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The return of handwriting: what the research says

Writing Time 15/10/26

As concerns grow about student outcomes and time spent on screens, pencil and paper are making a welcome comeback in Australian classrooms. And the case for that return is strongest where it matters most: the primary years. Studies^{1 2} suggest that children who learn letters and words by hand tend to outperform those who learn them by typing. Regular, explicit handwriting practice is key to unlocking those benefits.

Let’s take a closer look at the research and explore how handwriting supports learning and educational outcomes.

How does handwriting help develop motor control?

Strong fine motor skills in early childhood are closely linked to how students go on to learn literacy and numeracy in primary school.^{3 4} Fine motor skills help students develop the control needed for tasks such as forming letters.⁵ Students who can master everyday tasks gain confidence and competence, which can make it easier to learn new skills.

The opposite is also true. Students with poor fine motor skills often struggle to put words on paper, making it harder to process information. How children feel about their handwriting matters too. Research suggests that children who feel confident in their fine motor skills tend to develop stronger handwriting, and low confidence can make children less willing to persist.⁶

Vanessa Hewitt, a literacy advisor with the NSW Department of Education, says children are starting school very familiar with tablets and touchscreens, and that ‘technology in many cases may have replaced drawing, painting, puzzles, play dough’. That is the kind of play that builds the gross motor skills leading to fine motor skills, and therefore, pencil control and handwriting.⁷ She says this makes explicit handwriting instruction even more important in the early years.

Along with play-based activities such as using building blocks and playing ball games, handwriting is a great way to develop motor control. Perfecting a pencil grip and forming letters require precise hand-eye coordination and control of the small muscles in the hand and arm. Hewitt adds that pencil grasp is worth getting right early because, once established, it is ‘incredibly hard to change’.⁷

As well as dedicated letter formation practice, your handwriting routine should incorporate gross and fine motor skill practice:

• For the lower years, start with finger tracing or sweeping movements in the air. The Writing Time Foundation program incorporates the catchy Hero Line songs (available for free at Writing Time Online), where students perform the suggested sweeping movements as they sing along. Each Hero Line has its own song, which is sung to the tune of ‘The Wheels on the Bus’. These actions help students become familiar with letter formations while also developing their gross motor skills, supporting overall motor control.

• Across all year levels, students can use art, alongside dedicated letter formation practice, to develop their fine motor skills. The full-page artwork activities in the Writing Time Student Practice Books include the slants, slopes and loops needed for letter formation. Students won’t even realise they’re practising handwriting as they create an art masterpiece.


How does handwriting support reading and spelling ability?

Reading, spelling and writing are interconnected skills, so dedicated and explicit instruction in all these areas reinforces students’ knowledge and strengthens their understanding. One of the first steps to reading is recognising the letters and letter combinations that form words. Researchers describe handwriting as ‘a complex visual-motor skill that affects early reading development’.⁸

Brain imaging offers one explanation. In a small study of 15 pre-literate children aged four to five, regions of the brain associated with reading showed stronger activation when children viewed letters they had practised printing by hand, but not letters they had practised typing.⁹

Studies measuring literacy skills point in the same direction. In a four-week study with 23 preschool-aged children, handwriting training was superior to typing training for word writing, with a tendency towards better word reading as well.¹ In a 2025 study, 50 five-year-olds were randomly assigned to learn unfamiliar letters and words by handwriting or typing. The handwriting group performed better at letter naming, word decoding and visual word identification.²

Together, these findings and other neurological research^{9 10} help explain the connection between handwriting and early literacy development. The act of handwriting, rather than typing, may help children develop their ability to visually recognise letters.⁹ This highlights the link between handwriting and learning to read and spell, reinforcing the importance of handwriting instruction throughout primary school, when students are learning and developing key literacy skills.

Letter formation is often touched on in spelling lessons, but there’s rarely time for the sustained practice that students need. A dedicated handwriting program like Writing Time lets teachers explicitly teach letter formation and gives students plenty of targeted practice, helping to build the foundations for stronger literacy outcomes.

How does handwriting reduce the cognitive load for students?

Handwriting also affects how fluently students can write and express their thoughts.

Producing a piece of writing places an enormous cognitive load on students, particularly when they’re still learning the mechanics of handwriting. Students need to learn how to hold a pencil, apply the right amount of pressure to the page (but not too much!), remember how to form each individual letter and combine those letters to make words. As students become more fluent writers, these processes require less conscious effort, reducing the cognitive load and making writing more achievable and less stressful.

In a study of almost 5,000 students in their first three years of primary school in Norway, handwriting fluency explained 7.4 per cent of the differences in writing quality, even after attitude to writing, language background, gender and grade were taken into account.¹¹

The researchers explain that having to think about forming each letter ‘may tax children’s processing capacity, resulting in the loss of one or more writing ideas or plans held in working memory’.¹¹ Hewitt puts it in classroom terms: when students have to think about how to form each letter, ‘the quality of their writing and the quantity, it’s all affected’.⁷ The aim is for handwriting to become automatic, so students can focus their attention on composing.

How does handwriting boost memory and understanding?

