When I hand write, I am generally forced to either slow down and repeat what I am listening/watching (if an option), or actually think about what is being said, and choose the important parts to write down, or rephrase it in a more efficient-to-write way.
I am taking a course right now and I find repeatedly that I understand the concepts from taking down the notes (many aha moments), and then I remember. I rarely if ever actually look at the notes I take - they are objectively inferior as a product compared to the official course notes or the textbook.
Maybe typing would be efficient for learning if I was bad it - could be an interesting hypothesis to test.
If lots of people said they code better while riding a unicycle, I'm not sure I'd just dismiss it off hand.
If you can replicate that mental engagement while typing, you'd probably get similar results.
This makes a lot of sense to me in light of what we know about how learning happens. I have never seen any research on brain activity though, and my tutor didn't cite any.
This doesn't really refute the theory—maybe touch typing is worse—but it doesn't match my logical intuition at all.
Wish I had a definitive answer. I do know from personal experience that when I'm touch typing notes while reading a book or listening to a lecture, my thoughts drift fairly often. (I'm a fairly fast touch typist though, 140+ wpm.) I'm also more likely to be thinking, "damn, that's a lot of notes!" rather than about the material, lol. Whereas while handwriting, I'm heavily engaged with the material, to the point where I lose sight of the fact that I'm in the middle of taking notes.
Oh and because it's so easy to make quick edits while typing, I find it hard to resist the impulse to correct a typo or add an extra word here and there, which further distracts me from the material.
Also, I can touch type for long stretches without the slightest mental fatigue, but I need a tiny mental break after 30-60 seconds of handwritten note taking.
Since you can change all of this on computers (or it happens automatically), you don't have to give it thought before writing it down.
I'm sure if you drove the unicycle through a trough of paint and then used it to make words you'd have a similar experience.
the thing it's doing when writing with your hand is fine motor control, one of the most important and distinguishing abilities that humans have.
I tutor in a makerspace and one thing I've observed it's that it's now easier to teach old people how to solder than younger kids, and that in my experience has never been the case before. Due to growing up on impoverished digital interfaces I see lack of dexterity that I've never seen in young people before. Same reason I suspect you see a decline in people picking up tactile musical instruments like the guitar or violin.
Forcing people to handwrite both makes writing more laborious and takes away from what is actually important in writing, which is forming your thoughts. At minimum, when handwriting you can't go back and insert words or rearrange sentences to try out different ideas.
I do still think kids should learn how to write by hand, because it's culturally important. However, I think it could be emphasized somewhat less, and I don't think schools should teach cursive (which, anecdotally, I think is actually having a small resurgence in many schools).
All other exercises would need more expensive tools and after inventing a sufficient number of different patterns for other activities, that would be practically equivalent with writing a different alphabet on another medium than paper, e.g. carving wood or stone, etc.
I did not like to use handwriting for things like taking notes at school or at the university, and I switched to typewriting as soon as I could afford a computer. For work purposes I now use only typewriting.
Despite this, I am very grateful that in the first years of school I was forced to practice handwriting, even if I have abandoned decades ago the style of handwriting that I was taught.
The reason is exactly what the previous poster has said, that this practice of handwriting as a child was essential for developing the motor control that I needed later as an electronics engineer for soldering or for assembling and disassembling various miniature devices.
for one it's not clear to that this is what is actually important in writing or unrelated. That's just a bias in a culture that systematically neglects embodied practice.
In Japan there's an increasing phenomenon of Kanji-illiteracy among the young. Turns out there is a close connection between writing them out, the order of strokes and the physical activity and the memorizing of meaning of the Kanji, just passive observation or digital input can't replicate. There's a reason calligraphy is such an important tradition. There's an inherent connection from your hand, to your working memory to the processing of symbolic meaning.
This mirrors the discourse you see in math. "Rote memorization, writing equations, isn't important, you need to be able to think" turns out it really isn't and countries that teach traditionally excel at math. We live in an educational culture of thinking-pilled people who disregard the physical world and practice with abysmal results.
...this is very much not my understanding of the literature on math education, I'm not sure what you're referencing.
I know I retain more if I handwrite notes. It's my lived experience, so that's what I do in meetings, generally. These notes get transcribed back into some orderly data store for later reference, but the initial notes are pen and paper.
Do you know that is how simplistic these studies actually are?
A lot of education research is shockingly bad. (And, to be clear, a lot of it is also really good!)