Carol Parker is grateful that her school has supported her efforts to offer students keyboarding instruction.
The assistant principal at Tennessee’s Rockvale Middle School has witnessed firsthand how students’ writing improves when they learn to keep their fingers on the keyboard’s home row and thumbs on the spacebar.
“When I have former students that I see out in public, they love to share with me how, ‘Oh, in middle school, this class helped me so much,’” said Parker, whose school is located southwest of Nashville.
Just as more states are requiring schools to teach the fading art of cursive, Parker as well as many fellow educators and researchers are calling for a parallel focus on the basic skill of keyboarding, particularly in the elementary grades. Learning the foundational skill early isn’t only sound life preparation, they argue, but it can set students up for academic success as high-stakes assessments increasingly go digital—including, most recently, the College Board’s Advanced Placement exams. And although students are growing up using smart phones and iPads, their natural inclination toward technology doesn’t mean they inherently know how to properly keyboard.
But even as more states set standards around keyboarding instruction, it’s not a given that all schools formally teach it, said Denise Donica, professor and chair of the department of occupational therapy at East Carolina University, who has also studied the rise in demand for handwriting instruction in public schools.
“It kind of mirrors the same thing that we’ve seen in handwriting. You have expectations of what students are supposed to be able to do, but taking time to teach those foundational skills isn’t always there,” Donica said.
Sixty-nine percent of school and district leaders said their school or district teaches keyboarding in some capacity, whether as a standalone course, a skill in the classroom, or both, according to a recent EdWeek Research Center survey.
Schools are most commonly teaching the skill to students in the late elementary and middle school grades, according to the survey: 84 percent of school and district leaders said their school or district teaches keyboarding in grades 3-5; the same percentage said their school or district teaches it in grades 6-8.
Keyboarding instruction is less common for students in grades K-2 and in high school. However, majorities of school and district leaders still say they offer it at those grade levels: 62 percent for K-2 and 57 percent for high school.
Typing instruction is necessary even in an age of ubiquitous digital devices, said Steve Simpson, director of technology integration and innovation at the Arlington school district in Texas, a school system of 56,000 students in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
“I would challenge anybody who’s a proficient keyboardist or typist, how they learned,” he said, “and the idea that you just pick it up by accident or through some kind of independent perseverance is kind of silly. It really does require a program that’s intuitively designed.”
Online exams and cognitive benefits of proper keyboarding are driving typing instruction
Generally speaking, there are two main ways to type using a standard QWERTY keyboard.
There’s the proper form: placing all fingers along the keyboard’s home row, allowing someone to type without looking down. And there’s the hunt-and-peck style: a person uses mainly their index fingers to look for the keys they need.
Donica has found in her research that the fastest a person can type using the hunt-and-peck method is about 35 words per minute. Proper keyboarding can help someone reach 70 words per minute or more.
Speed and accuracy are helpful for students taking timed online tests. But the benefits that come from keyboarding go beyond saving time.
“Once a child learns how to [handwrite] letters, there’s less cognitive energy to write because they don’t have to sit and think about each stroke that they’re doing. It’s the same kinesthetic feature with the keyboard as well,” Donica said. “Once they know where those keys are and can quickly type them, it doesn’t take as much cognitive load to do so, so they’re able to get their thoughts out more freely.”
“You may even find that their thoughts are more complete,” she added. “I know we see that a lot in handwriting. Your sentences are longer in your paragraph if you don’t have to use that cognitive energy for the basic mechanics.”
While some educators believed about 15 years ago that speech-to-text technology would eventually render keyboarding obsolete, most now agree it’s here to stay.
But the question that has long plagued schools and districts remains: When is the right time to teach keyboarding?
When to teach keyboarding can vary across schools
As far back as 1998, technology standards called for students to use keyboards “efficiently and effectively” by the end of 5th grade, according to past Education Week reporting.
Around that time, Utah was revising its technology guidelines to “strongly suggest” that keyboarding be taught in the 3rd grade, and even to 1st or 2nd graders who were ready, the state’s then-instructional technology coordinator told EdWeek in 1999.
Today, Utah’s state board of education has keyboarding standards for grades K-5 and requires 5th graders to take a keyboarding proficiency test that assesses whether they can type in proper form without looking at the keyboard instead of emphasizing a required speed or accuracy rate, said Ashley Higgs, an education specialist with the state board.
Utah is now updating its keyboarding standards again to set goals for individual grade levels rather than grade spans. The state also plans to expand the standards so they apply to 6th grade, given that a number of elementary schools include that grade level, Higgs said.
The emphasis in Utah on formal keyboarding instruction, such as proper finger placement, really kicks off at the same grade several other states emphasize: 3rd grade.
“When do kids start being able to participate in music and being able to play instruments? Typically, it’s starting in grade 3, because they have that hand-eye coordination,” Higgs said.
It’s also when students start taking standardized tests as required under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.
In general, Donica has seen schools invest time in younger grades on keyboard fundamentals—like recognizing letters on the keyboard and their position. As students get older, they’re more likely to learn about typing using the home row.
“If we think developmentally about the students and where they are at those grade levels, it’s not a one-and-done skill. It is something that does need to be introduced and then scaffolded so that it is built up on for at least a few years so that they can master that skill and be efficient at it,” Donica said.
Schools vary in how they teach keyboarding
Then, schools teach keyboarding in a variety of ways.
In the Arlington district, students use intervention and enrichment time to practice keyboarding using a self-paced and adaptive application from Learning.com, Simpson said.
In the Northbrook-Glenview School District 30 in the Chicago area, students learn keyboarding as a unit in grades 3 and 4.
The district sends parents information on the course and its expected outcomes ahead of time. It also provides students at-home access to the web-based keyboarding program they use at school, said Andrew Kohl, the district’s director of educational technology.
Before those classroom units, students start learning some of the basics—primarily, that the keyboard doesn’t list letters in alphabetical order. Afterward, in middle school, the district doesn’t teach keyboarding, but middle school-students can access the keyboarding program 3rd and 4th grade students use if they need more practice.
Back at Rockvale Middle School in Tennessee, Parker has decided to go back to the classroom to teach computer-based classes, including reminding students of proper keyboarding technique.
“Repetition is key. The more you type, the better you get it,” she said. “Typing, it’s a skill. It’s something I’ve always taught as a life skill.”
