Assessing Vocabulary
Students who are learning explicitly taught words can be directly assessed with multiple choice or true-false questions. This traditional assessment might provide useful feedback to the teacher, but ideally, assessments would also provide opportunities for students to learn something while doing them.
EXAMPLE:
Consider the following options for tracking students' learning:
- Track students’ use of newly taught words in written assignments.
- Track students’ use of newly taught words in classroom discussions. If this is too hard to do while listening and guiding the discussion, give students points for noticing when their classmates use words from a targeted list (and of course for using those words themselves, as well).
- Do the sentence strip strategy that Beck and McKeown introduced: Students bring in a sentence they have heard or read from outside school that contains a newly taught word. The sentence then gets transcribed onto a sentence strip and hung in the classroom.
SEE ALSO:
Vocabulary Assessment to Support Instruction Building Rich Word-Learning Experiences
Author(s):McKeown, Margaret G.; Deane, Paul; Scott, Judith A.; Krovetz, Robert; Lawless, Rene
(2017). New York, NY: The Guilford Press
