Why Many Kids Struggle on State Assessments: The Obvious Typing Skill Gap No One Fixes
Last month I proctored our 4th grade’s first full practice state test, and half way through the ELA section I stopped beside Mia’s Chromebook. Mia’s one of my strongest writers—she turns in personal narratives that make me laugh out loud, she aces every reading comprehension quiz we give, and she always volunteers to share her work with the class. But that day, her shoulders were hunched up to her ears, and she was stabbing at the keyboard with her index finger, one letter at a time. She’d erased the same sentence three times, and the progress bar at the top of the screen showed she’d only finished two of the seven constructed response questions. When I leaned down to ask if she needed help, she blinked fast and whispered, “I can’t type fast enough. I’m not gonna finish.”
I’ve seen this every year for the last 12 years I’ve taught 4th grade, and it never stops feeling avoidable. After the test, I pulled our school’s internal data just to confirm what I already suspected: our students who had consistent keyboarding practice in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade type almost twice as fast on test day as their peers who didn’t, and their overall scores are 18 percentage points higher on average. The gap isn’t because the kids who practice are smarter—it’s because the kids who don’t spend all their time and brain power hunting for the right key instead of focusing on the answer they want to write. It feels so obvious when you see it in front of you, right? But almost no schools or families prioritize regular typing practice when kids are little.
Last week at parent-teacher conferences, I talked about this with Mia’s mom, and she said exactly what I hear from most parents: “I thought the school taught typing in tech class.” We do have a tech teacher, but she sees each class for 45 minutes once every six days. That’s less than three hours a month of tech time, and most of that gets eaten up by learning how to log into portals, use Google Classroom, and complete the required practice test modules. There’s no time left for actual keyboarding practice. When I started teaching 12 years ago, we had 15 minutes of keyboarding practice built into the daily morning work block for 1st through 3rd grade. But as testing pressure grew, that time got cut to make room for more reading fluency drills and math practice. It’s backwards, right? We cut the skill that lets kids show what they know to make time for teaching more content, but the content doesn’t matter if they can’t get it down on the screen before the clock runs out.
A lot of parents push back and say their kids type all the time on phones and tablets, so why do they need extra practice? That’s a fair question, but the muscle memory doesn’t translate. I had a 5th grader two years ago who could type 48 words a minute texting his friends, but when he got on a full keyboard for the state test, he clocked in at 11 words a minute. Thumb typing on a small screen is nothing like typing on a standard keyboard, and hunting and pecking with one or two fingers doesn’t get faster just because you text a lot.
This isn’t one of those problems that needs a huge budget or a complete curriculum overhaul to fix, though. I’ve figured out small, low-effort things that teachers and parents can do that add up, just from experimenting in my own classroom and with my own two kids at home.
For teachers, instead of printing out paper exit tickets every Friday, have kids type their responses into a shared Google Doc. That’s 3 to 5 minutes of extra typing practice a week, no extra prep, no extra cost. If you have 10 minutes of dead time before lunch or after recess, pull up a free site like Typing.com and let kids play the typing games—most of them don’t even realize they’re practicing. For parents, you don’t have to sign your kid up for an expensive class or add another chore to their nightly routine. Try swapping one small written activity for a typed one. My 10 year old used to write a short note to his grandma every Sunday after we visited. Now he types it into an email, and that’s 5 to 10 minutes of practice a week, no extra time carved out. A lot of families have 10 minutes while dinner’s cooking where kids are just hanging around waiting—have them do a round of typing games on the kitchen Chromebook then, instead of scrolling TikTok. It’s that small.
Mia’s parents started doing exactly that: 5 minutes of practice every night while the pasta boils. Two months later, when we took our second practice test, she finished all her questions with 10 minutes left to check her work. Her typing speed went from 8 words a minute to 22, which is right on target for 4th grade. It was a tiny change that made a huge difference for her.
I’ve brought this data up to our district curriculum team twice in the last three years. Everyone nods, agrees it makes sense, says it’s a problem worth looking at. Then nothing changes. The schedule is already full, the testing requirements are already non-negotiable, and there’s always something more pressing to focus on.
I get it. There are a million problems in education right now, and a typing skill gap feels small compared to underfunded classrooms and understaffed schools. But it’s one of the few easy problems to fix, if we start early enough. You don’t need fancy equipment or extra hours in the day, just a few minutes a week, when kids are young enough to build that muscle memory before test day rolls around.
Today I walked past a 2nd grade classroom during work time, and saw three kids hunched over a worksheet writing sentences, when they could have been typing them into a document. Mia’s test is next month, and she’s ready now, but there are hundreds more Mias in schools across the district right now, building up to that same moment where they realize they can’t show what they know, just because no one gave them 5 minutes a day of practice when they were little. It’s still not too late for them, if we start acting on the obvious thing we already know.
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