School Age

Eight-year-old Ryan Wilson considers himself pretty proficient on the keyboard: He types messages to his friends and instructions into search engines, and sometimes word-processes his school work. But he’s still using two fingers to do his typing. Would learning real keyboarding skills be worthwhile for him?

Ron Owston, director of the Institute for Research on Learning Technologies at York University in Toronto, thinks so: “Keyboarding is definitely a valuable skill, even for elementary school kids. And our research shows that being able to use the computer effectively improves children’s writing skills as well.”

In one study, Owston and his fellow researchers worked with two groups of eight-year-olds. The kids in the experimental group were given laptops and taught keyboarding and computer skills; the control group (from a different school) had the standard amount of computer access in class — in other words, not much.

“In the first year, the control group was actually a bit ahead,” says Owston. “But by the end of the third year, the kids with the computers produced higher-quality writing — their essays and stories were longer, more detailed, more complex. They expressed their thoughts better. Their work was also better when you looked at spelling and grammar.”

Originally published in Today's Parent, November 2007