Kessler, Brett, Tatiana Cury Pollo, Rebecca Treiman, Brian Byrne & Richard K. Olson. 2010, July. Predicting spelling accuracy to Grade 2 by computer analysis of erroneous spellings in kindergarten. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR), Berlin, Germany. Abstract retrieved from http://spell.psychology.wustl.edu/SSSR2010
Predicting children’s later success in spelling from earlier accuracy rates is difficult when children still misspell everything. Measures of partial accuracy are required, the gold standard being Liberman et al.’s 5-point scale. To improve speed, accuracy, and flexibility, we developed a Web service, Ponto, to automatically score partial accuracy and help test which measures work best.
Kindergartners (mean 6 years, 2 months) from Australia and the U.S. spelled 10 words to dictation. The productions of the 55 who spelled all words wrong were further analyzed. Responses were scored with a version of the Liberman measure and with several measures from Ponto. The latter differed in whether they aligned response letters to standard spellings (tree) or to pronunciations (/tri/), and in whether they deducted for sequencing errors (rtee) or for extraneous letters (treeabc). These measures were used to predict the number of words correctly spelled in WRAT subtests at Grades 1 and 2.
All measures correlated significantly with Grade 1 accuracy. The strongest correlation (.43) was with the Ponto measure based on sound-letter plausibility, ignoring extraneous letters; sequencing was irrelevant. That measure accounted for 21% of variance in a hierarchical regression. It was the only measure still correlated (.27) with accuracy at Grade 2.
The fact that Ponto can be readily configured to automatically generate different scorings facilitates exploration of leading indicators of spelling achievement. For the present dataset, it already outperforms standard manual methods.
Kessler, B., Pollo, T. C., Treiman, R., Byrne, B., & Olson, R. K. (2010, July). Predicting spelling accuracy to Grade 2 by computer analysis of erroneous spellings in kindergarten. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Berlin, Germany. Abstract retrieved from http://spell.psychology.wustl.edu/SSSR2010
Last change 2010-11-21T12:42:41-0600