Fact · Typing and writing speed
In a 2023 study of high school students, typing or handwriting sentences while learning them gave lower recall than acting the sentences out or listening to them.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“handwriting and keyboarding during encoding produced the lowest recall in comparison with the enactment and verbal listening conditions”
Sentence memory recall in adolescents: Effects of motor enactment, keyboarding, and handwriting during encoding, G. B. W. Söderlund et al., Brain and Behavior, 2023, Abstract, Results.
Open the original (DOI 10.1002/brb3.3226)- What it measures
- Students saw lists of verb-noun sentences under four conditions: motor enactment, verbal listening, handwriting and keyboarding. Recall was tested afterwards.
- What it does not show
- The task used short verb-noun sentences in one country. The study shows what happened to memory for those sentences, not whether typing harms learning in general.