In evaluating Typing Pal as a teaching tool for students with disabilities, I believe that Typing Pal does not provide the proper types of experience in the cognitive phase. Accuracy and word per minute benchmarks for each activity mean that students who struggle may stay “stuck” on the same exercise for weeks. This is frustrating and diminishes student perception of their abilities. Students need to experience success, not be asked to redo lessons multiple times. Doing more of the same does not help these students. Students need alternative ways to learn keyboarding with reasonable and appropriate benchmarks for success.
Keyboarding, like handwriting, is a complex skill that requires many hours of practice and instruction. (HWT professional development) According to research, keyboarding acquisition is a process that involves three phases:
- Cognitive phase: The student relies on visual feedback. The learner looks at their fingers or at the screen immediately after hitting a key.
- Associative phase: The student relies on kinesthetic cues.
- Autonomous phase: The student relies primarily on kinesthetic feedback.
According to research by Type2Learn, “keyboarding is a psychomotor activity that needs to be taught through introduction, repetition, and reinforcement. Key/letter locations should be introduced two at a time in a sequential format with repetitive activities that begin to build the kinesthetic memory traces that will link each letter with the appropriate finger movement and key. These activities must be designed to guide the learner toward successful completion and reinforce accomplishment.”
Leonard West (1983) proposed that mastering digraphs (two-letter combinations) was the key to maximum typing speed and accuracy. Earlier research showing that typing efficiency improved when typing practice contained “frequent letter combinations or common words,” (Type to Learn)
During the Cognitive Phase students are introduced to proper posture and technique. Students are introduced to individual keys and practice strings of individual letters and letter combinations. During this phase students are taught the proper use of action keys including: shift, enter, backspace, tab. Research shows that student progress should be cumulative, adding letter combinations of previously learned individual letters.
Associative Stimulus Phase includes on-going practice through exercises and activities that provide the repetition necessary for “kinesthetic memory traces” to develop. Developing kinesthetic memory traces is part of the psychomotor learning process (Starr, 2001). This stage of learning is the longest of the phases and involves developing a sense of continuity and rhythm in keyboarding. During this phase students begin to move their eyes away from the keyboard and trust their fingers to stroke the correct key.
Autonomous Muscle Response Phase (Automaticity): Automaticity is a level of proficiency where the learner is able to complete a task as a whole without devoting attention to each individual component task. Keyboarding automaticity requires facility in typing to the point where the operator is keying without thinking of the individual keys.
Methodology
- Pre-assess students to determine where students are on continuum of keyboarding learning.
- Cognitive phase
- Associative phase
- Autonomous phase
- Use Gamification and badges for students to see their progress and maintain motivation.
- Students will enter QWERTY Land and move through different lands based on their phase in the keyboarding learning process.
- Students may stay in any land for as long as they need to complete that phase of learning.
- Each land will include quests from:
- Keyboarding without Tears
- Typing Club
- Dance Mat Typing
- Exercises from Keyboarding Skills for Children with Disabilities
- offline keyboarding games (kinesthetic)
- authentic keyboarding or word processing tasks (sight words, spelling words, other writing assignments)
- Students will earn points for completing quests that work toward mastery of the objectives in their specific phase of learning. As students earn points for participation they will gain higher levels of adventurer status. This will give students who take longer to learn the positive reinforcement of making progress.
- As students master different skills they will earn badges to show mastery of the skill. This will give the student who learns keyboarding more quickly badges for completing skills.
