title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Research and Diagnostic Lab of Writing Functions, School of Occupational Therapy, Hadassah and the Hebrew University Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, P.O. Box 24026, Jerusalem 9124001, Israel. Electronic address: hayley.weigelt@mail.huji.ac.il.
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Weigelt Marom
authors.affiliation: Research and Diagnostic Lab of Writing Functions, School of Occupational Therapy, Hadassah and the Hebrew University Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, P.O. Box 24026, Jerusalem 9124001, Israel. Electronic address: naomi.weintraub@mail.huji.ac.il.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Weintraub
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003194:Computer-Assisted Instruction / Q000379:methods*; D003201:Computers; D004410:Dyslexia; D005260:Female; D005385:Fingers; D006236:Handwriting; D006801:Humans; D007859:Learning Disabilities; D008297:Male; D009048:Motor Skills; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D012984:Software; D013334:Students; D014495:Universities; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Higher education; Keyboarding; Learning disabilities; Touch-typing acquisition