ABSTRACT
How about those spelling pre- and posttests? Do students show what they know on these? Are they a learning experience? A structured multimodality system can improve even pretest scores by 50%. The teacher says the word, places it in context, and repeats it. The teacher then hand signals the students to visualize the word (see it), repeat it subvocally (say it), beat out the syllables (beat it), write the word (write it). They then put down their pencils (drop it) until the signal for write on the next word. With this testing procedure, not only will students achieve better on the tests, but they will also learn more about how to spell on their own. After doing action research with highly positive results with fourth-grade students in an urban school, a Maryland University intern, Patricia Berard, labeled the approach the VAT strategy, for visual, auditory, tactile (see Glossary).
