Going Back To The Basics In Education

Larry Jacobs' 2017 reflection on cursive and keyboarding, followed by what newer research says about teaching children to handwrite and type.

By Larry JacobsJul 6, 20179 min read

Close up of a fountain pen with lavender ideal for writing themes natural light

Teaching keyboarding alongside handwriting: what 2019 to 2026 research says about children's writing and what schools can do.

In this 2017 piece, Larry Jacobs of Education Talk Radio describes a conversation about cursive handwriting and the surprise of finding keyboarding products at the ISTE conference. The section below, added in 2026, reviews what newer research says about handwriting, typing and teaching keyboarding to children.

When it comes to texting, I’m all thumbs

A few weekends ago, my son and I went on a “Stargazing Astronomy Cruise “on Casco Bay off Portland Maine as a Father’s Day gift. It was cool, about ten people on an open, retired US Navy skiff with an Astronomer from The University of Southern Maine. One of the other passengers was a woman whose children go to Catholic school in The Portland Archdiocese and when she found out that I was in the Education business, she started telling me about her kids’ (the oldest is 14) adventures in school and how angry she is that the kids “aren’t even learning cursive writing.”

And, beyond the usual curmudgeonly cliché “that’s what I learned in school and it never hurt me,” she absolutely understood why it’s important to learn cursive neurologically… its hand-to-brain learning. And that’s important… even beyond solid aim when you want to pick your nose.

Here’s the simple explanation as to why it’s important, from www.scilearn.com via the words of author/psychologist, Stanislas Dehaene, at the College de France in Paris (who) states that, “When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated. There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain. And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize. Learning is made easier.” So when we write something down, this research has shown that our brains get activated in ways that aren’t activated when we type something. And this brain activation helps with recall when we are learning.”

Pretty smart mom, eh? I couldn’t agree with her more.

In addition to that, two days later, I did three “Live from ISTE” shows on Education Talk Radio. Something very interesting that I would not have expected came up on them.

To put it into perspective, ISTE, in case you just arrived from Mars or missed that day in your courses at ‘The Vladimir Putin “How to be an American Educator ” Spy School,” is the acronym for the International Society for Technology in Education. The EdTech folks and ISTE’s conference are huge in terms of both exhibitors and attendees.

So, as I interviewed various exhibitors and companies attending the show, you’d think all we’d be talking about was high tech EdTech.

Au contraire’, Laddie Buck.

Several of the companies I spoke to, much to my surprise, talked about their new products in teaching another hand to brain subject, typing aka keyboarding.

Keyboarding? What?? These kids are digital natives. They’ve been playing with keyboards for years. Typing has become, I would have thought, almost instinctual, like turning right when you’re driving if you see a Dunkin Donuts on your right. It’s in our DNA.

I honestly don’t know if typing is still taught in schools. It was when I was a teacher. It was the corner room as far away from possible from everything else because the clickety-clack of the typing was constant out of the classroom. I haven’t heard much about it lately, but I have this feeling it’s not happening like it used to. This is an error. Hence some edTech companies are going back to basics in an age of advancing EdTech.

By the way, you are reading the words of the world’s fastest two finger typist, (oops, keyboardist, or keyboarder, or typer?) When I was in high school, I took academic subjects; highly useful subjects like Trigonometry and Physics. No typing class for Larry. I assume they figured that, because I was college bound, I’d eventually be a professional executive of some sort and have a secretary and she could type for me. Remember there were no computers back then so why bother teaching ‘academic me’ something I’d never use and, thanks to that philosophy, my college term papers looked like they were typed by an elderly, blind Orangutan.

These days, we have voice command that can do typing for us. Why even bother with keyboarding skills? Here’s why. Voice ain’t perfect. A favorite guest of mine on the show is a Community College professor in Michigan. Her name is Amelia Gamel. She left me a voice mail, “Hi Larry, This is a Million Camels” was the way it started. My friend Joann McDevitt’s message came out as “Ceramic Divots calling.” So much for transcription.

And we have texting. Let me be blunt, at the risk of sounding like a Luddite looking at a motor-driven tractor in 1873 and saying “nope , I’m sticking with my mule,” I hate texting. One reason is that I’m one of those texters who uses my index finger to hit the keys as I hunt and peck for them, so my text of “yes, I’ll meet you on time” usually starts off as, “tess, I’ll meat u on rmie”.

