The Master's Level Graduate Research Conference is supported by the Office of Graduate Studies.
The present research investigates how dependent college students, particularly good and poor spellers, have become on spell checker to recognize, correct, and produce fewer homophone and spelling errors. Participants identified and corrected errors that were embedded in a pre-written short story with or without spell checker access, and also wrote their own short story either with or without spell checker. Findings of this study show significant differences between the performance of good and poor spellers across these tasks. When compared to good spellers, poor spellers corrected a greater percentage of spelling errors with spell checker and produced significantly more errors without spell checker when writing a short story. These findings suggest that poor spellers may have a greater need for spell checker than good spellers, and are at a greater risk for relying on the software as the only step in the proofreading process. However, spell checker did not make a difference in assisting participants to recognize, correct, and produce significantly less homophone errors. This provides support to previous research that spell checker is not entirely accurate in identifying all types of errors and that the program should not be used as the only method for proofreading papers.
| Presenter: | Adriana Riano (SUNY Brockport) -- arian1@brockport.edu |
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| Topic: | Psychology - Panel |
| Location: | 127 Hartwell |
| Time: | 9:35 am (Session I) |
