Computers and Composition

The predictive relationship between handwriting automaticity and children's writing performance is well documented. However, less is known about the relationship between keyboarding automaticity and children's keyboard-based writing performance. In this exploratory study, we examined the unique contributions of automaticity in both writing modalities in predicting Grade 2 students (N = 49) paper-based and keyboard-based writing performance (i.e., compositional quality and fluency) after controlling for students’ literacy skills (i.e., spelling, word reading, and reading comprehension), attitudes toward writing, gender, and nesting due to classroom. Multilevel modelling results showed that automaticity predicted students’ paper-based compositional quality and keyboard-based compositional quality and fluency. Findings further suggested that the relationship between automaticity and writing performance was stronger in keyboard-based text composing than in paper-based text composing. These results reinforce the role of automaticity of transcription skills in predicating the writing performance of beginning writers across modalities and stress the significance of explicit pedagogy and frequent instances of practice to promote the mastery of transcription skills across modalities in the early years of schooling.

In this article, we describe the philosophy, objectives, and development of Multilingual User-Experience (Multilingual UX), a community-driven initiative for supporting technology innovation with marginalized communities. We highlight how community-based mentorship can guide innovative technology design through an intersectional technofeminist perspective. We begin with a discussion of the impetus for building this initiative before discussing how we are collaboratively designing a research center to facilitate technology design with and for marginalized communities. We both theorize and enact the intersectional technofeminist principles of our work by telling the story of our project with our collaborators and community partners, in the form of vignettes from a symposium. We conclude by looking ahead to our next steps and by offering strategies for intersectional technofeminist community building and technology innovation, in the hope that our experiences can be further developed and localized to support similar initiatives that highlight the value of feminist collaboration in technology design.