<p>Tasks with a&#xa0;high potential for cognitive activation help to stimulate elaborative thought processes in primary school students and thus support their learning. Accordingly, primary school teachers should be able to adequately assess the cognitive activation potential of tasks and select or design suitable tasks for their lessons. This is particularly relevant in the context of spelling instruction, as current studies on spelling performance among primary school students highlight the urgency of improving the quality of instruction. However, it has not yet been investigated whether primary school teachers can recognize the cognitive activation potential of spelling tasks and, consequently, possess the necessary knowledge to select appropriate tasks. This article reports the results of a&#xa0;questionnaire study in which 280 primary school teachers, trainees and 25&#xa0;researchers from the fields of instructional research and/or orthography didactics assessed various spelling tasks in terms of their cognitive activation potential and provided explanations for their assessments. The findings indicate that teachers are generally able to correctly identify highly cognitively activating spelling tasks and justify their assessments appropriately. However, they tend to overestimate the cognitive activation potential of tasks with low cognitive activation compared to the researchers. This discrepancy is also reflected in the justifications provided. Differences between teachers with varying levels of professional experience are only occasionally observable. Trainees, however, rate their own competence in making high-quality task selections lower than experienced teachers. Overall, the findings suggest that primary school teachers still require further input from further training programs to enhance the didactic quality of their instruction.</p>