THE EFFECTIVENESS OF FOUR SELF‐CORRECTED SPELLING TEST METHODS

ABSTRACT

Spelling achievement of fourth graders was assessed using four self‐corrected test methods. Two‐hundred nine children in two schools were randomly assigned to one of four treatments. Methods included visual and listwise, visual and wordwise, oral and listwise, and oral and wordwise.

A 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design was implemented. Factors included (a) type of feedback (wordwise versus listwise), (b) presentation mode (oral versus visual), and (c) student's gender. Analyses of covariance were conducted, with the pretest as a covariate. Wordwise feedback produced significantly higher gains than listwise. There were no significant differences in gains between visual and oral modes, or among presentation mode, gender, and ability.

Students should use the self‐corrected test as a method of spelling study, and use wordwise, feedback during self‐correction.     

The Beginnings of Expertise for Ballads

To study the beginning stages of expertise, 14 students, who were inexperienced with ballads, heard and recalled a series of 5 ballads over the course of 5 weeks. Compared with their first recall of the first ballad, their first recall of the fifth ballad had one and a half times as many words, two times as many rhyming words, and three times as much line structure evident in the written recall protocols. Compared with novices, the 14 beginning experts more often filled in blank spaces in novel ballads with words of the correct number of syllables and more often chose the original stanza of a novel ballad that was paired with a changed version of the stanza. The beginning experts were also able to compose, in 20 min, ballads about two thirds as long as the 10-stanza ballads they learned. Thirty characteristics were identified in the set of the five learned ballads. The ballads composed by the beginning experts used over half of these. The beginning experts also explicitly stated about one quarter of these 30 characteristics, but there was no statistical relationship between the characteristics used and the characteristics stated. Memory expertise is viewed as a pervasive aspect of cognition in which people make use of a variety of regularities in the material to be learned.     

Ouch Ouch Stop It

There is more that is the same than is different between many schools of counselling and psychotherapy. Building on this assumption, the author rails against what she sees as absurd in-fighting within the field. She further accounts for some failures of good fellowship within the counselling movement by alleging a possible developmental characteristic shared by many counsellors. The piece ends with a rallying cry to a unity which she trusts that in many practitioners' experience was never missing.