Setup Student Profile and Spelling Practice Options

This article explains how to setup the student profile and the default options for the Spelling Practice:

After launching the application (for the installation procedure please refer to this link),

from the application’s main screen choose Settings and then Test Options from the inner menu as shown in the image below:

from this panel setup the spelling test option:

Student Name

The name of the student that is going to attend the spelling training session. This has not to be confused with the user name (related to the user account) that can be edited from within the Account Panel.

Student Grade

The grade of the student, using this parameter the software will choose a spelling words list suitable for the student. This means that if the student wants to raise the test difficulty could choose a higher grade.

To better understand how the software chooses the spelling lists used during training refere to the related article.

Default Dictionary 

The dictionary that will be used for the tests, Spelling Bee NInja comes bundled with an official dictionary named “Spelling Bee Ninja 1” but also offers the possibility to create an unlimited number of custom dictionaries, importing the words from virtually any source.

Difficulty

This option specify the difficulty level: it can be set to Standard, Hard and Harder, when set to Hard or harder a certain amount of words will be chosen from grades higher that the actual one. In particular:

• Standard: all the spelling words are selected among the ones suitable for the student.
• Hard: 30% of words are picked from the next grade of difficulty (example: if the student is a second grader 30% of words will be 3rd grade words and 70% 2nd grade words).
• Harder: 60% of words are picked from the next grade of difficulty (example: if the student is a second grader 60% of words will be 3rd grade words and 40% 2nd grade words).

Note that this setting is effective only when using Official dictionaries (custom dictionaries cannot be official), the harder the level the higher the potential score reachable.

Repeat policy

This settings defines the way the  Student can access to word repetition during spelling bee sessions, possible values are:

• Unlimited repeat. : the student can ask the word to be repeated an unlimited number of times.
• Repeat 3/2/1 times :- The student can ask the word to be repeated respectively 3 2 or just 1 times during the spelling test.
• No repeat: repeat word is not allowed during training sessions.

Words per test:

this option defines how many words a Spelling Training Session will contain, can be set to 10, 15 and 20.

Allow word Definition:

If set to Yes, the student will be allowed to access to the word definition during the test.

The more restrictive all these options will be the higher potential score could be reached, the harder the test will be.

After setting the desired values save them by pressing the “Save” button at the bottom of the panel.

A more precise idea on how and how much these settings affects the final spelling test grades is given in the article How the spelling score is calculated

How to set the Spelling Practice Options

The idea behind the Spelling Bee training software is to setup the options to a comfortable level, then, once the maximum score is reached, proceed by increasing an option a time and keep on training, constantly adding  the misspelled word to the study list  and studying definitions.

Once a Student has  acquired the capability to master  tests of  a higher level of  difficulty than his/her grade then it means a very good spelling skill has been reached.

Beyond this level is strongly suggested to start creating new custom dictionaries containing the spelling words from the latest contests or the ones provided by teachers.

Is always a good practice, at the end of each session, to write down the unknown words and importing them in a custom dictionary named for instance “Unknown words“, then training regularly with using that dictionary.