Handwriting also appears to help students retain what they learn. A well-known 2014 study by psychological scientists Pam Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel Oppenheimer of UCLA suggested that students who took notes by hand processed ideas more deeply than those who typed, who tended to copy lectures word for word.¹²

More recently, a 2024 analysis of 24 studies found that students who took and reviewed handwritten notes achieved higher results than those who typed, even though typists captured far more words.¹³ The authors concluded that handwritten notes are more beneficial for studying and committing to memory.

Beryl Exley, Professor of English Curriculum at Griffith University, says that ‘what we find with handwriting is that it enhances learning retention’.¹⁴

Handwriting practice can also support memory retention when students apply their skills while composing texts, completing activities or responding to questions in other learning areas. A handwriting program with cross-curriculum themes adds a handy extra layer, bringing together handwriting and meaningful learning.

The upper years Writing Time Student Practice Books include handwriting practice activities that cover history, maths, English and science. Activities range from labelling a life cycle diagram to completing the missing words in a poem to writing key facts from a passage about tsunamis. The Years 4 to 6 handwriting program targets key handwriting skills and pairs it with meaningful and engaging content activities.

How can you make handwriting an essential part of your teaching routine?

Research suggests that handwriting is best taught in short, focused lessons: daily in the early years and at least three times a week from Years 3 to 6. Posture, pencil grip and letter formation should also be reinforced during all writing tasks, not just in handwriting lessons.⁷

Handy projectable tools at Writing Time Online are here to help. Pop up the free projectable Posture, Position and Pencil Grip reminder before students engage in a writing task, or quickly recap accurate letter formation with the interactive See & Trace tool.

Ready to build engaging and effective handwriting into your weekly routine? Writing Time will improve students’ handwriting fluency leading to better educational outcomes.

The Writing Time series is available in NSW, Qld and Vic handwriting fonts, with full-colour Student Practice Books available from Foundation right through to Year 6 – making it the right choice for every Aussie classroom. The free projectable, interactive and printable resources available at Writing Time Online perfectly complement the student books.

References

1. Kiefer, M, Schuler, S, Mayer, C, Trumpp, NM, Hille, K & Sachse, S 2015, ‘Handwriting or typewriting? The influence of pen- or keyboard-based writing training on reading and writing performance in preschool children’, Advances in Cognitive Psychology, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 136-146, https://doi.org/10.5709/acp-0178-7↩

2. Ibaibarriaga, G, Acha, J & Perea, M 2026, ‘The impact of handwriting and typing on the reading acquisition process: a study using an unfamiliar orthography’, Reading and Writing, vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 2389-2411, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-025-10703-2 ↩

3. Suggate, S, Pufke, E & Stoeger, H 2019, ‘Children’s fine motor skills in kindergarten predict reading in grade 1’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, vol. 47, pp. 248-258, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.12.015 ↩

4. Pitchford, NJ, Papini, C, Outhwaite, LA & Gulliford, A 2016, ‘Fine motor skills predict maths ability better than they predict reading ability in the early primary school years’, Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, article 783, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00783↩

5. Australian Government 2008, Extract from Putting Children First, National Childcare Accreditation Council (NCAC), viewed 7 February 2017, http://ncac.acecqa.gov.au/educator-resources/pcf-articles/Supporting_children’s_development_fine_motor_skills.pdf. ↩

6. Schwery Klingele, J, Vetter, M, Truxius, L, Maurer, MN, Wyss, JS & Eckhart, M 2025, ‘Relations between graphomotor self-concept and graphomotor skills: A longitudinal study in early school age’, Learning and Instruction, vol. 101, article 102229, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2025.102229↩

7. NSW Department of Education 2026, In conversation about handwriting (podcast), viewed 7 October 2026, https://education.nsw.gov.au/teaching-and-learning/curriculum/literacy-and-numeracy/professional-learning/podcasts/handwriting↩

8. Vinci-Booher, S & James, KH 2021, ‘Protracted neural development of dorsal motor systems during handwriting and the relation to early literacy skills’, Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, article 750559, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.750559↩

9. James, KH & Engelhardt, L 2012, ‘The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children’, Trends in Neuroscience and Education, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 32-42, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2012.08.001↩

10. James, K & Berninger, V 2019, ‘Brain research shows why handwriting should be taught in the computer age’, Learning Difficulties Australia Bulletin, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 25-30, viewed 2 October 2026, https://ldaustralia.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/1048-LDA-Bulletin-Autumn-2019_D4_WEB.pdf↩

11. Skar, GB, Lei, P-W, Graham, S, Aasen, AJ, Johansen, MB & Kvistad, AH 2022, ‘Handwriting fluency and the quality of primary grade students’ writing’, Reading and Writing, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 509-538, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10185-y↩

12. Mueller, PA & Oppenheimer, DM 2014, ‘The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking’, Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 1159-1168, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581↩

13. Flanigan, AE, Wheeler, J, Colliot, T, Lu, J & Kiewra, KA 2024, ‘Typed versus handwritten lecture notes and college student achievement: A meta-analysis’, Educational Psychology Review, vol. 36, article 78, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09914-w↩

14. Hammond, N 2026, ‘What does the rise of digital devices and decline of handwriting mean for how we live and learn?’, ABC News, 26 January, viewed 7 October 2026, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-26/handwriting-decline-education-digital-devices-learning/106231320↩

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