Handwriting vs Typing: What New Brain Research Means for Learning Maths

Handwriting vs Typing: What New Brain Research Means for Learning Maths

A high-density EEG study from Norway's NTNU has found that handwriting activates far more widespread brain connectivity than typing does. For Maths Australia, the findings offer a timely, evidence-informed lens on a principle the I-CRAVE Maths® Methodology has built lessons around for years: that forming a word, number or symbol by hand is not interchangeable with tapping it out on a screen.

Walk into almost any classroom today and you'll see the same small decision being made dozens of times an hour: does this task call for a pencil or a keyboard? For most teachers, that decision is made on autopilot - driven by convenience, typing speed, or whatever device happens to be closest to hand. A recently published neuroscience study suggests it deserves a little more thought than that. How a student forms a word or a number, it turns out, may shape how effectively their brain engages with what they're learning.

In a study published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2024 comparing handwriting and typing, researchers Ruud van der Weel and Audrey van der Meer, from the Developmental Neuroscience Laboratory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, used a high-density, 256-electrode EEG array to record brain activity in 36 university students as they completed two everyday writing tasks: forming words by hand with a digital pen, and typing the same words on a keyboard. It's one of the most detailed comparisons yet of what these two acts actually look like inside the brain.


What the Brain Scans Revealed

Each student completed the same list of 15 words twice - once handwriting them in cursive with a digital pen directly onto a touchscreen, and once typing them on a keyboard - while wearing the 256-electrode sensor net. To keep the comparison as clean as possible, only right-handed participants took part, and typing was restricted to the right index finger, ruling out hand dominance and multi-finger coordination as explanations for whatever differences emerged.

The difference between the two conditions was striking. When students wrote by hand, the EEG recordings showed 32 statistically significant clusters of connectivity - equivalent to 16 distinct connections - linking the parietal and central regions of the brain. When the same students typed the same words, this widespread pattern of connectivity simply wasn't there. That doesn't mean the brain switched off during typing; it means the elaborate, cross-region communication seen during handwriting had no equivalent in the typing condition.

These connections were concentrated in two specific frequency bands: theta (3.5-7.5 Hz) and alpha (8-12.5 Hz). This detail matters more than it might first appear. Elsewhere in the neuroscience literature, theta-band activity has been closely associated with working memory and the encoding of new information, and some researchers have linked it to activity in the hippocampus - the brain structure most central to forming new memories. Alpha-band connectivity, meanwhile, has been associated with focused attention and long-term memory performance. Handwriting consistently produced connectivity in both bands. Typing did not.


Why Handwriting Recruits More of the Brain

Van der Weel and van der Meer point to what they describe as the spatiotemporal pattern created by handwriting: the ever-shifting combination of visual feedback, finger-position sense and precisely controlled hand movement required to shape each letter. Writing an "a" asks the hand to do something different from writing a "b", which is different again from a "7". Typing asks the same simple motor act of every letter - the index finger presses a key, and the shape of the resulting symbol is decided by the keyboard, not the hand. It's a small difference in physical demand, linked to what appears to be a much larger difference in neural engagement.


A Pattern Seen Before

This isn't an isolated finding. It builds on the same laboratory's earlier work: a 2017 study that found drawing by hand engaged substantially more of the brain than typing, and a 2020 study that identified the same theta synchronisation pattern in both primary-school-aged children and university students when they wrote by hand rather than typed. Three studies, spanning different age groups and slightly different methods, all point in the same direction - which is exactly the kind of replication that gives a finding real weight in neuroscience.

Image courtesy of Dyslexability

How This Aligns with the I-CRAVE Maths® Methodology

This pattern raises an obvious question for anyone involved in education: does it matter how children are taught to record a new idea, not just whether they reach the correct answer? A growing body of research suggests that it does. But it's worth being precise about what this study shows and what it doesn't. Van der Weel and van der Meer were not investigating any particular teaching method, and certainly not the I-CRAVE Maths® Methodology.

Their research examined the general act of handwriting versus typing single words in a laboratory setting with adult participants. What it offers is not proof that any specific program works, but a plausible neuroscientific explanation for why a teaching sequence built around drawing and handwriting, rather than tapping, typing or selecting from a screen, makes good cognitive sense.

Developed by Maths Australia CEO and Founder Esther White, the I-CRAVE Maths® Methodology builds on the well-established Concrete-Representational-Abstract (CRA) approach by incorporating diagnostic assessment, explicit instruction, verbal reasoning and multi-sensory teaching strategies informed by decades of classroom practice and pedagogical research.

Every lesson follows the same six-stage sequence:

• Identify: Assess what the student already knows.
• Concrete: Build the concept using hands-on manipulatives.
• Representation: Draw an accurate representation of what has been built.
• Abstract: Write the mathematical symbols and notation.
• Verbal: Explain the mathematical thinking aloud.
• Explicit: Demonstrate understanding by teaching the concept back and applying it independently.

