This synthesis examined the effects of spelling interventions on spelling outcomes for students with disabilities in Grades 6 through 12. Thirteen single-case design studies were identified for inclusion in the review. No studies used a treatment/comparison design. The most common types of interventions involved systematic study strategies, such…

Cover-copy-compare is a practical, low-cost, effective strategy for teachers to add to their repertoires of evidence-based practices. This article describes the cover-copy-compare strategy and how it can be applied to teach both self-management and basic academic skills. A variety of ways this strategy can be used across content areas are…

Learning disabled students frequently have difficulty with spelling. A process that develops the student's thinking so that he is able to discover spelling rules for himself encourages him to remember and use them. Rules governing when to double final consonants or drop silent e's illustrate the process. (VW)

The study examined 40 learning disabled fourth graders' spelling performance in response to strategy training and variations in study conditions. Students who were taught the five-step study strategy recalled correct spelling of more words than controls. However, spelling performance of students who received strategy training was not…

Spelling tricks for 35 sight words that can be used by learning disabled or regular classroom students are given. They include replacing silent or confusing letters with pictures to aid visual recall; locating a smaller, more familiar word in the longer word; and rhyming certain letter groups to related words. (VW)

Eight students (aged 9 to 14) with learning disabilities were placed in a variety of spelling programs and followed a variety of study schedules. Results showed that students averaged more words spelled correctly when they used planning and self-recording strategies than when they did not use these student-directed strategies. (JDD)

This article suggests that the use of mnemonic strategies may help learning disabled (LD) students in the area of spelling, which is of particular frustration to most LD students. It has been found that children with learning disabilities do not have a pathological difficulty with long-term memory, but rather a deficiency in the use of…

A study evaluated the effects of attribution training combined with spelling strategy training on spelling performance, strategy transfer, and effort attributions. Subjects, 43 adolescents with learning disabilities in grades 7 and 8, were stratified by grade level and randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: spelling strategy…

This article discusses the importance of attribution and strategy training for understanding motivation in students with learning disabilities, contributions of attributions to the larger motivational schema, and problems associated with measuring this affective variable. (DB)

Strategies to optimize spelling instruction for students with learning disabilities are presented. Teacher-directed techniques involve a test-teach-test sequence, reduced word lists, reinforcement, imitation plus modeling, analogy strategy, and constant time delay. Eight study techniques to help students improve their spelling skills are also…

Among 28 upper elementary learning-disabled students in a summer remedial program, those that were taught spelling with explicit rule-based strategies out-performed students presented with a visual imagery mnemonic on unit tests, a posttest, and a standardized spelling test. Contains 20 references. (SV)

Thirty-four adolescents with learning disabilities received either spelling strategy training, spelling strategy plus attribution training, or a control condition. Significant differences in spelling recall scores favored the strategy training condition. Addition of the attribution training resulted in no observable improvement in spelling…

This review of 38 studies on spelling interventions designed for students with learning disabilities who are poor spellers found that nearly all "systematic" techniques can be effectively employed. Study interventions consisted of four types: instructional procedures (such as imitation modeling and analogy training), computer-assisted instruction,…

Forty learning-disabled fourth graders learned to use a spelling study strategy, studied words under varying conditions, and predicted their scores on a subsequent test. Results indicated that, even without inclusion of specific metacognitive training components, strategy training produced important metacognitive improvement and that metacognitive…

Ten students (ages 11 to 13) with learning disabilities were taught the Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) study approach to learning spelling words. This study strategy was extracted from students who had won spelling bees and comprises five basic components: (1) physiology (students visually picture the word to be learned); (2) strategy…