Relationship of employment status and sex to self-reported job- seeking behavior of selected black secondary graduates

This study was undertaken to determine the effects of each of the production typewriting factors of keystroking, planning, and error correction on proficiency at typing business letters at two levels of instruction, at three levels of difficulty, and under three conditions. The conditions were designed to isolate the effect of each of the three factors on proficiency in typing business letters. A secondary purpose was to estimate the relationship between straight copy and letters, between letter conditions, and between speed and accuracy for straight copy and letters.

The study involved 107 beginning typewriting students and 84 advanced typewriting students who were enrolled in six suburban high schools in Virginia.

The same straight-copy timed writings and business letters were used in both the beginning and the advanced typewriting classes. The two 3- minute timed writings consisted of paragraph materials that had a stroke intensity of 6.0. The nine business letters also had a stroke intensity of 6.0 and consisted of three 150-word letters at low, medium, and high difficulty levels.

The primary data analysis of mean performance scores for speed and accuracy on letters was carried out via repeated measures ANOVAS. The Pearson product-moment correlation was used to compute the relationship between variables.

Some of the major findings of the study were as follows:

1. Keystroking accounted for a little less than half of total production time, planning accounted for a third of production time, and error correction accounted for approximately a fifth of production time.

2. Keystroking and error correction were greatest for low difficulty letters; planning was greatest for high difficulty letters.

3. At the advanced instructional level, the percentages of production time used for keystroking and planning increased, while the percentage of production time used for error correction decreased.

4. The correlation between straight copy and letters for speed was moderate to high; the correlation between straight copy and letters for accuracy was low.

5. The correlations between letter conditions were high for speed and moderate for errors.

6. For straight copy, the correlations between speed and accuracy were not significantly different from zero. For letters there was a weak negative relationship between speed and accuracy.