An Evaluation of Instruction in Visual Imagining on the Written Spelling Performance of Adolescents with Learning Disabilities

Recent research has evaluated the utility of teaching potentially covert strategies to mediate overt performance. As an extension of this developing literature, the current study used a multiple-probe design to evaluate the effects of instructing in a visual imagining strategy on correct written spelling responses with three adolescents with various learning disabilities. After the participants were presented with the textual target stimuli, they were instructed to imagine the word in their head before writing it down. All three participants demonstrated improvements in spelling after this instruction, but two of them required additional consequences to meet the mastery criterion.