When I Digitized My Spelling Screener, Saving Time Wasn’t the Biggest Gain

While teaching is filled with amazing perks—being able to see your students grow, watching students use strategies you have taught them to find success, seeing them mature into avid learners, and of course enjoying the simple fun that comes from working in a highly engaging environment filled with young people—one thing teachers the world over, and myself personally, almost universally find tedious is the myriad of mandatory (and quasi-mandatory) assessments.

You know the ones I am talking about. The assessments where someone says, “Here is a highly recommended assessment that you should give your students, and while you technically don’t have to, we will also be checking to make sure you did and reviewing the data.” I am not sure what that looks like for you or for your district, but for us one of these required data points—administered three times per year—is our spelling screener.

From kindergarten through fifth grade, we administer a spelling screener, with a basic version for grades K–2 and an advanced version for grades 3–5. This LETRS-based spelling screener itself is not particularly onerous. In fact, it sounds quite simple to administer: call out twenty-five words, read a sentence that includes each word, and have students write the word down. The teacher then takes that data and compiles it into a scoring matrix designed to track student growth across spelling, phonics, syllable types, root words, and nearly a dozen additional word components.

Like many tedious teacher tasks, the real issue is not what the assessment is, or even the information it provides. I actually want strong phonics data for my students, so I am not opposed to what I am assessing. The problem lies in how long it takes to administer and score.

Although the spelling screener is straightforward on paper, administering it in a real classroom is already slower than one might expect. Even when it is conducted exactly as intended—with words read clearly, repeated, and used in sentences—some students will still, inevitably, miss one word, and in many cases more than one. This is not a failure of the assessment or the students so much as a reflection of the practical reality of asking an entire class of 10- and 11-year-olds to remain attentive and synchronized through twenty-five consecutive spelling words. For me personally, administering the screener alone typically takes about thirty minutes. However, anyone familiar with the LETRS-based spelling screener knows that this is actually the fast part. The slow part comes afterward.

Once the assessment is complete, the traditional process requires the teacher to manually transfer each student’s spelling responses into an individual scoring matrix. Each matrix contains eighty-two distinct data points, capturing performance across vowels, syllable types, root words, and multiple additional phonics features. After completing individual matrices, class-level composites must then be constructed in order to make the data usable for instructional planning. Across my two classes, this meant manually entering data for nearly fifty students and creating multiple class composites—amounting to approximately 4,100 individual data points entered by hand.

Depending on handwriting clarity, word placement, and simple fatigue, this process typically took me between two and four hours. While I did become faster with repetition, I know teachers who take days—and in some cases weeks—to complete this step. Because the screener is administered three times per year—in August, December, and May—I know colleagues for whom compiling this data stretches across an entire month while juggling all of their other instructional responsibilities.

One day last August, sitting at my desk surrounded by stacks of spelling sheets and open spreadsheets, I found myself thinking, This really sucks. Surely someone must have already created an automated version of this.” I then spent—one might even say wasted—nearly forty-five minutes searching for a digital version of one of the country’s most widely used spelling screeners. The closest solution I found was a calculator program created by another educator. Unfortunately, because it functioned solely as a calculator, I still had to manually enter every student’s spelling data before the tool could even run.

That was the moment I began imagining something better: an automated spelling screener where students could type their responses into a Google Form as I called out each word—just as I always had—and where the program would then apply the existing scoring rubric and automatically populate both individual student matrices and class-level composites. It felt like a simple idea. “There aren’t that many spelling rules,” I remember thinking. Never in my life have I been more deceived about the ease of a project than I was with this one.

While the full description of my tale of woe in developing this program will have to wait for another time, suffice it to say that after more than 200 hours of pecking away at it—with few ups and many downs—I eventually did manage to create a program that automated the entire spelling screener. Students simply typed the words as they always had, while I could compile individual student scores and class composites nearly instantaneously. The first time I used the program with my entire class, a process that would normally take between two and four hours of manual entry took less than two minutes.

For now, let’s set aside the questionable logic of spending over two hundred hours building a program that saves me only a few hours per administration and instead focus on what I did not expect to gain from having created this digital screener. While the original purpose of this digital screener was to save time—and it does that admirably—I quickly began noticing additional benefits that were not apparent during its development.

• Removing handwriting from the transcription process eliminated a layer of subjective interpretation that had quietly introduced measurement noise into the data.

• Because the Google Form required a response for every item, students could no longer skip words.

• The digitized format also allowed me to see, in real time, bar graphs showing how many students spelled a given word in the same way, making error patterns immediately visible.

• The data became instantly shareable with my teaching team, literacy coach, and even my students, without additional processing.

• I also noticed that students typed significantly faster than they wrote—at least at the fifth-grade level—reducing the administration time from roughly thirty minutes to closer to fifteen.

• Additionally, the screener included an intelligent alignment feature that could recognize when a student entered a word on the wrong line or produced a close misspelling and still assign it to the correct scoring category.

• just as importantly because the data was fully digitized, I could immediately compare individual students, analyze word-level trends, form targeted small groups around specific phonics needs, and actually use the data in ways that had previously been impractical due to the time required to compile it.

So yes, the tool accomplished what I originally set out to do: it eliminated hours of tedious manual data entry. But the larger gains were found in the ancillary benefits—benefits I had not anticipated and problems I had not fully recognized—simply by shifting the assessment’s format without altering its structure, content, or purpose in any way. This is the exact same assessment my colleagues administer, and the same one used by thousands of teachers across the country. The only difference is that this version has been digitized—and that difference has proven to be substantial.