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Long before artificial intelligence (AI) began summarising lectures, jotting notes by hand used to be a universal learning practice. But an expert warns that the trend of automated note-taking risks abandoning one of our brain’s most powerful tools for comprehension.
According to Dr Kitty Yeung Kit-yu – a registered educational psychologist in Hong Kong – the physical act of writing plays a vital role in cognitive development.
The engine of active learning
According to a 2025 study published in the science journal Life, researchers in Italy looked at brain scans to compare how adults’ brains reacted to writing with a pen versus typing on a keyboard.
The findings show that while typing encourages passive transcription, handwriting is more cognitively demanding. Because writing by hand is slower, it forces the brain to digest and synthesise concepts in real time, driving deeper thought, memory and problem-solving.
Typing every spoken word in a class offers little educational value, Yeung said. Automated note-taking tools do even less for the brain.
“Handwriting forces students to stop, process and actively digest what a professor is saying – engaging a deeper cognitive mechanism that directly fosters critical thinking,” said Yeung, who is also a specialist in child development, dyslexia and special educational needs (SEN) research.
“As you write, your mind actively processes the words, which in a way helps you recall them.”
For young learners, this lays the groundwork for literacy. Yeung pointed to research that had found that children who practise writing by hand had better reading fluency and letter-sound comprehension compared with those who relied on keyboards – proving that learning to read is rooted in learning to write.
On a physical level, handwriting also trains fine motor muscles.
“Typing lacks this entirely ... You don’t practise flexing the wrist, modulating pressure – harder versus lighter – or executing delicate strokes,” Yeung said. “Those refined motor skills only develop through physical writing practice.”
While this cognitive link is vital for alphabetic languages like English in which writing letters can connect sounds to spellings, handwriting’s role is even deeper for character-based languages like Chinese.
Form, sound and meaning in Chinese literacy
Yeung’s current research examines handwriting’s impact on child development; she stressed that physical writing remained a foundational pillar of Chinese literacy.
MRI scans reveal that when readers recognise Chinese characters, the regions of the brain responsible for writing light up simultaneously, meaning reading and writing characters are intertwined in the brain.
Handwriting unites a Chinese character’s three core dimensions: 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 pictographic representation of the action; 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 semantic meaning of ‘hand’,” Yeung noted.
If children only learn Chinese through this typing method, it could hinder their grasp of character form, sound and meaning.
A landmark 2012 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that children in mainland China who relied heavily on pinyin keyboard entry showed higher rates of reading impairment, as phonetic typing bypasses the motor memory necessary to master complex logographic scripts.
The dyslexia exception
However, for dyslexic learners, who struggle to process a word’s visual form, Yeung noted that digital AI tools had many benefits for their learning. “If their underlying character recognition system is impaired, copying [by hand] won’t actually help them,” she said.
For these students, relying on audio tools and memorising Chinese characters by sound is more effective than relying on writing their notes by hand.
This is why SEN students can use speech-to-text tools during university entrance exams, Yeung said.
“By allowing dyslexic students to turn spoken language into text on a computer, they can bypass their output barriers in non-language subjects, ensuring their academic performance reflects their actual knowledge,” she said.
Should we avoid using all AI tools?
Yeung emphasised that schools should aim not to banish AI tools from the classroom, but to teach students how to use them without surrendering 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.
For instance, if you want to use AI tools to transcribe a lesson, you can do that alongside taking notes by hand. After class, you can check your notes against the AI summary and refer to the transcription if you need to check the accuracy of something you wrote.
Just as typing has its place when writing long essays or chatting online, AI tools also have their place.
The core intellectual heavy lifting, however, remains in your hands.
