The primary objective of this study was to determine the most effective of three spelling programs for sixth graders coming from two culturally different and racially distinct areas of a large metropolitan school district. A secondary objective was to examine any differences which might exist between inner-city and suburban children in the attainment of spelling skills. A third purpose was to measure the growth in spelling achievement from pretest to posttest for all subjects. Three spelling strategies were used as treatments: (1) teacher constructed strategy; (2) Kottmeyer strategy, involving a series of eight grade level workbooks which sequentially present the phonetic and structural characteristics of words; and, (3) Hanna strategy, which assumes that the phoneme-Grapheme correspondence can produce reliable spelling generalizations. Two hundred and sixteen graders served as subjects. Half of the subjects came from an inner city elementary school with an ethnic composition of 88 percent Negro and 12 percent Korean and Japanese. The other 108 subjects came from a suburban elementary school which draws from a middle to upper-middle class Jewish and Caucasian community. A pretest-posttest design was employed. There were 36 subjects in each group. There was an equal number of boys and girls in each group. (Author/JM)