When Dr. Julie Masterson, associate provost and dean of the Graduate College at Missouri State University, noticed her then second-grade son was having difficulty learning to spell some 20 years ago, she approached his teacher and inquired about ways to help him improve his skills. His teacher replied with a simple “Oh that’s normal. He’ll learn.”
As a speech-language pathologist, Masterson was fascinated that he was a very strong reader despite his poor spelling skills.
Why was this? This question motivated Masterson for the next 20 years as she researched literacy development in young children. Her findings suggested that the way in which we teach our children to spell may be wrong.
Collecting data on spelling
She and her collaborators (including many MSU students) developed software to analyze spellings and indicate goals and methods for treatment as well as a metric to monitor student progress. The team conducted treatment studies and found that the children’s spelling did get better, but their reading improved to an even greater extent. Improvement in reading is particularly important in an era of school accountability.
With this metric, they’ve been able to do several group comparisons on children from various backgrounds, including kids of aboriginal descent in Australia and those who are African American versus not African American. They also tested children who were living with certain conditions like speech disorders or deafness.
People would have assumed that if you were deaf for a number of years, your spelling errors would be primarily due to a lack of awareness of sounds because you weren’t hearing them,” said Masterson. “Yes, some of them were, but a lot of them were just like errors in people who are hearing yet have failed to learn the necessary spelling features. The good news is that our tailored treatment can be used to help them learn what they need to learn.”
Read the full story on Mind’s Eye.
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