Understanding Students’ Typing Skills: Evaluating the Effects and Efficiency of a Typing Intervention for Elementary School Students

Common Core State Standards require elementary school students to have sufficient keyboarding skills. Specifically, students are expected to use computers to produce a written composition in a single sitting. Despite Common Core State standards, students are not performing proficiently on computer-based writing assessments. Research suggests computers are not being used in writing instruction and comparisons of typed and handwritten assignments for elementary school students revealed that students type significantly less than they handwrite. Therefore, students may not have pre-requisite typing skills necessary to compose a quality typed composition. The purpose of the current study is to evaluate the effects of an online typing intervention on fourth- and fifth-grade students’ writing performance.