The director of primary school De Klinker in Oud-Beijerland wanted to throw away the chalkboards when he moved. Everything would be replaced by digital whiteboards and whiteboards. We are not going to do that, said teachers Sophy de Man and Ingeborg Heshof. They like to write on the chalkboard. De Man: „Now it says ‘the storming of the Bastille’. I write it down as I explain the story. The children are writing about that.”
The chalk is hard to find in most schools. Digibords, on which photos, videos and powerpoints can be displayed, are extremely popular. Typing instead of writing, iPads instead of notebooks.
Within twenty years, a generation of fast typing, scrolling, clicking learners has grown up.
But Marcel Schmeijer (first teacher, now education advisor) sees that a small group of teachers at primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities demand that their students write a lot. By hand, on the board and on paper.
Children “have to actively process teaching material in order to remember it,” says Schmeijer. “Write down, summarize or answer questions about it yourself. Just reading from a screen or typing is not enough.”
Over the past seven years there have been many studies published from which this appears. Forming individual letters on paper would also teach preschoolers to read and write better than typing.
Sophy de Man also practices taking notes with her students: “In geography they don’t get a pre-printed list of continents on the IWB, but we write all the names on the board. And the children write them too.”
From a to Z
To take good notes, you must be able to write fluently. And many primary school students no longer learn that, observes Gert Verbrugghen, English teacher at the Alfrink College (vmbo) in Deurne. Last year, the letters and handwriting of three juniors were so distressing that he had to learn to write them all over again. Forming the letters one by one, from A to Z.
“More and more children can type alone,” says Verbrugghen. “Some primary schools – and parents – facilitate that, but you shouldn’t do that. Any child can learn to write if you take the time. Practice for ten minutes every day and then faster and faster. It takes some time but it works.” This year he teaches seven first graders to write. The parents have to help.
Many children can only type
Gert Verbrugghen VMBO English teacher in Deurne
Writing by hand is the most efficient way to process information, says emeritus professor of educational psychology Paul Kirschner. “Young people can type very quickly these days, even if they don’t have a Schoevers diploma. Entire lecture halls are typing with a laptop in front of them. They type the information they receive from the teacher at lightning speed, but that goes in their ears and out. They type on autopilot. Only when you write it down by hand and thus select it – separate main and side issues – and summarize it because otherwise you wouldn’t keep up with the teacher’s pace, did the information stick.”
And reading a book, made of paper, aids memory better than learning from a screen, say advocates such as Kirschner and Schmeijer. The layout of a page alone makes it easier to remember the text than online texts that run one after the other.
Read about the role of technology in education: Will there be a teacher in the classroom in 2035, or a robot?
The green block
Rosanne Leguit (20) can confirm that interdisciplinary social sciences student. As one of the few of her fellow students, she writes and reads everything on paper. “Sometimes I remember a text because of the color on the page. Then I think: oh yes, that was in that green block.” When she attends lectures, she makes notes with “arrows and blank lines that make it easy for me to sort things out.”
Marisa Schutte (23), second-year master’s student of community development, does not. She has, she says, an illegible handwriting. “I really couldn’t learn from a text I wrote by hand.” She types everything the teacher says, because she doesn’t want to miss anything, she says.
In high school Schutte had “as many as ten notebooks” and “even a paper diary”. She lost half and so had to remember what she had heard in class. “Scriptures were clumsy for me.”
17 percent of primary school students diagnosed with dyslexia. That’s absurd!
Gert Verbrugghen VMBO English teacher in Deurne
People are less able to concentrate with a laptop than with a notebook, Kirschner says. “And especially if you are also disturbed by e-mails and whatsapps.” People cannot multitask. “I researched that myself. If you shift your focus to listen to someone else, you miss what the first person is saying to you.”
The fact that some schools place so little emphasis on writing by hand means that on average children read worse than before, says Gert Verbrugghen in Deurne. “According to the Education Inspectorate, 17 percent of primary school students have been diagnosed with dyslexia. That’s absurd! There are researchers who say that only 1 percent of people are dyslexic. But yes, such a label has advantages: the student gets more time to take a test and the tutoring is reimbursed. In fact it is not dyslexia but poor education.”
His school, the Alfrink College, is praised by, among others, the Education Inspectorate for its solid education. Verbrugghen: „Primary schools in the region sometimes find us difficult: why do you require pupils to be able to write well? Well, because every child should be able to do it, I say. But we are in a shrinking region – there are fewer and fewer potential students – so we have to be careful with our feedback. Because you don’t want them to choose another school.”
Also read: Sometimes a notebook is better than a laptop
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 10, 2022
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