Digital or physical exercise books in History writing: which is better?

Posted on by J.J. Hamilton

In 2022, I announced that I was going back to University. I graduated in 2018 and decided to train to teach in 2019, getting about half a year’s worth of training in before taking on two year 11 groups and two year 10 groups in my first year of teaching.

Which, by the way, was during the height of the Covid pandemic.

So, of course, I decided to take on an extra challenge right after I’d finally settled into the challenges of my job. That year was one of my toughest for the simple reason that time management became a real contentious point in my life. I couldn’t simply plan lessons, mark books and deliver high-quality lessons; I also had to conduct research, attend meetings, read and take notes on nearly 70 academic sources, and write the whole 15,000-word project.

How I also managed to fit in about three holidays in the summer before the dissertation was due, I’ll never know.

But there’s something to be said about taking on a big, heavy project. It brings so much more satisfaction than simply writing piecemeal texts every now and again. I love having my own corner of the internet on this blog, but I wouldn’t feel fully satisfied if it was the only project that I was working on.

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to share my findings with the rest of the world. It’s not something that I’m aiming to publish, but it feels like such a shame to have this great thing that I spent so many days of my life invested in rotting away in the files on my computer.

The dissertation explored whether substituting traditional exercise books with digital ones improved the writing structure of Year 7 students in their History lessons. If that sounds interesting to you, keep reading. If you’re here for productivity, I’d recommend my entire Bullet Journal system. Looking for health and lifestyle hacks? Check out my guide to getting the best sleep of your life.

Still here? Great! Here’s what I found out:

The setup

Conducting research anywhere other than at my school would have been way beyond the scope of what I should have expected out of a dissertation, so that’s where I setup shop. I put aside an hour or two every Sunday to make progress, which really helped when I stuck to it, so I’d really strongly recommend that you stick with that if you’re hoping to do something similar anytime soon, especially if it’s alongside a full-time job.

I picked two Year 7 classes that I was already teaching, since their behaviour was already great and it was super convenient for collecting data. When conducting research, you should always pick a class with tip-top behaviour, since that’ll make your life much less stressful when trying to put together your findings for such a hefty project.

Unless, of course, you’re focusing on behaviour management. Obviously.

The reason I went for two classes was so that one could act as the experimental group, and use the digital books, while the other was what we call a control group – the group who opted for business as normal and carried on with using traditional exercise books. For those in the experimental group, they used one Google Doc that had been posted onto their Google Classroom. I discovered an add-on for Docs called Magic Exercise Book, which allows teachers to add additional pre-made pages to documents that were already present in a students’ assignments – something that the vanilla version of Docs fails to do. Make sure you get approval for add-ons from your IT department well in advance for any additional content you need to bypass any firewalls in good time, or you might find yourself delaying your project.

Additionally, it’s always best to run a pilot study. For me, this involved about four weeks in our second cycle of work where I tested various aspects of the digital exercise books to ensure that they wouldn’t break, as well as seemingly simple things, including that students could actually use them.

The point of my research was to investigate whether doing the same things in a digital format had any noticeable improvement on writing quality, examined through the writing of their PEE paragraphs. This is how we measure students’ written progress in History, through the application of knowledge in PEE paragraphs: point, evidence, explanation.

Or, in non-teaching terms: making a statement, backing it up with your knowledge, and then telling the reader why your knowledge supports your statement and overall argument. Kids stick to this structure throughout their schooling lives, in various degrees of detail, so it’s essential that they get this right from the start. If we can implement micro-improvements through experiments like these to improve their writing early on, why not?

The good

Generally, students enjoyed using their iPads, finding them easier and quicker to use for research and note-taking – but I expected this, since we know how addicted young people are to their devices. Students also expressed a desire to use their devices more frequently in both the experimental and control groups, but this could simply be out of a baseline love of technology, rather than due to a profound impact on their work ethic.

What I really liked was that handwriting anxieties became a thing of the past. Students expressed joy at not being held back by poor spelling, punctuation and grammar, and I loved being able to read what everybody had written without issue. Moreover, editing work became much easier, leaving students free to explore their ideas, which is an essential building block to formulating ideas prior to writing PEE paragraphs.

The bad

Digital note-taking is a lot more convenient than writing in an exercise book, since it can be accessed even when students are at home, but because we can type faster than we can write, it often encourages students to copy the teachers’ notes or words verbatim, rather than applying critical thinking and summarisation to their learning. Equally, while digital note-taking with a stylus can be effective with practice, research generally indicates that handwriting is superior for memorisation.

So, if we went fully digital, would we be doing a disservice to the students we teach?

Equally, sadly, my own findings suggested that digital exercise books don’t significantly improve the quality of writing, even if students feel more positive about using their iPads than they do their books. Also, if staff feel negatively towards the integration of technology, they are less likely to use them and more likely to view them as distractions, or as negative influences on screen time.

On top of that, while students preferred not worrying about handwriting, I was also concerned about a lack of practice in both spelling tricky words, such as tier 3 language, and in letter formation, which is crucial at this stage in their education career. It’s for this reason that I’d be interested in repeating a similar experiment, but with styluses instead of keyboards.

Finally, digital exercise books, sadly, had little impact on the ability of students to plan and structure well-written answers. Despite increased exposure to iPads and dedicated planning time, the differences in performance between the two groups was not statistically significant.

The mixed results

The impact of iPads on student engagement and achievement is probably the most mixed part of this research. There were some really positive points – both in my findings and in the wider literature – such as how technology can enhance learning through interactive activities and personalised feedback. However, its effectiveness generally depends on how well-integrated the iPad has been into the curriculum, as well as the classroom teacher’s attitude towards it.

Equally, with the mixed results on handwriting, I think that further research is needed into how more legible writing, in spite of less handwriting practice, could impact the future prospects of students – both positively and negatively. For instance, from the viewpoint that students need handwriting practice because that’s a fundamental skill that I also have – of course we shouldn’t use only digital books. However, in a modern landscape, I’m struggling to remember a time where I’ve absolutely had to rely on my handwriting for extended periods of time that aren’t simply providing written feedback for my students.

Even brainstorming ideas for my blog or for lesson plans can be done by typing. So, it begs the question: how much handwriting practice do young people need these days?

I’m not sure I have the answer. While digital books reduced handwriting anxieties and improved students’ attitudes towards learning, they did not significantly improve students’ writing skills or confidence in writing PEE paragraphs.

As I’m sure the academics reading will know, the answer is thus: more research needed.

It’s a little frustrating to know that my intervention didn’t lead to any significant improvement in students’ writing, but that is the nature of research. You can’t hope to find the answer you’re looking for; you can only do your best to test something and see whether it helps.

Have you ever tried something new in your classroom? Any research you’ve attempted that’s succeeded or failed to make a difference? Or something that you’ve always wanted to try but never got round to? I’d love to read about them in the comments below. Equally, if you ever fancy carrying on my research, let me know how it goes! Get in touch if you’d also like a downloadable PDF of my research sources, so you can read the literature that I had to read and review for myself.

There are 68 sources, though, so be careful what you wish for…

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