Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy When should teachers correct written work?

I attended the open house at the school of my daughter, who is in 2nd grade. Booklets that students wrote about themselves were on the wall, and they contained lots of spelling mistakes. I think even in 2nd grade, errors in writing should be corrected (especially when it will be displayed), not because one expects perfection from 7-year-olds but because children learn from fixing their mistakes. I suppose this makes me a critic of "invented spelling". Is there research to support my skepticism? When my daughter writes stories at home she often asks me how to spell words. She wants to get things right.

My daughter's teacher is unlikely to start correcting the work of her "authors", as she referred to them at open house. Any suggestions on how to correct the work our daughter brings home without demoralizing her?

This makes me crazy. I don't know of any research, though. DD is now in 4th and I see more correction, but not as much as I would like.

I don't know that I would correct the work your daughter brings home after it is graded. Do you have an opportunity to check homework? I always have DD fix spelling and punctuation mistakes there.

Maybe tell her that once or twice a week you and she are going to pick some of her writing for publication. Then have her make a clean copy with whatever corrections she needs to do and put the work in a place of honor.

Frankly, this is what the teacher should be doing for work she intends to "publish" on the classroom wall.

this drives me nuts, too. DD is just 5, but we literally had a spelling test this morning - i didn't care if she got the words right the first time (which she did) but we went through and talked about each word and why it was correct. the entire point is to learn how spelling works - so when she does get a word wrong, she'll treat it the exact same way.

way back when i was first looking at schools, i literally decided against the neighbourhood one for this exact reason: on registration day, i saw Grade 6 work posted on the walls that was riddled with both factual and spelling errors - and that's just not "good copy" to me. if it's "finished" - it should be correct. i really hope someone does find some research on this, so that everyone who needs it can bring it in as ammunition. sigh.

Maybe the teachers are scared they'll do a Dan Quayle.

There's research that supports invented spelling as a good tool to support typical learners. I think this another but more subtle gifted versus mainstream issue. For typical learners with layers of slowly evolved skills accumulated through repeated practice this makes sense as the process used to discover phonemic rules involves some early mistakes to build to future exceptions.

The process is lock in the basic concept then add the exceptions. Just like kids who add -ed to every past tense word or -s for every plural as a natural phase.

Now if my DS who pattern matches and makes confident guesses at words has no immediate correction, he is going to near-permanently remember his misspelling. And those are hard to unstick.

I tend to agree that those uncorrected items there on the wall are literally billboards advertising the work of a bad teacher.

Using the original as a draft and then working through the corrections for the 'production' copy to be displayed on the wall would bea far better approach for everyone IMO

Underlining is what I was taught. We were taught to teach our students to try the word and underline it if they weren't sure if about the spelling. But to keep going with the draft. On the second draft the child takes the time to correct spelling and add the word(s) to the his/her personal word list.

The teacher does the same thing when checking work, underlines misspelled words. Depending on situation sometimes providing the correct spelling, sometimes helping the child to look it up.

I could be wrong, but I feel like, for the most part, when things were hung in the school hallway, the kids did a first draft that the teacher corrected, then they did a final draft that went up in the hallway... I'm sure it just depends on the school and teacher.

The study cited by Moomin looks at college students at the University of Minnesota studying German, and its conclusions may not apply to elementary school children in the U.S. learning their native language.