A Textbook Approach to Spelling vs. A Teacher Directed Approach

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of two teaching approaches in spelling. The first teaching method was guided by the spelling textbook and the second was a teacher directed approach. In this study, the students were divided into two equal ability groups and were instructed using the assigned teaching approach. The 26 subjects used in this study were heterogeneously grouped and attended an urban school in the city of Rochester. The study began with the administration of a seventy five word pretest to determine the group compositions and the forty most frequently misspelled words. After calculating the results of the teacher made instrument, the subjects were divided into two equal ability groups. Each group received twelve weeks of instruction based on the assigned teaching modality. Weekly tests scores, pre and posttest scores, and the sum of the weekly tests scores were all studied to determine which teaching method produce significant performance results. The results were determined with the use of a two-tailed 1 test. The statistical results indicated that there was a significant difference between the teacher directed approach and the textbook approach when comparing the sum of the weekly test scores. The results also indicated that no significant difference existed between the two teaching method when long tern1 retention was compared. Therefore, it was concluded that the teacher directed approach did produce better results than that of a textbook.