Generation Z is the first to have been educated in a 100% digital environment since primary education. This has made it easier for them to have great communication skills through social networks, but it is leaving aside other skills that humanity has cultivated for more than 5,500 years: handwriting.
This tendency to abandon writing worries experts and educators, who observe how dependence on electronic devices is affecting the written communication capacity of young people and the consequences for learning that this implies.
More screens and less paper. Keyboards and touch screens have relegated paper and writing to the background, causing handwriting to lose ground among Generation Z. This trend, observed in various countries, not only affects students’ handwriting, but also the ability to express oneself in a clear and structured way in written texts.
In statements reported by the Turkish newspaper Türkiye TodayProfessor Nedret Kiliçeri, a professor at Istanbul University in Turkey, noted: “Students’ writing is often illegible, with letters that slant downward or upward on the page. They often confuse letters when writing them like the D and B”, pointing out the loss of spatial skills that writing on paper provides.
Digitalization is just an excuse. Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology published a study in the scientific journal Frontiers in Psychology which shows the importance of handwriting in the cognitive processes related to learning. The researchers asked one group of participants to use a digital pen to write a text, while the rest did so with a keyboard.
The results demonstrated increased activity in brain areas related to learning, memory formation, and information encoding. These data demonstrated that, although writing is carried out with a digital pen on a screen, the fact of structuring the information to write it and the motor coordination to draw the words is a much more efficient activity for learning than doing it with a keyboard.
Writing makes us remember the words. “Our findings suggest that visual and motion information obtained through precisely controlled hand movements when using a pen contributes greatly to brain connectivity patterns that promote learning,” said Professor Audrey Van der Meer. In another 2020 study, Professor Van der Meer delved deeper into the importance of handwriting in the analysis and learning processes in 12-year-old children.
In her conclusions, the researcher recognizes that, although handwriting activates more learning areas than keyboard writing, that does not mean that it is learned faster or better with one method or another, nor does it make children more intelligent.
“There is evidence that students learn and remember better when they take class notes by hand. At the same time, using a computer with a keyboard can be more productive when writing a long text or an essay,” Van der Meer said. scientific medium Sciencenorway.
Multiple choice exams to write less. Arda Kahrama, a university student, commented in the article that for a good part of their education they have been demonstrating their knowledge with multiple choice exams, so the skills of developing written communication have become less present in their education.
“Since elementary school, we have been doing multiple choice exams. I don’t remember writing essays unless it was absolutely necessary. Social media already has its own language: short forms and emojis. I think writing as we knew it is dying.” .
A paradigm shift in communication. According to Professor Kiliçeri “students tend to avoid complex sentences and believe that a series of short phrases constitutes a paragraph. This trend reflects the impact of social networks, where communication is reduced to short messages and emojis.”
What the researchers suggest is that it is not that members of Generation Z are more or less intelligent than previous generations because they have not exercised the skill of handwriting as much. The problem is that this lack of practice in structuring writing and using social networks has led Generation Z to a paradigm shift in the way they communicate.
As Professor Nedret Kiliçeri pointed out, this change is making many young people unable to write quality emails or academic texts. “Students now prefer to use a minimum of words to convey basic information. They aim to summarize ideas in just ten words and use the immediacy that keyboards provide.”
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Image | Unsplash (Unseen Studio)
