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What if there was an inexpensive assessment that could be administered to an entire class in less than thirty minutes, scored in about sixty minutes, have high predictive validity, and provide relevant information for reading and writing instruction (Invernizzi, Landrum, Howell, & Warley, 2005)? This description may sound like an educational infomercial, but I am actually describing qualitative spelling inventories.
What is a qualitative spelling inventory?
A qualitative spelling inventory is a series of word lists (Templeton & Morris, 1999) based on grade level (Schlagel, 1989) or one list that features several developmental levels (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston, 1996; Ganske, 2000). In administering the inventory, a teacher says the word on the list, gives a sentence with the word in it, and repeats the word. The students attempt to correctly spell each word on the list. I was recently invited to administer the Words Their Way Upper-Level spelling inventory (Bear et al., 1996) to a class of eighth grade students in a rural North Carolina middle school. It took about twenty-five minutes to use this inventory with twenty-nine students. I like to administer the inventory at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year to measure student progress. The same list of words is used each time so you can compare the same words. It is important to note that students are not given the list of words before taking the assessment (Bear et al, 1996).
Scoring the inventory
Unlike traditional spelling tests, where the only data yielded is whether a student spelled the word correctly or incorrectly, qualitative spelling inventories also score knowledge of particular features of words (Bear et al., 1996). Each word is scored and several categories of spelling features are checked as well. For example, disloyal gives information on student mastery of vowels (oy), unaccented final syllables (al), and affixes (dis). A student could spell the word disloyel which would be incorrect, but instead of only dismissing this spelling as wrong, we can also tease out the correct use of ambiguous vowels and prefixes. This quality of the inventory was helpful to me when I shared it with parents in my previous work as a third grade classroom teacher. I was able to place a positive spin on...