Abstract
Eight pseudowords were presented to 29 undergraduate students within the context of four brief passages. Students were instructed to do one of three things: (a) learn the details of the stories, (b) learn both the story details (high priority) and the spellings of the pseudowords, or (c) learn both the word spellings (high priority) and the story details. Instructions to learn word spellings led to significantly better spelling performance without significantly affecting passage comprehension; however, even those students instructed to make the learning of word spelling a higher priority spelled only a mean of 4.9 of the 8 words correctly. The need for determining why students have such difficulty in learning to spell new words is discussed.