – harder versus lighter – or executing delicate strokes,” Yeung said.
Writing to learn Chinese
The role of handwriting is even deeper for character-based languages like Chinese.
A 2012 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal found that children in mainland China who relied on pinyin keyboard entry struggled more with reading.
This is because handwriting unites a Chinese character’s form, sound and meaning.
“Typing simply doesn’t evoke these features,” Yeung said.
Different parts of a Chinese character can represent its meaning and pronunciation. Take the character for pai (拍), meaning to pat, as an example. When writing it, the “hand” radical (扌) is a visual representation of the action, and it is paired with bai (白), which gives a hint as to how the word sounds.
“When typing – say, using the Quick ... Input Method – you might just press a key corresponding to a single horizontal stroke. That key stroke bears no relationship to the physical shape or the underlying ... meaning of ‘hand’,” she noted.
If children only learn Chinese through this typing method, they might struggle to fully learn a character’s form, sound and meaning.
Should we stop using AI tools?
Yeung said that schools should not ban AI tools from the classroom. Instead, she believes they should teach students how to use them without giving up their own critical thinking.
“Ultimately, a student’s writing must reflect their own critical thinking and reasoning – not let AI do the thinking for them,” Yeung said.
If you want to use AI tools to summarise a lesson, you can do that while also taking notes by hand. After class, you can check the accuracy of your notes against the AI summary and see if you missed anything.
Just as typing has its place when writing long essays or chatting with friends, AI tools also have their place.
But the core process of learning and thinking should remain in your hands.
