Speed and Accuracy Goals

Speed & Accuracy Goals

Once solid keyboarding technique has been established, it is time to focus on typing speed and accuracy.

The Keyboarding for Kids program is designed to take students back through the finger families they learned in Keyboard Chatter, focusing this time on increasing speed and accuracy. Remember that the whole point of learning to keyboard is to utilize the keyboard as a tool for inputting data more quickly and efficiently than handwriting allows.

As students work through the lessons and timings in KBK, point out to them that the speed at which they type each lesson is only recorded by the system if they type the lines perfectly. Accuracy is vital. After all, who cares how quickly someone can type random keys on the keyboard? Speed doesn't mean anything without accuracy.

Consistent speed and accuracy is also important. Require students to complete at least three good timings on each line in each lesson before moving on to the next one. At the same time, be sure to keep your students moving through the lessons at a good pace. Even a student who can type 60 words per minute on the home row keys is still not proficient if the home row keys are all they know. The true test of speed and accuracy comes as students progress to later lessons and timings that include complete sentences and paragraphs.

 

Race Car IconHow to Set Individual Keyboarding Speed Goals

Hopefully by the time students reach fourth and fifth grade, they will have enough experience with keyboarding that they will complete the minimum requirements and lessons before the end of the school year. At this point, it is time to challenge these students and push them to increase their keyboarding speed and accuracy beyond the minimum mastery level.

Keyboarding speed does not only come from training your body and brain to know where each individual key is on the keyboard. After the basics have been learned, speed and accuracy increases from practicing common words and phrases to the point that your mind and body can type them as if in one single motion. After mastering technique; after mastering keys, finger movements, and finger families; after reaching minimum requirements for typing speed; automaticity in keying high-frequency words and phrases is the next goal.

To begin the process of building keyboarding vocabulary on a day-by-day basis, instruct students to key the first 50 high frequency words ( Download High Frequency Words.pdf

 ) one time with just a space between them. Have students practice this three times and turn in their best speed. Set a goal for each student by adding 8 wpm to the best rate. This may be adjusted down a bit if the student has major accuracy problems or adjusted up a bit for students who are highly motivated. Goals should be high enough to require good, hard work and drill.

After individual goals have been set, include in each daily lesson plan a time for 6-8 minutes of individual work on a particular list. The work should include keying each word several times without correcting errors, but attempting to be quicker and more accurate with each keying. In the last minute of the drill period, students should time themselves on the word list (keying it only one time with a space between each word and doing a count-up timing. Timing should be done only after lots of drill each day.) When a student reaches his/her individual goal with no errors on the list, the timing should be printed and turned in for the teacher to evaluate and record. Students must pass off one list before moving onto or beginning work on the next one. Vocabulary name cards should be at the student’s work station for each vocabulary drill session and collected at the end of each session. The high frequency words should be the focus of this activity; however, variety can be added and vocabulary built by constructing lists of “specialty” or content words.

Any lists that students are working on can be added to KBK as well by copying the lists into one of your created timings.