I attended curriculum night at my son’s elementary school last week and was surprised and alarmed to hear his teacher’s answer to a parent’s question about spelling tests.

Parent: “What day will the spelling tests be?”

Teacher: “We won’t be doing spelling tests. Rockwood (School District) has mandated that spelling tests be eliminated by next year, and many teachers are opting to phase them out this year.”

What!!!??

The teacher went on to explain that:

• Spelling will be graded and assessed as part of the students’ everyday work.
• Many students simply memorize the words for the spelling test, but continue to spell the very same words incorrectly on everyday written work.
• Rockwood has research to indicate that weekly spelling tests do not improve students’ spelling mastery skills (or something to that effect).

As I looked around the room, these are the reactions I interpreted from the looks on the faces of other parents:

• Many were surprised, like me, and hadn’t heard this information.
• Many were displeased, like me.
• Some were nodding in agreement.
• Some smirked. I’m not sure whether they were smirking because they were thinking, “This is so typical” or “I knew it” or “This is yet another example of the dumbing down of America” or something else. I have yet to master mind-reading, I guess.

When I got home, I fired off an email to the Associate Superintendent for School Leadership and Curriculum for the Rockwood School District, Dr. Scott Spurgeon, inquiring about the mandated elimination of spelling tests. Within 24 hours, I received an informative email from Kathy Ryan,  Curriculum Coordinator, Language Arts K-12. (Note: this is one of the many things I love about our school district — administrators are not only accessible, but they respond quickly to parent inquiries.)

Ms. Ryan shared the following information with me:

1. The Rockwood Curriculum states that assessment of spelling should take place primarily through each student’s writing.
2. Weekly tests are not required.
3. In order to be consistent in all buildings and for all children, the district has determined that spelling pre- and post-tests will be discontinued during the 2010-2011 school year.
4. Research on writing asserts that students need more time for authentic writing tasks, and spelling pre- and post-tests take nearly an hour of instructional time each week.
5. Dozens of elementary teachers field-tested this approach during the last school year and found that spelling ability did not diminish, but student willingness to check for spelling errors in all tasks increased.
6. Beginning in the 2010-2011 school year, teachers will give a spelling inventory test at the beginning and end of each year to identify strengths and weaknesses so instruction can be designed to meet student needs.

“We believe that this change in spelling assessment practices will allow students more time to study words and more time to develop spelling through writing,” Ms. Ryan wrote.

Ms. Ryan also shared with me some of the research upon which this decision was based. I won’t quote all of it now, but I will say it looks solid. If you would like to see this document, email me and I’ll forward you a copy.

HOWEVER, I’m still bothered by the idea of no spelling tests. Spelling tests have worked for decades. They’re part of the BASICS! I think the new approach of assessing spelling in daily writing is a great idea. In a school district with high standards like Rockwood, a student should not be able to get an A on his/her weekly spelling tests, only to then misspell the same words in daily writing assignments. But I don’t think the time required for weekly spelling tests is wasted time. According to the “spelling letter” that was shared with parents, weekly spelling pre- and post-tests take about 40-50 minutes and that time can be put to better use for writing instruction and practice. Seriously? I’ll bet with a little effort, we could identify 40-50 minutes in the elementary school’s weekly schedule that could be used for those spelling tests without taking away from writing instruction or practice — i.e. extra recesses, assemblies to motivate for fund-raisers, “Pickle-puppet” sessions that cover topics probably best addressed at home.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my school district and I’m very impressed with the assessments on standardized tests and the ACT and SAT. I’m a huge fan of my son’s elementary school and believe the teachers and the principal there are doing an amazing job educating our students. Plus, I’m sure the district had multiple “committee/parent” meetings before making this decision, and I somehow missed the process while staying busy in my duties as a mom, part-time writer, etc. But I am alarmed by the trend away from some of the more basic learning techniques that have worked for so long. Don’t even get me started on the way my son is taught to add, subtract, multiply and do long division. That’s a whole other post.

At the very minimum, a weekly spelling test requires these elementary students to practice the skill of studying and memorization. I know that memorization isn’t the best learning technique or skill in most cases or in most subjects. I also acknowledge that learning spelling patterns and principles is vitally important and probably more effective in creating life-long good spellers and solid writers. However, memorization IS a skill and learning technique that we all use everyday. And studying for a weekly test IS a valuable practice. I vote that we bring back weekly spelling tests, and when I mentioned this last week on Facebook, it seems there were lots of other parents who felt the same way. What are your thoughts on the topic?

Popularity: 1% [?]

Welcome back!

Posts like this

• Political Correctness Going Mad Yet Again
• Reminder – Children See, Children Do
• Interactive DVD Uses Fairytales to Teach Reading Skills