Teaching digital skills: the evidence map

This pillar exists because of a vacuum: digital skills are the most-used, least-taught competencies in education. The reason is a myth with its own page — the assumption that exposure teaches, which the international assessments demolish — and the consequence is that most guidance on teaching these skills is vendor marketing or folklore. Here we hold the domain to the same standard as the science pillar: graded evidence, honest THIN labels where the literature hasn't caught up to the classroom, and practical sections a teacher can use Tuesday.

The fluency layer (where automaticity is the goal)

The keyboard-and-files layer gates everything above it — every skill left unautomatized here taxes working memory during everything else forever (the cognitive-load argument).

• Typing benchmarks by age — realistic targets, the accuracy-first case, and why most benchmark tables online are folklore (our flagship THIN-grade page).
• Hunt-and-peck fossilization — why habits set early, what the big keystroke datasets show, and the retraining dip that sinks remedial programs.
• Files and folders: the mental model that stopped arriving from home (articles coming: the search-vs-folders generation, file naming, find-anything search).

The applications layer (where genre conventions are the content)

Email, documents, spreadsheets, slides, video: each is a genre with conventions worth teaching explicitly — subjects that say the thing, structure in documents, less-words in slides, formulas over answers. The durable teaching target is the convention layer that survives every vendor redesign (why we simulate) — spreadsheet thinking especially, as the most underrated numeracy vehicle in the primary curriculum (article coming).

The judgment layer (where the strongest evidence lives)

The best-researched corner of the whole domain, thanks to the Stanford program:

• Lateral reading and SIFT — the measured failure, the fact-checkers' habit, the interventions that work.
• Sponsored results and lookalike URLs — the most-failed assessment item and the most drillable fix.
• The misinformation set continues in the science pillar's myth pages and the safety pillar (screenshots, stale news, machine text).

The computing layer

• Computational thinking — what it is, the constructs ladder, blocks-to-text, and the transfer claim handled honestly (PROMISING, not the sales pitch).
• Coming: the loops-conditionals-functions ladder in depth, debugging as pedagogy, the command line for children (why it's not obsolete), and AI literacy for primary ages — including the uncomfortable machine-text detection limits.

How to read this pillar

Same contract as everywhere in the library: evidence grades (criteria), "what the evidence doesn't say" sections, and a bias we'll name upfront — this pillar is where our commercial interest is strongest, so position notes appear wherever we describe something we build, and the THIN grade gets used without embarrassment: the honest state of digital-skills pedagogy research is thinner than the domain deserves, and pretending otherwise is how folklore benchmarks and vendor claims fill the gap.

© Glu IO Pty. Ltd. — Wiz Kids (wiz.kids). Link freely; republication requires permission — see terms. Found an error in our reading of the research? We correct fast: tell any teacher piloting Wiz Kids.