title: Internal Structure and Development of Keyboard Skills in Spanish-Speaking Primary-School Children With and Without LD in Writing.
abstract: This study had two purposes: examining the internal structure of the Test Estandarizado para la Evaluación Inicial de la Escritura con Teclado (TEVET; Spanish Keyboarding Writing Test), and analyzing the development of keyboarding skills in Spanish elementary school children with and without learning disabilities (LD) in writing. A group of 1,168 elementary school children carried out the following writing tasks: writing the alphabet in order from memory, allograph selection, word copying, writing dictated words with inconsistent spelling, writing pseudowords from dictation, and independent composition of sentence. For this purpose, exploratory factor analysis for the TEVET was conducted. Principal component analysis with a varimax rotation identified three factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0. Based on factorial analysis, we analyzed the keyboarding skills across grades in Spanish elementary school children with and without LD (i.e., poor handwriters compared with poor spellers, who in turn were compared with mixed compared with typically achieving writers). The results indicated that poor handwriters did not differ from typically achieving writers in phonological processing, visual-orthographic processing, and sentence production components by keyboarding. The educational implications of the findings are analyzed with regard to acquisition of keyboarding skills in children with and without LD in transcription.
authors.affiliation: 1 Universidad de La Laguna, the Canary Islands, Spain.
authors.forename: Juan E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Jiménez
authors.affiliation: 1 Universidad de La Laguna, the Canary Islands, Spain.
authors.forename: Isaac
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Marco
authors.affiliation: 1 Universidad de La Laguna, the Canary Islands, Spain.
authors.forename: Natalia
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Suárez
authors.affiliation: 1 Universidad de La Laguna, the Canary Islands, Spain.
authors.forename: Desirée
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: González
keywords: elementary school children; keyboarding efficiency; learning disabilities; transcription; typing