Does dictation help students write better?

Dictation can help some students write better, and the best evidence is for students with learning disabilities in written expression. The studies are small, and most used older software. They do not show that dictation improves writing for every student. A dictated draft also needs editing by hand, because in one study speech left more uncorrected errors than a phone keyboard did ¹.

Dictation helped students with learning disabilities write better essays

The strongest evidence comes from studies of students with learning disabilities. In a 2002 dissertation, postsecondary students with learning disabilities in written expression wrote significantly higher quality essays, at a faster rate, with continuous speech recognition than by keyboarding without help ². The same study found that essay length did not differ significantly between the ways of writing ³. Speech made the essays better and faster, but not longer.

A 1995 study of 29 university students with learning disabilities found similar results. Essays written with a speech recognition system received significantly higher holistic scores than essays written without assistance ⁴. A 2004 study of high school students with learning disabilities found that essays dictated to speech recognition were better than handwritten ones, and that essays dictated to a human scribe were better still ⁵.

A 2023 summary from the National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO) reports that five studies comparing speech to text with handwriting for students with a specific disability generally found longer text and fewer mechanical errors, such as spelling, when speech to text was used ⁷. That is more text with fewer spelling slips. It is not the same as better writing, so read the scores as the measure, not the word count.

Students without learning disabilities showed no gain in the 2004 study

The 2004 study is the clearest example of a limit. It found no difference in essay quality for students without learning disabilities ⁵. So the benefit reported in these studies belongs to students whose difficulty with writing is the barrier that dictation removes. A student who writes with no barrier may gain speed, but the studies do not show a gain in quality.

Dictation does not remove errors, so the final edit matters

Speech produced fewer errors during entry than a phone keyboard, but it left slightly more errors in the final text: 1.30 percent uncorrected for speech against 0.79 percent for the phone keyboard ¹. That study used short messages and a 2016 recognizer, so current accuracy may differ. The lesson still holds: the words the recognizer gets wrong stay in the draft unless someone reads it. The revised paper says upper-bound speech recognition performance has greatly improved compared with earlier systems, so today's tools may do better ⁸.

It depends on the student, the tool and the task

• The student: the gains are reported for students with learning disabilities. Students without them showed no difference in the 2004 study.
• The tool: the 1995, 2002 and 2004 studies used older recognition software. A modern tool may do better, but none of the studies we read tests today's apps on school essays.
• The task: none of the studies we read tests a full term of coursework. Speed in a short task may not predict how long a full draft takes to edit.
• The editing: because speech leaves more uncorrected errors, an unedited dictated draft can contain more mistakes than a draft typed on a phone keyboard ¹, so the editing time counts as part of the cost.

What to do if you want to test dictation on your own writing

1. Write one essay by keyboard and one by dictation on similar topics, and keep both drafts.
2. Edit each draft by hand, timing the edit, and count the errors you fix.
3. Ask your teacher to mark both, without knowing which is which if possible.
4. Use dictation for drafting, then keep the editing and checking by hand.
5. If you have a learning disability, raise the tool with your school, since it may be part of a formal plan.

Whether dictation helps your own writing is a question you can answer with a small test, not a rule. For whether dictated writing is worse than typed writing, see the question on dictated and typed writing. The guide to speech to text for students has the full set of studies, and the question on whether using speech to text is cheating covers the rules for the text you submit.