Why Poor Typing Skills Tank State Test Scores (And Why No One Fixes It Early)
Last May, I proctored our 7th grade state ELA assessment in the back of the library, and spent 45 minutes watching Mia work. She’s a quiet kid who turns in vivid, thoughtful personal narratives for our in-class assignments, usually pulling a high B or low A. That day, she hunched over her Chromebook, pecking every letter with her two index fingers, backspacing half the time because she’d hit the wrong key, her left wrist curled awkwardly against the plastic edge of the desk. With 12 minutes left on the clock, she had two full sentences written for her 5-paragraph argumentative essay. When I leaned over to check if she needed a bathroom break, she mumbled, “I can’t think and type at the same time. The clock’s too fast.”
After the test, I pulled up the state’s own data study they’d released a few months prior. Researchers tracked 12,000 students across the state from 3rd grade through 7th grade, and confirmed what I’d been seeing anecdotally for years: typing performance on state assessments directly correlates to how much consistent keyboarding practice students got in earlier elementary grades. Kids who had 15 minutes of structured practice a week in 3rd and 4th grade scored an average of 18 percentile points higher on the writing portion of the 7th grade test than kids who got less than 5 minutes a week. It’s not some groundbreaking educational revelation—if you can’t get your ideas down on the screen before time runs out, you can’t show graders what you actually know. It feels obvious, doesn’t it? But almost no one is acting on it.
I texted my friend Lila, who teaches 3rd grade at our feeder elementary school, and asked her how much keyboarding practice she fits in each week. She laughed and said she’s supposed to do 20 minutes, but between catching up on reading intervention groups, fixing broken Chromebook Wi-Fi connections, and covering for a missing paraprofessional most weeks, she gets to it once a month, if that. When I asked my own 4th grade son, he told me his class did one lesson on home row back in September, and hasn’t touched keyboarding since. The old computer lab that used to be reserved for skill practice is now used for extra reading test prep three days a week.
It’s not just a school scheduling problem, either. Lots of families don’t have extra devices for kids to practice on at home. Mia lives with her mom and two younger siblings, and the only internet-connected device they have is her mom’s old iPhone. She never gets to type on a full keyboard outside of school, so she never gets the casual extra practice that kids with their own laptops get. Her final test score came back as below basic, and she had to go to summer school for writing intervention. The problem wasn’t her writing. It was that she never got the 10 minutes a week of practice early on that would have let her show what she could do.
I’ve been testing out small changes in my own classroom this year, and it’s way easier than people make it sound. You don’t need a fancy curriculum or extra prep time. I swapped 10 minutes of the daily morning warm-up worksheet that most kids half-finish anyway for 10 minutes of self-guided typing practice on Typing.com, which is completely free. I do it twice a week. It requires almost nothing from me—kids log in, work through the lessons or competitive speed games, and the program tracks their progress automatically. After three months, even my slowest peckers have gained 10 to 15 words per minute, with no drop in our other core work. It’s just shifting time that’s already set aside, not adding something new to an overflowing plate.
For parents, it’s just as low effort. You don’t need to buy an expensive typing program or turn it into a nightly homework chore. If you already have 10 minutes of unstructured screen time built into your day—waiting for dinner to cook, killing time before soccer practice, the gap between finishing homework and bedtime—swap 10 minutes of scrolling or passive watching for 10 minutes of typing practice. My son used to scroll TikTok for 15 minutes while I make dinner; now he does 10 minutes of typing games (he’s obsessed with beating his own high score for words per minute) then gets 5 minutes of TikTok. He doesn’t complain, and he’s already faster than I am at this point. If your kid likes writing fanfiction or chatting with friends online, encourage them to do that on a full keyboard instead of just a phone screen. That’s practice, too.
The big hold-up isn’t that it’s hard, or that it costs too much. It’s that keyboarding gets written off as a secondary skill, not “core” academics. When schools are pressured to boost reading and math test scores, the first things cut are the untested skills: keyboarding, art, recess, free reading. The irony is that cutting keyboarding ends up hurting the test scores everyone is working so hard to improve. I had a parent-teacher conference last month where a mom asked me why her son’s state writing score was so much lower than his in-class work. I asked her how much he typed at home, and she said he writes 1000 words of fanfiction a week on his laptop. His typing speed is 60 words per minute, and his in-class ability matched what he knew how to do. The pattern is impossible to miss once you start looking for it.
I’m working with our elementary school’s leadership team to roll out the 10-minute twice-weekly routine to all 3rd and 4th grade classes next year. Some teachers are already on board, excited to get rid of one more pointless worksheet. Others say they just don’t have room in their already packed schedules. I get it—everyone is stretched thinner than they should be these days. But I can’t stop thinking about Mia, rubbing her wrist and staring at that clock last spring, all the ideas in her head that never made it to the screen because she didn’t have the practice to get them down fast enough. It’s such a small thing, 10 minutes a week. It’s such a preventable mistake. We’ll see how it goes. Some kids will get the practice this year, some won’t. All I can do is keep pointing out the obvious, and hope eventually more people start acting on it.
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