Approved-By:  "EDTECH Moderator" <21765EDT@MSU.BITNET>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.edtech
Date:         Tue, 25 Aug 1992 18:40:36 EDT
From:         stan kulikowski ii <STANKULI@UWF.BITNET>
Subject:      keyboarding curriculum

----------------------------Original message----------------------------

  i have been asked to comment on the recent email threads about keyboarding
which are appearing in several mailing lists.  i have been considering these
issues recently, and i cannot escape the conclusion that keyboarding is
essential elementary curriculum.  schools which fail to provide this in the
3rd grade are not preparing their students for the basic requirements of
information processing.  schools have been preparing our students for textual
difficulty for most of this century.

  wood and freeman (1932) studied 15,000 elementary students and determined
that significant gains in language abilities were evident with training in the
use of mechanical typewriters.  rowe (1958) trained 3rd grade students to 42
words per minute with a little less than 40 hours training time.  results like
these were reproduced many times, but school curriculum never developed
systematic typing instruction except as vocational training in high school, and
then mainly for the girl's secretarial employment.  ubelacker (1992) noted that
in today's computer environment, waiting until secondary schooling to attempt
keyboard training as part of vocational studies is becoming useless.  too many
students have already developed hunt and peck typing strategies by this time
and are nearly impossible to retrain in a useful length of time.

  touch-type keyboard output rate of 3rd graders (after 40 hrs training) is
typically 10% higher than their speed of handwriting.  legibility is no longer
a problem for teacher reading.  with computer networks, advances in automatic
grading of elementary materials will help handle the greater written output.

  the curriculum logic is simple:   1st grade learn to print,
                                    2nd grade cursive penmanship,
                                    3rd grade touch typing.

  computing is not an option that schools, teachers, or students can choose to
ignore in their future.  nothing is going to replace keyboards as the most
efficient data entry for people with 10 independent fingers-- even dictation to
voice recognition cannot match long term input rates of 10 articulators.   we
can type faster than we can write or even talk.  keyboarding is essentially
limited by the rate of our thoughts.

                               ***

  the main addition i would append to the above findings, is training in dvorak
keyboards over qwerty is strongly indicated.  not only does dvorak carry a
strong 20% increase in productivity by matching finger strength to letter
frequency in english... retraining from qwerty takes about 100 hrs training
time to match output speeds.  the dissonance in the keyboard patterns will be
easier to retrain the hunt&peckers from their poor qwerty habits.

           dvorak (1948)                      qwerty (1873)

         7 5 3 1 9 0 2 4 6 8              1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
         ? , . p y f g c r l /            q w e r t y u i o p
         a o e u i d h t n s              a s d f g h j k l ;
         ; q j k x b m w v z              z x c v b n m , . /


  it seems difficult to believe that an additional day per week is achieved
in data entry productivity with this difference in keyboard.  but this has been
repeatedly confirmed by major studies since 1948.  all have been ignored by
curriculum developers because gregg shorthand developed touch typing as a
standard secretarial skill in the 1930s.

  keyboard teachers worry that if we train dvorak, the students will be lost
when they encounter mainly qwerty keyboards in the business world.  this is a
false concern:  learning both patterns is not a difficult task, particularly
for the young.  it is well known that the common position of 'M' on both dvorak
and qwerty keyboards causes a mild but noticeable cross-pattern interference
for people who master both keyboard patterns.  dvorak was not familiar with
this effect and that remains the outstanding error in his key placement.  with
computers, changing the keyboard pattern of most machines is just loading a
driver into memory during boot up.  it is easy to convert whatever machine you
encounter to efficient input patterns.

  now, why do schools persist in avoiding the obvious?  it is very difficult to
alter curriculum, even that designed to promote failure.
                                                        stan

references

b.d. wood and f.n. freeman (1932) an experimental study of the educational
          influence of the typewriter in the elementary school classroom.
          macmillan company, NY.

j.l. rowe (1959) readin, typin, and rithmetic.  business education world,
          vol 39.

s. ubelacker (1992) keyboarding: the universal curriculum tool for children.
          9th international conference on technology and education; university
          of texas at austin, pp 808-810.


    .                  stankuli@UWF.bitnet
   ===
         when a thraskin puts fingers in its ears, it is polite to shout
   ---                                          -- old venusian proverb
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