Effects of digitalisation on learning to write – A naturalistic experiment

Students' writing is being digitised to a different degree across countries, municipalities, and schools. Yet, knowledge on the effect of digitalisation remains scarce. Due to local autonomy over instructional methods, Norwegian schools portray a full array of this global diversity of practices, representing a unique naturalistic setting of digitisation, with other factors being held relatively constant. The study explores how elementary students' writing is affected by to what degree students' writing involves using digital tools and/or handwriting over the first year in school. A total of 577 Norwegian first grade students (6 years). In a natural experiment, students were tested for spelling ability (dictation) and for narrative text writing ability. Students wrote one text by hand and one text on a digital device and handwritten and typed texts were analysed for handwriting legibility, holistic quality, text length and compositional spelling. The statistical analysis was performed using Linear mixed-effects models. The results show that students from classes with a higher degree of digitalisation wrote longer texts with more words correctly spelled when writing on a digital device, compared to others. However, students from classes where more writing was done by hand performed better on handwriting measures. We suggest that both modes convey writing proficiency, each with its specific benefits.