Do Keyboarding Skills Improve Student Test Scores?
Written by Beth Budinich – Typing.com Teacher Champion
Proficient keyboarding skills are an example of a background skill that may have quite an impact on test scores as students are doing more and more online testing.
While it can be hard to quantify the effect it may have, there are studies that show there is an effect. Also, teachers that are administering tests speak to the benefits of their students being efficient at keyboarding. Students proficient at keyboarding also notice their ease of focusing on their writing instead of on the mechanics of keyboarding.
From the South African Journal of Education Vol. 26(2)281-293 2006, is a keyboarding study by Elsie Lubbe, Jan Monteith and Elsa Mentz called “The Relationship Between keyboarding skills and self-regulated learning”.
This study defines keyboarding skills as: “The ability of learners to key in information into the memory of the computer with the minimum effort and energy use.”