The Hamburger Schreibprobe: Problems with a new spelling test

The application of the Hamburger Schreibprobe by practitioners led to the a ssumption that dyslexic children cannot accurately be diagnosed by this tes t. To examine this hypothesis a sample of 148 third graders participated in three tests: the Hamburger Schreibprobe, the Diagnostischer Rechtschreibte st and the Weingartener Rechtschreibtest. It turned out that the applicatio n of the Hamburger Schreibprobe led to a considerable amount of wrong diagn oses. This was not the case when applying the two other tests. The Hamburger Schreibprobe includes three strategies as a qualitative analy sis of spelling: the alphabetic, the orthographic and the morphematic strat egy. It could be shown that there are only few students whose orthographic and morphematic strategy differ in a way that would make individualized ins truction advisable. In addition to the empirical results it was pointed out that the alphabetic strategy is not clearly divided from dialectal spellin g mistakes.