What is the role of spelling in standards and testing?
If a state or school district has standards for writing, spelling and other conventions will almost always be part of them. Most frequently, there are multiple standards for writing that include an expectation that as students go through elementary school, their spelling will be increasingly readable and then increasingly correct. It’s often included as part of a “conventions” standard, sometimes under the framework of the six traits of good writing (Culham, 2003). Spelling used to be assessed by standardized tests, typically by asking the student to pick the one misspelled or correctly spelled word out of a group of four and bubble in the answer. Today, it’s most common for spelling to be part of an assessment that involves writing to a prompt, so that spelling is considered in the context of the student’s writing. This is, I believe, a positive change in the direction of more authenticity and relevance. Students may or may not be allowed to use dictionaries and other references when
