Skillbuilding Mastery is an advanced keyboarding course designed to increase typing speed and accuracy to employable levels of 50+ wpm.This ourse has been field tested and adopted by the U.S. Government, Dept. of Labor, National Office of the Job Corps. It is a uggested text in its list of courses in the Clerical curriculum. It is appropriate for High School, and adult-College-University.

This is a self-paced course and students are encouraged to mt the speed and accuracy goals in each exercise before continuing on to the next one. Students will have 15-second, 30-second, and 1-5 minute timings. All of the 1-5 minute timings are taken from the best Human Relations books. While taking timings students learn how to handle irate customers, read tips on being an effective speaker, learn how to get people to like you, learn how to handle mistakes, how to be successful, the need to be understanding and sensitive to other’s feelings and needs, etc. There are 517 timed exercises that are automatically scored, and those that meet the accuracy rate are recorded to the Progress Report. There are five proofreading exercises to teach proofreading skills. All the alphabetic, punctuation, numeric, and symbol keys are covered with timings.

Prerequisite? Students keying approximately 32-35 wpm by touch, without looking at the keys, are prepared to take this course. Students keying in less than that would do better to use the Keyboard Short Course first to quickly bring their speed/accuracy to a level that would ensure success in this course. With the short course, set a goal of 40 wpm for each exercise and complete at least sixteen lessons. If you do that, you will be prepared to do well in Skillbuilding Mastery.

When you take the tour of Skillbuilding Mastery, you can take the Course Entry timing to establish your present speed and accuracy. When you take the course and practice the exercises, set your goal so it is challenging. If you are already typing 50 wpm, increase the grading scale in the Setup to 60 wpm and have 60 wpm as your goal for each exercise in each lesson. When you finish the course, you may take the Course Exit timing. Your Course Entry score, Course Exit score, and your Improvement will appear on the Grade Report.

Progress and Grade reports are calculated automatically. Progress Reports are viewed on the screen and can be printed. The Brief Progress Report shows the best score for each exercise that meets the accuracy standard, and the lesson average for each completed lesson. If printed Grade Reports are desired for a classroom situation, the Current Grade Report option averages completed lessons and compares it to the grading scale entered in the Setup. It is available at any time throughout the course to help students evaluate their progress toward their goal. This may also be used as a mid-term grade, or as an objective evaluation for a student-parent-teacher conference. The Final Grade Report contains the final grade to be recorded for the course. If a student wishes to improve the final grade, he/she consults the Progress Report to see which exercises need improvement and more practice. A new Final Grade Report may be instantly obtained that includes the improved scores.

Skillbuilding Mastery is a course that has many special features designed for teaching and learning. Very briefly, these course features are:

• Internet Based Software
• NO PAPERS TO GRADE
• Self-Paced
• Individualized
• Competency Based
• Instant Feedback
• Progress Reports
• Grade Reports
• Motivating
• Practice and Raise Previous Scores

How much time does the course take? This will always vary depending upon the person doing the practice. The number of lessons assigned can also influence the amount of time taken to complete the course. This course is better utilized in a quarter or semester format, from 12-15 weeks. Generally speaking, the more time you have to practice, the higher the goal can be. Students need time to practice to achieve higher goals. If the time is shortened, the wpm goal should be lowered too.

Is there any Formatting (letters, memos, tables, reports, etc)? Formatting is not included in any of our keyboarding texts (we include a free formatting book separately to all customers--Nuts 'n' Bolts Formatting). For many years formatting was only taught in typing classes. With computers came sophisticated word processing programs. Any word processing text will have more complete formatting information and exercises than any typing book. The trend for years has been to teach keyboarding only and then place skilled students in any word processing class for formatting. They can then learn formatting on a word processing program that can be purchased commercially, used at home, and used on the job. The keyboarding courses from Ellsworth Publishing Company will give your students the skill to do well in any word processing class. In addition, some students may need to develop or improve typing skills for computer or writing classes and do not need or want to pay for extensive formatting instruction.

Some teachers like to use the timed exercises to sustain students’ skills. In a word processing class, for example, the first 15 minutes could be used to practice the lessons again to raise the timing scores to new higher levels. The rest of the class could be devoted to word processing. You could have them practice timings throughout the semester at the beginning of class. This would help students retain the higher keyboarding speeds they developed in the beginning of the course.