Keyboarding Instruction

Keyboarding instruction has not only been an interest to educators but also educational software manufacturers as well. Such manufacturers have developed software contents, through which students can be taught to become proficient typists. Most of the software packages include many interesting features that are meant to help students with the learning process. For example, the “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing” software includes a series of customizable training textual and visual contents that are meant to be engaging and motivating to a would be typist. This software package has been used by thousands of schools across the world. Yet, a standard methodological approach that can be used to teach and asses typing students has not been established.

Although the textual contents found in “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing” software are unique, many other well known software packages, such as Typing Tutor, Typing Tutor for Dummies, Typing Pal Junior, Typing for Business Plus, Typing Instructor, All the Right Type, Typing Master, and Keyboard Master offer similar kinds of textual contents as well. The contents are for the most part language specific. Given the instructional approach of such software packages, the contents have shown to be valuable to some extent. As a result of the contents of those software packages, typing students, after vigorous practice sessions would eventually be able to memorize the exact basic routines for typing really words on a typing keyboard.

The problem is that a learner would face with the “difficult task” of learning simultaneously the keyboard finger placements, and the keystroke combinations of each introduced word. It is well known that learning how to type using the traditional contents is both mentally and physically challenging for learners and that it is a methodological problem. The source of the problem is identified to be rooted in the contents of keyboarding software packages. As argued by Davidson and Kochmann (1996) such packages violate psychomotor skill development.

The content problem has to do with the incoherence of the physiological aspect of the keyboard with respects to human hands and fingers, and how the brain accounts or compensates for them physiologically and psychologically during the learning process. The effects of typing instruction on the psychophysiology of an individual are well documented. Conducted experiments have revealed that practicing known words, such as “self”, “silk”, “soap”, and/or randomized versions of these words repeatedly would only cause a learner to memorize their compositional structures. Students would only develop high proficiency for typing their exact keystroke combinations across the keyboard (Delphonse, 1995 and 2006).