Primary teachers who were nominated by their supervisors as effective in educating their students to be readers and writers responded to two questionnaires about their practice. Subjects were 23 kindergarten, 34 first-grade, and 26 second-grade teachers. As expected, there were shifts in reported practices between kindergarten and grade 2, although there was much more similarity than difference in the reports of kindergarten, grade-1, and grade-2 teachers. The teachers claimed commitments to: (1) qualitatively similar instruction for students of all abilities, along with additional support for weak readers; (2) literate classroom environments; (3) modeling and teaching of both lower-order (e.g. decoding) skills and higher-order (e.g. comprehension) processas; (4) extensive and diverse types of reading by students; (5) teaching students to plan, draft, and revise as part of writing; (6) engaging literacy instruction (i.e., instruction motivating literate activities); and (7) monitoring of students' progress in literacy. (Contains 73 references and three tables of data.)

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This study examined relations between self-efficacy and outcome expectancy beliefs and spelling and writing performance. Perceptions about spelling and writing were assessed in 258 collegeage participants. Spelling performance was measured through a 50-item spelling test and writing performance by a holistically scored writing sample. The most highly correlated variables included spelling outcome expectancy and writing outcome expectancy, spelling selfefficacy and writing self-efficacy, spelling performance and spelling self-efficacy, and spelling and writing performance. A causal model relating perceptions, spelling performance, and writing performance was proposed and its appropriateness estimated. Direct effects on spelling were found for spelling self-efficacy, while spelling self-efficacy had indirect effects on writing performance and spelling had a direct effect on writing performance. The causal model was discussed in terms of changing conceptions of writing instruction and traditional views of the role of spelling as a necessary component of good writing.While spelling never has occupied more than a fraction of the attention devoted to reading, good spelling nonetheless has been regarded by many parents and educators as an essential goal in the development of literacy. Traditionally, spelling instruction involves time set aside daily for spelling activities: these include pretesting, study, and post-testing of words on predetermined lists; a systematic method of study; drill and practice of isolated words; and activities that encourage students to write the words in a meaningful context (see review by Brown, 1990). This bottomup philosophy (Yellin, 1986), emphasizing rules, drill, repetition, and memorization of word lists, has its roots as far back as the late 1700s when Noah

This study examined relations among spelling performance and students' beliefs about spelling, including self-efficacy for spelling ability, outcome expectancy for spelling, and attributions for good spelling across grades 4,7, and 10. Spelling self-efficacy remained relatively constant across grades. Spelling outcome expectancies for adult life and school declined across grades, as did effort and ability attributions for spelling success, with a disproportional decrease in ability attributions between grades 4 and 7. Self-efficacy was the strongest predictor of spelling performance at all grade levels; attribution for ability entered into the regression for grade 4 students, while outcome expectancies for school and writing were more important in grades 7 and 10. Cluster analyses on the grade 10 sample showed that students with high efficacy as spellers and high outcome expectancy of spelling for writing were the best spellers, with the highest performance reserved for those who attributed good spelling more to effort than ability. The impact of spelling instruction on developing beliefs is discussed.Although the area of spelling has never captured the attention of educators and researchers to the degree that reading and writing have, over the past two decades there has been mounting interest in understanding the cognitive processes that underlie spelling and in integrating this knowledge with the larger body of knowledge of cognitive science (see Frith, 1980, and the review by Brown, 1990). As a maturing field, cognitive science in general has broadened its scope beyond the more 'purely cognitive' models proposed initially (Anderson, 1983;Rumelhart, 1975;Schank and Abelson, 1977;Winograd, 1975) to include a variety of affective and motivational variables affecting learning (Bandura, 1982(Bandura, , 1986 Dweck and Legget, 1988;Pintrich, We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Greg Schraw, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, for his feedback and helpful recommendations relative to data analysis and preparation of this paper.

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