Measuring and Assessing Typing Skills in Writing Research
- authored by
- Luuk Van Waes, Mariëlle Leijten, Jens Roeser, Thierry Olive, Joachim Grabowski
- Abstract
In keyboard writing, typing skills are considered an important prerequisite of proficient text production. We describe the design, implementation, and application of a standardized copy-typing task in order to measure and assess individual typing fluency. A test-retest analysis indicates the instrument’s reliability. While the task has been developed across eleven different languages and the related keyboard layouts, we here refer to a corpus of Dutch copy tasks (N = 1682). Analyses show that copying speed non-linearly varies with age. Bayesian analyses reveal differences in the typing performance and the underlying distributions of inter-key intervals between the different task components (e.g., lexical vs. non-lexical materials; high-frequent vs. lowfrequent bigrams). Based on these findings it is strongly recommended to include copy-task measures in the analysis of keystroke logging data in writing studies. This supports a better comparability and interpretability of keystroke data from more complex or communicatively-embedded writing tasks across individuals. Further potential applications of the copy task for writing research are explained and discussed.
- Organisation(s)
-
Institute of Psychology
- External Organisation(s)
-
University of Antwerp (UAntwerpen)
Nottingham Trent University
Universite de Poitiers
- Type
- Article
- Journal
- Journal of Writing Research
- Volume
- 13
- Pages
- 107-153
- No. of pages
- 47
- ISSN
- 2030-1006
- Publication date
- 2021
- Publication status
- Published
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education, Language and Linguistics, Linguistics and Language, Literature and Literary Theory
- Electronic version(s)
-
https://doi.org/10.17239/JOWR-2021.13.01.04 (Access:
Open)