Graded Word Spelling Test

Book excerpt: Spelling is a key skill in the National Curriculum for English and an important 'basic skill' which continues to be valued highly in further and higher education and in the world of work. Vernon's Graded Word Spelling Test is a widely used, standardised test designed to assess spelling attainment and progress from age 5 to 18+ years. This revised edition provides new norms which are reliable and fully up to date: the target words, graded in order of current difficulty, are unchanged. The Graded Word Spelling Test is designed for use throughout the years of compulsory schooling, and extends to the level of spelling reached by well-educated adults. Its wide range is achieved by the presentation of 80 test words, graded in order of difficulty and each placed in the context of a short sentence. Many of these sentences have been re-cast to be more relevant to functional literacy today. The Graded Word Spelling Test takes only 20-30 minutes to give to individuals or to a group. This new edition provides norms as standardised scores, percentiles and Spelling Ages, based on a national standardisation sample of over 3500 pupils, students and trainees. The words have also been analysed to classify and match them to the National Literacy Strategy and the Key Stage 3 National Strategy Framework for Teaching English, so that teachers may more easily identify particular patterns of strengths and weaknesses in a student's spelling.