Thread by @C_Hendrick

What works in spelling instruction? New study on how to teach it effectively and the pre-testing effect:
- Copying spelling words might be one of the least effective things we ask pupils to do.
- Generating answers before learning can improve spelling, even when pupils are wrong.
- The benefits of testing grow over time, not immediately.
- What matters is not how many times pupils see a word, but how often they retrieve it.

One of the rapidly developing areas of research I've been watching closely is "pretrieval" practice and what happens when you test students on material before they learn it.

My theory on pre-testing has been that there is some kind of priming effect by quizzing students on to-be-learned material.
The pretesting effect now has a well‑controlled demonstration for spelling, in both Chinese and English.

What matters is not how many times pupils see a word, but how often they retrieve it.
Three groups saw the same words, but only the ones who had to think about them learned them best.

A few things though; the "errorful generation" framing is partly misleading in this dataset: the conditional analysis shows that pretesting items initially guessed correctly were retained at ceiling (M ≈ 0.92–0.95), whereas items guessed incorrectly recovered only modestly (M ≈ 0.59–0.65). So it seems we could say that pretesting works in school spelling not only by inducing error but also by surfacing what pupils already half‑know.

Secondly, the much smaller English effects (d ≈ 0.26–0.35 versus 0.61–0.74) sit alongside much lower absolute retention (~40% versus ~80%). The L2 condition may simply be operating closer to a difficulty floor, which has implications for how foreign‑language teachers should think about scheduling testing relative to instruction.

So in English L2 spelling for novice learners, it does not matter whether you test before or after instruction, it only matters that you test.

Lastly, more strokes per character predicted better retention. The authors flag this as counterintuitive and tentatively read it as a desirable‑difficulty effect at the item level; equally plausible is that high‑stroke characters are more visually distinctive and therefore more memorable.