Testing the Spelling Abilities of Iowa School Children by the Buckingham Spelling Tests

Abstract

The following study concerns the spelling abilities of 8,624 Iowa school children in io cities, approximately 1,500 children in each grade from the third to the eighth inclusive. The cities are Boone, Centerville, Algona, Grinnell, Ames, Creston, Ft. Dodge, Dubuque, Ottumwa, and Sioux City. In all, 1,503 third-grade children were tested; I,599 children in the fourth grade; 1,441 in the fifth grade; 1,525 in the sixth grade; 1,361 in the seventh grade, and 1,195 in the eighth grade. The tests were given in order to determine whether or not Iowa children are as proficient in spelling as children in other states. For this purpose modified forms of Buckingham's tests in spelling were used. Nature of the tests.-There were three tests in the series. Test No. I was composed of 50 words which most children in the third and fourth grades, according to Buckingham, should be able to spell correctly. Test No. II was composed of 50o words which most children in the fifth and sixth grades should be able to spell correctly. Test No. III was composed of 50o words which most children in the seventh and eighth grades should be able to spell correctly. The reader will remember that Buckingham has given us lists of words together with the average number of times each word was spelled correctly by children in a given grade throughout the United States. In this way the average difficulty of a particular word for a particular grade was determined. For example, Buckingham found that the word doctor is on the average spelled correctly by 55 out of every ioo children in the third grade, and by 75 out of every ioo children in the fourth grade. If enough words are taken and their difficulty is determined for each grade, we have what may be called a standard spelling test. That is, we know that on the average a certain percentage of the children in a given grade 556