The effect of a touch-typing program on keyboarding skills of higher education students with and without learning disabilities

Abstract

This study examined the effect of a touch-typing instructional program on keyboarding skills of higher education students. One group included students with developmental learning disabilities (LD, n=44), consisting of students with reading and/or handwriting difficulties. The second group included normally achieving students (NA, n=30). The main goal of the program was to increase keyboarding speed while maintaining accuracy. The program included 14 bi-weekly touch-typing lessons, using the "Easy-Fingers" software (Weigelt Marom & Weintraub, 2010a), that combines a touch-typing instructional program and a keystroke logging program, to document the time and accuracy of each typed key. The effect of the program was examined by comparing keyboarding skills between the beginning (pre-test), the end of the program (post-test) and 3 months after termination of the program (long-term). Results showed that at the end of the program, keyboarding speed of the NA students decreased while the speed of the students with LD somewhat increased. In the long-term evaluation, both groups significantly improved their speed compared to pre-test. In both cases high accuracy (above 95%) was maintained. These results suggest that touch-typing instruction may benefit students in general, and more specific, students with LD studying in higher education, which often use computers in order to circumvent their handwriting difficulties.

Keywords: Higher education; Keyboarding; Learning disabilities; Touch-typing acquisition.