The Strategic Spelling Skills of Students with Learning Disabilities: The Results of Two Studies

Journal of Instructional Psychology, March, 2000 by Craig Darch, Soobang Kim, Susan Johnson, Hollis James

Laidlaw Spelling Program: An Activity-Based Approach. The alternative instructional approach was based on activities taken from Laidlaw Spelling Program (1990), a popular commercial spelling program used in many classrooms. Students in this treatment group received instruction on the same three word types that were taught in the Spelling Mastery program. However, the teaching procedures for this group differed from the procedures in the Spelling Mastery group. This program contained 3 primary spelling activities. The first feature was that practice words were organized around word pairs (e.g., make, making) with several word types presented at the same time. Students were instructed to look carefully at the various word endings. Next the students were asked to write each word with the ending (e.g., making) and without the ending (e.g., make). Next, the students used the spelling words to complete a story that was presented by filling in blanks with the correct spelling word. Finally, the students were asked to complete a dictionary and sentence writing activities for selected spelling words. All spelling lessons, regardless of the word type introduced were organized around these general spelling activities. Dependent Measures

Probes. Ten item probe spelling tests were administered to students in each of the instructional groups after they had been taught for four consecutive days for each of the three word types evaluated in this study. Probe 1, administered on day 5 of the study, contained 10 phonetically regular words that the students were taught in the four day lesson sequence. Probe 2 focused on words that were taught using a morphographic analysis, while probe 3 contained only words that ended in "e" and contained a long vowel sound (e.g., skate). Probe 2 was administered on day 10 of the experiment and probe 3 was administered on day 15. All probes were administered by the senior author and took approximately 20 minutes to complete. Probes were administered in groups for students in each instructional condition.

Post Test. A 30-item post test was administered the day following the completion of all other experimental activities. This test contained 10 words for each of the three word types taught in this study. No help was provided to any student during post testing. If a student asked for help with spelling a word, the experimenter told the student to just do the best they could. Post testing was completed in groups as lasted approximately 45-50 minutes. Results and Discussion

Table 3 provides the means, standard deviations, and percent correct for the students in each of the two treatment groups, the rule-based approach (Spelling Mastery) and the traditional approach (Laidlaw Spelling Program). As can be seen from Table 4, there are differences favoring the Spelling Mastery group on each of the three probe measures and the post test. While the range of percentage correct for the Reading Mastery group was 87% correct on Probe 1 (phonetically regular words) to 70% correct on Probe 3 (spelling rule words), the scores for students in the Laidlaw Spelling programs were significantly lower on each of the three measures (p [is less than] .01). For example on Probe 1, these students scored 63% correct, and on Probe 3, they scored only 42% correct. Even though the students scored lower on the Post test measure (73% correct) than they did on Probe 1 and Probe 2, they significantly performed higher than the students who were taught with the Laidlaw Program (53% correct).