The majority of today’s elementary students are exposed to technology on a daily basis with tablets and smartphones at home and computers at school. As a technology integration teacher, I see many of my students who are adept at using touch-screen devices and texting with their thumbs, but significantly struggle to use a computer mouse and type quickly and accurately with all of their fingers on a keyboard. To help address this gap specifically in keyboarding skills, I decided to add a keyboarding instruction and practice time to the technology integration classes that I teach. My students have been using the online program called Typing Club for the past three years.
I decided to collect data in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the Typing Club program for my second, third, and fourth grade students. I was curious about what kind of growth my students were making with their typing skills overtime, but I was also very interested to try to find out if the keyboarding program was more or less effective for certain grade levels. I hypothesized that my classes of fourth graders would show a higher increase in their typing scores overall than my classes of second graders. Over the course of the 2019-2020 academic school year, all of my students did 15 minute practice sessions online with Typing Club twice a week, for a total of 30 minutes per week per student. Every month from mid-August 2019 through mid-March 2020 I averaged the typing speed in WPM (Words Per Minute) for each student and class so that I could compare them.