Disambiguating the benefits of morphology and vocabulary instruction for improving spelling among English-speaking children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation sought to isolate and examine the benefit of morphologically-focused instruction for improving spelling skill among English-speaking, elementary-school aged children. There is a growing body of evidence which suggests that morphological knowledge makes an important contribution to literacy development, and that instruction on morphological structure benefits word reading, reading comprehension, and spelling. However, in previous intervention studies examining the benefits of morphological instruction for literacy outcomes, morphological instruction was confounded by discussion of word meaning, as morphologically complex words are related to other words in the same word family both in their meaning and in their form. Thus, there is uncertainty with respect to the relative benefits of morphological and vocabulary instruction for literacy development. This study addressed the overlap between morphology and vocabulary instruction, by intentionally extricating instruction on morphological structure from instruction on word meaning, and comparing the relative effectiveness for improving children’s spelling of morphologically complex words. Children in Grades 3 and 5 were randomly assigned to one of two intervention groups, and were taught to spell the same set of morphologically-complex words. In one group (the Morphology group), the children were taught about morphological structure, including root words and suffixes, while any discussion of the meanings of the words or word parts was deliberately avoided. In the second group (the Vocabulary group), children were taught the meanings of the complex words, while carefully avoiding any discussion of the root words or suffixes. Chapter one provides a literature review and description of the theoretical basis for the present study. The intervention is described in chapter two, including a description of the participants, and an overview of the intervention procedure and group selection process. This chapter also describes the outcome measures assessing spelling, morphological knowledge and word meaning knowledge. Chapter 3 presents the results of the study, including changes in spelling performance, morphological knowledge, and word meaning knowledge. Across grade and intervention group, children’s spelling improved after the intervention, and a relative benefit of morphological instruction over-and-above word meaning instruction was observed among children in Grade 3 in their spelling of complex words taught in the intervention. On the measure of morphological knowledge, children in both grades improved after the intervention, however this improvement was not differentiated by intervention group. Children also improved on the measure of word meaning knowledge, and a differential benefit was observed for the children in Grade 3, with the children in the Vocabulary group improving significantly more than the children in the Morphology group. Finally, Chapter 4 synthesizes the findings from Chapter 3, providing a cohesive discussion of the relative benefits of morphology and word meaning instruction, with emphasis on the practical and theoretical findings from this study. Overall, this work provides further indication that literacy instruction that is focused on morphology has benefits for spelling development in English-speaking children, with a unique benefit of morphological instruction particularly evident among children in Grade 3
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".