Although producing quality written expression is a vital skill, many students in the United States struggle to produce proficient written language. There are many academic and career outcomes related to the ability to produce written expression, yet many schools lack formalized writing assessment and instruction. As such, many questions remain related to individual differences in writing ability and best practices in assessment and instruction. To answer these questions, it is necessary to establish a model of written expression and what specific variables exist within the model to be used to assess written language. Modern writing assessment theory uses levels of language as a framework with commonly assessed dimensions of accuracy, complexity and productivity. This framework has yet to be firmly established in the literature, and the variables included in each level are just beginning to be explored. One salient variable in writing research, assessment and instruction is spelling ability, and how this ability may influence the production of written language. This study furthers the work by Wilson et al. (2017), Troia and colleagues (2019) and many others (e.g., Berninger et al., 2006; Flower & Hayes, 1981) with the ultimate goal of developing a model of written language to guide assessment and instruction in schools. Specifically, data were drawn from Truckenmiller and colleagues (2020) study piloting a writing assessment tool, Writing Architect, which sampled 526 students from third to eight grades; this study used sixth, seventh and eighth grades with a resulting sample size of 290 students. Results indicated spelling was a significant predictor of writing quality, in that better spelling indicated better writing quality. The same was true for text. For the sentence-level variable, a higher score indicated worse writing quality in a significant way. The word variable did not significantly predict writing quality in the model. The significant interaction between spelling and text variables suggests that the effect of text on writing quality is even higher when spelling ability is also high. Findings highlight the importance of writing and spelling instruction in school. The findings for this age group help identify how writing abilities may change over the trajectory of development and vary individually. Additionally, this analysis echoes the call for further research to establish variables for automated writing assessment.
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