Samenvatting

For communicating, learning and expressing yourself, writing is a very important tool. Therefore it is an important question in which way writing skills should be stimulated in education. Success for All Netherlands is a pilot study in the third grade of primary school. This method teaches children to write whole sentences from the start, using six learning-strategies. Success for All emphasizes the meaning of a text. Besides writing a meaningful text it is important that children use conventional spelling. According to Paus et al. (2010) spelling is one of the three components of writing skills. According to Van Kleef and Tomesen (2002) conventional spelling is the last phase of learning to write.
This research focuses around the question how conventional spelling is applied within the pilot of Success for All Netherlands. To shed light on these differences of appliance in conventional spelling this article makes use of explorative and descriptive questions. The article looks at the extend of using conventional spelling, minimal and maximal scores, stable patterns and the increase in use of conventional spelling of individual students and the amount of students that scored above eighty percent of words written in conventional spelling.
The research data comes from sixteen students in the third grade from a primary school nearby Groningen. To analyse their work a coding scheme was designed from which a percentage of writing in conventional spelling was deduced per student per assignment. Three assignments have been coded at the measuring points of autumn, Christmas and spring. This has been analysed using the Friedman test and descriptive statistics to see progress over time.
The Friedman test shows no significant difference in percentages of writing in conventional spelling between the three times of measurement. However the descriptive statistics unravel some anomalies. E.g., lowest and highest scores alike are seen in autumn and the patterns of scores differ greatly from student to student. This narrow focused study opens up new questions for future, boarder research into writing according to conventional spelling in the third grade.