But I watch 21^st century humans text and it’s all thumbs. I am, fyi, pro-thumb. I want to make that clear but I also like the other eight fingers. And if kids just use their thumbs all the time, the other eight become vestigial and what scares me, among other things, is that we will evolve to a point where babies cutely waving bye-bye will become a thing of the past as the new mom says “Honey, text Nanny bye-bye.”

There are serious reasons as well. Good keyboarding saves time and time in our day and age is a very valuable commodity. Good typing skills improve posture too and again, in an age when we’re stuck in front of computers all day, ergonomics matters for good health.

If you want to read a great article on the importance of teaching keyboarding, go here: https://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech072.shtml. Then listen to the shows below to hear about some of the latest products out there at https://tobtr.com/10086671 , https://tobtr.com/10094271 and https://tobtr.com/10105383 if you feel like heading back to basics.

Teaching keyboarding and handwriting in 2026: what the research says

Larry Jacobs wrote in 2017 that handwriting and keyboarding are both hand-to-brain skills and that schools should not drop either. The question of teaching keyboarding has since gained research attention, including studies of children and of brain activity. The findings support Jacobs on one point, that handwriting still matters, and they add a point Jacobs did not make, which is that the two skills help children in different ways.

What studies of children find

The largest recent summary is a 2024 meta-analysis in the Australian Educational Researcher by Anabela Malpique and colleagues. A meta-analysis combines the results of many studies. This one pooled 22 international studies with 6,168 primary school students and found that handwritten passages were of higher quality than typed ones, with an effect size of 0.53. Neither method showed a clear advantage for reading skills. The pooled studies differ in design and age, so the result describes a tendency across studies and not a rule for every child.

A 2019 meta-analysis by Luxi Feng and colleagues in Reading and Writing reached a related result. Handwriting fluency consistently supported writing performance, keyboarding let writers produce text faster, and the quality of writing was roughly comparable across the two methods. The finding that fluency matters is the practical point. A child who has to think about forming each letter, or about finding each key, has less attention left for ideas and spelling.

That point appears again in a 2025 study of 544 second graders by Malpique and colleagues. Spelling best predicted the quality of paper-based writing, handwriting automaticity best predicted how much children wrote on paper, and keyboarding automaticity best predicted both quality and quantity on a computer. In other words, a child who types well writes better on a computer, and a child who writes well by hand writes better on paper. A 2007 study of 300 UK primary children by Vincent Connelly and colleagues had earlier found that handwriting was faster than typing at every age and that handwritten essays scored higher, and the authors concluded that touch-typing instruction is needed for keyboarding to help writing.

Brain activity: useful but limited

Jacobs quotes Stanislas Dehaene on the brain activity involved in writing by hand. A 2024 study by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, F. R. (Ruud) van der Weel and Audrey L. H. van der Meer, in Frontiers in Psychology recorded brain activity from 36 university students who wrote words in cursive with a digital pen or typed them with one finger. Handwriting produced more widespread connectivity in the brain than typing did. The authors link this to learning and memory and urge that children be exposed to handwriting from an early age, with keyboard skills taught alongside it. The study did not measure learning, the participants were young adults and only one finger was used for typing, so it supports the idea more than it proves it.

Voice input and the case for keyboarding

Jacobs also raised voice input and its mistakes. A 2026 study of 64 children in Reading and Writing compared handwriting, typing and speech-to-text. Speech produced the most output when children copied sentences, and typing and speech both outperformed handwriting in producing words for a narrative. Handwriting and typing were more closely related to each other than either was to speech. Caregivers reported little use of speech input at home or school. The sample is small, but the result shows that voice tools are a third option and not a replacement for either skill.

What a school or parent can decide

Keep teaching handwriting in the early grades. The studies above link handwriting fluency to the quality of writing.
Teach touch-typing as a skill with its own instruction and practice time, because children who are left to find keys with one finger spend their attention on the keyboard.
Choose the tool for the task, as van der Weel and van der Meer suggest: handwriting for short notes and early composing, typing for longer pieces.
Watch for students for whom one method is a barrier. A 2026 study by Rina Khoury-Shaheen and Naomi Weintraub of 48 fourth and fifth graders found that students with developmental coordination disorder were slower and less legible when handwriting and slower when typing, and that keyboarding may help those with poor legibility.
Treat voice input as an additional option, with an adult checking the results, as Jacobs’ examples of mistaken transcription show.

Jacobs worried about thumbs replacing fingers. The research does not address that question, but it does support the larger point of Jacobs that children benefit from being taught both ways of putting words on a page.

Going Back To The Basics In Education