CIL 621

Assessment Experience #5
Spelling
Melissa is a young, 6th grade girl, who is 12 years old. She lives at home with her mother
and two younger siblings. Her household is monolingual. She attends a public school and is
currently in a self-contained, SLD (specific learning disability) classroom. She is in a classroom
with 16 students, one teacher and one teacher assistant. Melissa has been eligible for special
education services since 2011. She has been in a resource room, classroom setting until the
current 2015-2016 school year; the team decided with parent agreement to move Melissa to a
more restricted environment to help support her educational needs last 2014-2015 school year.
Melissa is currently reading at 2.1 (second grade and 1 month) grade level.
The purpose of a spelling assessment is to assess students phonemic awareness and
orthographic awareness. When an educator examines a students spelling, they are analyzing the
students level of phonemic awareness based on how the student spelled a word. The variety of
levels of phonemic awareness depends on the students knowledge of letter-sound correlation
and spelling patterns.
From the previous assessment, the Attitude/Survey Interest Inventory, Melissas score for
recreational reading is at the 83%ile and for academic reading she is at the 99%ile in 6th grade.
When giving the concepts of print Melissa can differentiate between letters and words, but
struggled with punctuation (i.e. quotation marks and comma). Melissa can correctly identify and
write the letters of the alphabet, along with segmenting 20/22 words.
When giving the Morris Spelling assessment, Melissa correctly spelled 6/10 firstgrade words. She was able to correctly spell the words: pet, wish, best, hide, and plane, in which

she scored full points for (4). Melissa struggled with words such as rock (rark), bump
(pumb), chin (grve), and drive (chuer). Melissa scored 2 points for the work rock because
she correctly had the beginning sound r and the ending sound k. Melissa score 0 points for
the other misspelled words. Melissas total of qualitative points of 26 out of 40.
In conclusion to this assessment, I was able to observe Melissas phonemic awareness
and orthographic awareness by analyzing her spelling assessment. Melissa started strong in the
beginning of the assessment spelling the first five words correctly. As the assessment continued,
Mellissa began to struggle. I then gave her the alternate form for the first-grade list to see if
there is a difference between the two assessments. Melissa correctly spelled 4 out 10 words
receiving a qualitative value of 32 out 40. Melissa was able to spell boundary consonants and
the vowel of most of the words, which gave her a higher score. According to Invernizzi et al.
(1994 p. 162) Melissa is in the pattern tier of word development. She is able to demonstrate her
knowledge of consonants and most vowel patterns.
Administering this assessment was easy to follow and execute. The examples given help
administer and score the assessment. However, not all students spell the same, so not all of the
examples necessary helped score Melissas spelling and as an educator; I had to make my best
judgment. The Invernizzi et al. (1994) article that went along with this assessment helped me
understand what I am in search of when analyzing her spelling. Now, that I have an
understanding of spelling patterns, I am able to meet the needs of Melissa to incorporate the
sound principle and vowel patterns in the written language.