Keyboarding
One of the long-term controversies over computer use at the elementary-school level concerns whether precious time should be devoted to the development of keyboarding skills (Jennings, 2001). Those who favor making keyboarding part of the curriculum make two points:
• Students must achieve some level of keyboarding proficiency before writing at the computer can be very effective.
• Encouraging students to write at a computer without adequate training allows them to develop bad habits that will be more difficult to overcome when the students do attempt to develop keyboarding skills.
The opposition in this dispute is not really against the development of keyboarding skills, but against holding off access to writing on the computer until students achieve keyboarding proficiency. Also, with the number of computers and the time each student can spend working at the computer each day so limited, some educators question whether allocating time to developing keyboarding proficiency makes sense. There may not be enough time to develop skill, and time might be more productively spent on other activities.
It is our impression that the topic of keyboarding receives less attention than used to be the case. However, studies do continue to surface cautioning against assuming that without purposeful attention to keyboarding practice young children will develop sufficient proficiency to at least match their writing skill when authoring by hand. A study conducted in Great Britain (e.g., Connelly, Gee, & Walsh, 2007) compared the transcription speed of upper-grade level elementary students using both handwriting and keyboarding. The authors note that keyboarding was not an expected part of the curriculum and found a very small proportion of students capable of keyboarding faster than they could write by hand. While transcription speed may not be a valued accomplishment, this research also demonstrated that writing assignments completed by hand were evaluated more positively than those that were composed by keyboarding resulting in the authors urging some keyboarding instruction.
How much training a student needs to become adequate at entering text using a keyboard depends to some extent on what level of proficiency is considered adequate. Students in the upper-elementary-school grades write with a pencil at a rate of about ten words per minute (Wetzel, 1990). Without keyboard training, upper elementary school students will write at the keyboard at about half the rate they can achieve with a pencil. To equal the proficiency elementary students are able to achieve with a pencil requires approximately twenty to thirty hours of keyboard training. After that, students must use their keyboarding skills regularly, or they will regress to an unacceptable level of proficiency. We would not think maintaining proficiency should be an issue given the opportunities for writing in an academic situation. However, given what you know about the number of students in a typical classroom, the number of computers available in some schools, and the length of the elementary school day, you can see what a challenge this requirement represents. Teachers would have to devote a large portion of the time actually spent on computers to keyboarding instruction in order to make students proficient typists. Exposure to keyboarding software without close monitoring by the teacher and without teacher understanding of proper technique also is not likely to produce competent typists (Erthal, 1998).
Cochran-Smith, Paris, and Kahn (1991) give a more optimistic view. They contend that two or three 20- to 30-minute sessions will be sufficient to get elementary school students familiar with the keyboard and basic computer functions (insertion, deletion, block moves) and into writing. They do recommend a more intensive style of adult-student interaction, called coaching, during writing time. Teachers are probably not used to monitoring basic skills such hand position when students work on tasks using a computer, but some attention to such matters may be helpful.
In schools with limited access to computers, it may not be possible to resolve the dispute about keyboarding training. The development of keyboarding proficiency and the application of computers in content-area instruction represent different values, and student use of technology will require value-based decisions about how computers should be used. The issue becomes even more complicated when other devices are used. For example, I cannot use “classic” keyboarding techniques when working on many “netbooks”. The breadth of the keyboard is simply too narrow for me to position my hands over the “home keys”. Then there are “tablet” computers that do not have a traditional separate keyboard, but require input by striking spots on the surface of the tablet representing a keyboard. Not only is the breadth of this virtual keyboard different, but there is no tactile feel associated with striking a key. Research is beginning to emerge comparing transcription speed on different devices (e.g., Chaparro, Ngugyen, Phan, Smith & Treves, 2010), but it is really too early to tell what might be considered typical with individuals who have used various devices for an extended period of time.