Within this sequence, two stages closely mirror the handwritten actions examined in the study.

• Representation: follows the concrete stage, where students draw an accurate, proportionate representation of what they have built. It is not a pre-printed template, and it does not rely on dots or ten-frames, which this approach has moved beyond. Instead, students construct the representation themselves, requiring careful visual processing, fine motor control and attention to mathematical structure.
• Abstract: follows by asking students to write the mathematical symbols themselves, connecting the concrete model and the drawn representation to the formal written language of mathematics.

Neither stage exists for the sake of neatness or compliance. Both deliberately require students to generate information by hand because students are using the same visually guided, proprioceptively rich, letter-by-letter and, in mathematics, number-by-number formation as they construct a new mathematical concept.

While this study did not investigate mathematics instruction or the I-CRAVE Maths® Methodology directly, its findings provide a plausible neuroscientific explanation for why drawing and handwriting engage brain processes associated with learning and memory more strongly than simply tapping, dragging or selecting answers on a screen.


Key Takeaways for Teachers, Tutors and Parents

None of this requires turning teachers into neuroscientists. A few practical, evidence-informed principles follow directly from the research:

• Protect handwriting time when new concepts are introduced. The study's authors explicitly recommend exposing children to handwriting activities from an early age, to help establish these connectivity patterns - precisely the point in a lesson where the Concrete, Representation and Abstract stages come into play.
• Don't treat digital tools as a substitute for drawing and writing during concept development. Technology has real value in the classroom, but replacing a handwritten representation with a fill-in-the-blank or drag-and-drop worksheet removes exactly the sensorimotor engagement this research associates with learning.
• Keep a place for typing. The study's authors are careful to note this isn't an argument against technology altogether - once a concept is understood, typing can be an efficient tool for fluency practice, drafting or longer written work.
• Extend the thinking beyond maths. While this article focuses on maths instruction, the same logic applies to early literacy, note-taking, and any subject where a student is meeting new material for the first time.

Understanding the Limits of the Evidence

Before this becomes classroom doctrine, the research deserves the same scrutiny as any other evidence we'd use to justify classroom practice. The sample was 36 university students, writing single words in five-second bursts, in a laboratory rather than a classroom. The task was general handwriting, not maths. And importantly, the study measured EEG connectivity patterns theorised to relate to memory and learning - it did not test learning outcomes directly. No recall test, retention measure or maths assessment was part of this particular experiment.

That gap between a pattern of brain connectivity and a demonstrated gain in learning is a legitimate point of scientific debate. A subsequent commentary on this paper, published in the same journal by researchers Svetlana Pinet and Marieke Longcamp, urged caution about over-interpreting EEG-based findings for classroom practice - a concern that echoes a broader, long-running debate in educational neuroscience about how directly brain-level findings should be translated into pedagogical recommendations.

What makes the original finding compelling despite these limits is that it doesn't stand alone. It converges with the same laboratory's earlier findings in primary-school-aged children, and with a much larger body of behavioural research - cited within the paper itself - linking handwriting to stronger spelling, letter recognition and recall across a range of ages. Evidence that lines up across independent studies, age groups and methods provides a meaningfully stronger basis for informing practice than any single result. It's this accumulation of evidence, not one paper alone, that supports the case for protecting handwriting in the classroom.

None of this suggests classrooms should abandon keyboards, or that digital tools have no place in modern maths teaching - they clearly do. What it does suggest is that the pencil was never made obsolete by the arrival of the screen. When a student meets a new mathematical idea for the first time, building it, drawing it, and writing it in their own hand, they may be giving their brain exactly the kind of rich, connected engagement this research suggests it needs. For a methodology like I-CRAVE Maths®, built for years around that same sequence, this emerging body of neuroscience is a welcome, if not unexpected, form of support.


Continue Exploring

If you're interested in learning more about the research behind effective mathematics instruction, explore the I-CRAVE Maths® Methodology, our professional learning, classroom resources and collection of evidence-informed articles.

At Maths Australia, we're committed to helping teachers, tutors, schools and families translate educational research into practical, explicit and multi-sensory teaching that builds genuine mathematical understanding and confidence.

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References

Van der Weel, F.R.R. & Van der Meer, A.L.H. (2024). Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom. Frontiers in Psychology, 14:1219945. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10853352

Askvik, E.O., Van der Weel, F.R. & Van der Meer, A.L.H. (2020). The importance of cursive handwriting over typewriting for learning in the classroom. Frontiers in Psychology, 11:1810. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01810. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7399101

Van der Meer, A.L.H. & Van der Weel, F.R. (2017). Only three fingers write, but the whole brain works: a high-density EEG study showing advantages of drawing over typing for learning. Frontiers in Psychology, 8:706. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00706. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5422512

Pinet, S. & Longcamp, M. (2025). Commentary: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom. Frontiers in Psychology, 15:1517235. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1517235. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11750765