Do typing skills matter? Investigating university students’ typing speed and performance in online exams

ABSTRACT

In response to COVID-19, universities worldwide experienced drastic and sudden changes including the need to shift to online teaching and assessment. Following previous research suggesting that individual differences in typing skills could influence text quantity and quality, we investigated whether university students’ typing speed is related to their performance in an online written exam, considering that low typing skills could potentially be disadvantageous. To this end, first-year university students participated in a copy-typing task immediately after completing a graded online exam. Results show a trend toward a triangular relationship between typing speed, text length and exam performance. Despite coefficients being small, this approach allows unique insights into externally valid data of university students’ typed free text production in an authentic online exam situation. Our findings emphasize the need for more research into this highly variable skill in order to understand and minimize unwanted interindividual differences that could possibly influence exam outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Typing skills
• academic performance
• assessment
• online exams
• COVID-19
• university students

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the teams of the Department of General Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience and of the Department of Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, which were involved in realizing the online exam, as well as the students who agreed to participate in this study after their exam.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that these results are based on the standard mediation analysis method. Bootstrapping is an additional statistical method commonly conducted within mediation analyses (see, e.g., Hayes 2009; Shrout and Bolger 2002). It might be of further interest to the reader that bootstrapping does not change the results in the present data (here, tested with a replication rate of 10,000).