Writing versus typing during science teaching: Case study in Slovenia

Abstract

In a case study conducted in a biology class in Slovenia, six grade students participated in a biology project Writing Versus Typing in a Biology Class. The final task in this project was to write a chapter for a biology textbook with the title Urtica dioica. The task was performed twice: firstly, the text was written by the hand and secondly it was typed on the computer keyboard. Handwritten and keyboard typed scientific texts, textbook chapters, were compared with the special focus on the lexical, syntactic, and semantic level of the text. The purpose of this research was to find out the effect of replacing handwriting with typing in the process of teaching/learning science subjects, where the understanding of texts is of crucial importance. A closer look at the students’ text products in the typing modality reveals that students, while typing, seem to be cognitively overloaded. One of the consequences of this is a lower level of cognitive achievement in their typed text: students show less knowledge, less terminological accuracy, and, above all, a lesser understanding of the interconnection between the items of information provided.