Situation

You give biweekly vocabulary tests. Each week, your students get seven new words. You talk with them about the definitions, trying to put dictionary speak into plain English, telling (funny) stories about the words, and asking for situations in which the word would be used. Because you do all this, you decide to replace the vocabulary test format you’ve had for years with something new.

You figure that, since you verbally review words by giving examples, having a section on the latest vocabulary test where you provide a scenario (Stephan doesn’t care) and students fill in the appropriate vocab word from a word bank (apathetic) is a good idea. You go a bit overboard with it and make that a sixteen-item section and fill the word bank with twenty words to add a wrinkle to it. You realize that, on a seventy-eight point test, this new section is worth forty-eight points but still think it’s fair.

Additionally, you have a student teacher and the university supervisor stops in the day said student teacher is correcting this test with his class. Afterward, the university supervisor looks over the test and gives a remark about it, how it perhaps tests student ability to adapt to new test items more than it tests vocabulary skill. Your student teacher tells you this during your prep. When students bomb that portion of the test, not in droves but in some statistically significant fashion with several possible explanations, you nod. And that critique passed on to you from the university supervisor tickles the back of your brain all afternoon.

At first, denial. You’ve reviewed the words a lot of different ways and feel that these new items are not tricks at all. Next, anger. So what now? Any time a new test item is included, you make it extra credit? There’s nothing wrong with putting new and better test items in place of old and busted ones. The bargaining settles as you decide to cut the total points possible to the highest score in the class, thinking that will keep the test valid. Depression sinks you and you just stare at the test, wondering what you were thinking making that new section worth so many points. Acceptance happens. Bringing some of your close colleagues in, you soon expand your thinking and decide you’re going to do something about it.

Two hours later, you have it all worked out, copies in hand, plans laid, and explanation given to your student teacher. That test will be thrown out. It’s now a study tool. The vocab review the next day will take the form of those new test items. A brand new test will be given Monday. This new test will have five scenario-fill-in items and five definition-fill-in items, along with a ten-word bank so that process of elimination helps. This is a set of steps marching toward eventually giving a similar test that this whole mess started with.

Due to all this, you do not get that stack of twenty papers for today graded and all hope of passing those pieces of writing back by this Friday flee.

You?

What do you do when you feel like a new test item is in order? Which test items do you think are fair to include from the beginning of the year? Is Matching such a universal test item that it doesn’t need scaffolding? How do you handle that idea that dawns on you as you’re making tomorrow’s test? What do you do if you’re making that test and finally realize that those test items you’ve been including don’t do what you want them to?Similar Posts:

• Vocabulary Via RSS
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The teacher creates four lists based on a set of words being studied. Each list has a different clue to tell students what the words are. There’s a list telling:

1. the first letter in the word;
2. the last letter in the word;
3. the number of syllables in the word;
4. the definition of the word.

(I could see a list of synonyms and a list of antonyms worked in there, perhaps in place of the definition and syllable count lists. Any other ideas of clues that can be given?)

Pass those lists out at random. Though QTEL never mentioned it, I tell students that they should hold onto their list at all times and that they shouldn’t let anyone see their list, that they will have to read the lists to others. Then students get up and form groups where all four lists are represented, figuring out the words.

Increased familiarity with vocabulary isn’t a bad thing. We have 100 words for this semester and I’m using this as a review for the next several days. I just pick words, fill out my Excel sheet with the proper letters, numbers, and definitions, print 8 copies of it (because all 4 lists fit onto one sheet of paper), cut it up, and pass it out. I figure it won’t benefit the students at all to keep their one list, so I collect the lists so I can use them next period.

It’s a really quick way to have students thinking about the words we’ve studied. And I should be able to crank these out over the next few days so we consistently play with vocabulary this way. Their vocab final is just around the corner, so we’ll be doing some flashcard work, too.Similar Posts:

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With vocabulary study, things like The Amazing Flash Card Machine can come in quite handy. But what if studying vocab was more of a conversation? What if it was a conversation where students could practice using the very words they are studying?

Using my Grazr idea from yesterday, I created a vocabulary blog, where the title of each blog entry is the vocab word and the actual entry is just the definition. That blog generates an RSS feed of my vocab lists and it’s a pretty quick task to enter all the words for a week; I created one week’s list in less than 5 minutes. Plugging that feed address into Grazr, I have a study page for one week’s worth of words and they are the specific words I select for my students to study. Since I did this all by creating a blog for my vocabulary, students can visit a page for a particular word and leave comments by clicking on “Go to site/Read More.”

Send In The Blogs

Create a blog over at Blogger and start writing lots of short postings. With the title of each post as the vocabulary word and the entry as the definition, Blogger will do the work of turning your lists into an RSS feed. Really, any blogging software will work for this. Using something like WordPress would allow you to set category names to designate the different vocab lists for each week, providing a different feed for each category. Take that feed and put it onto your site so your students know the vocab words.

RSS has made it easy for students to see the list of words. Now give them access to the blog so they start talking about the words instead of just seeing them. Students can leave comments of better definition, sample sentences, use of the words in “real life,” links to images that show the word, questions about how to use the word, and the like. Now you’ve got a conversation developing.

I know it’s not that simple. You may have to “require” comments at first and there will surely be a certain amount of the artificial in all this. It’s never easy to get students to spend even more time on something they typically hate, but maybe this is a way to make studying vocabulary more meaningful, to make it social.

I’ll do this next school year and keep you updated. Care to contribute to the idea party? Comment.Similar Posts:

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You’ll need an RSS feed of your vocabulary words (Tom put together a quick intro to RSS that might be helpful). Rolling your own RSS feed of vocab words offers you the most control over what words you use, but carries the biggest work load. If some of us want to work on turning vocab lists into feeds, we could likely have several lists created in short order. But that will take some time. Want it now?

Another way involves using whatever words crop up in a Word-of-the-Day or Words-of-the-Week RSS feed. These often have cool words that high school students could benefit from. But the quick turnover means that there’s very few words to study at a time and no archive (I’m sure there’s a way to save up the items from a daily feed into a big comprehensive feed). And the words in those types of lists can be obscure and not terribly useful. Choose wisely.

Either way, combine that feed with Grazr, a way to include information on your page in a slightly interactive way, and you’ve got a type of flash card system similar to The Amazing Flash Card Machine.

Study these vocabulary words again to see what I mean.

Move On

You’ve made your decision and now your vocab words are in an RSS feed. Type that RSS feed address into the “Currently Displaying” textbox over at Grazr and “See how it looks.” Once you “Get the code,” it’s just a cut and paste routine, really. Put that code into the sidebar of your site somewhere and you’ve got a little study area for students. Clicking on a word reveals the definition. Even though it’s a brief movement that doesn’t require much thought, that interactivity is a wonderful thing to help students learn.

UPDATE: I just found out this afternoon that Grazr apparently doesn’t work in IE or Opera Safari on a Mac. Is it working on PCs?Similar Posts:

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