Building Academic Vocabulary to Increase Student Achievement

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Building Academic Vocabulary to Increase Student
Achievement
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90/90/90 Schools Research

• 90 of Students on Free/Reduced Meals
• 90 of Students are Minority
• 90 of Students On or Above Grade Level

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Exemplary PracticeFour Components in 90/90/ 90
Schools

• Curriculum
• Prioritized Curriculum with Benchmarks
• Grade Level Course Expectations
• Managed Accessed With Technology
• Instruction
• K-8 Literacy Instruction with K-3 Emphasis
• Reading/Writing in Content Areas K-12
• Cognitive Differentiated Strategies
• Acceleration and Remediation Options
• Assessment
• Focus on Assessment to Increase Learning not to
  just give a grade
• Quarterly Benchmark Assessments
• Consistent Use of Rubric
• Organization
• Teams Holding Students in Common
• Large Blocks of Time K-12
• Multiple Options for Safety Nets

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Factors Affecting Student Achievement

• School
• Guaranteed and viable curriculum
• Challenging and effective feedback
• Parent and community involvement
• Safe and orderly environment
• Collegiality and professionalism
• Teacher
• Instructional Strategies
• Classroom Management
• Classroom curriculum design
• Student
• Home atmosphere
• Learned intelligence and background knowledge
• Motivation

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Categories of Instructional Strategies That
Affect Student Achievement
Rate
Category
Identifying similarities and differences
45 Summarizing and note taking 34 Reinforcing
effort and providing recognition 29 Homework and
practice 28 Nonlinguistic representations
27 Cooperative learning 27 Setting objectives
and providing feedback 23 Generating and testing
hypotheses 23 Questions, cues, and advance
organizers 22
Sources Marzano, R. J. (1998), A theory-based
meta-analysis of research on instruction.
Aurora, CO Mid-continent Research for Education
and Learning. (ERIC Document Reproduction No. ED
427 087) Marzano, R. J., Gaddy, B. B., Dean, C
(2000). What works in classroom instruction?
Aurora, CO Mid-continent Research for Education
and Learning. Marzano, R. J., Pickering, D. J.
Pollock, J.E. (2002). Classroom instruction that
works Research based strategies for increasing
student achievement, Alexandria, VA Association
for Supervisors and Curriculum Development.
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FACTOIDS

• On an average, a preschool child from a
  professional family is provided annually
  experiences with 11 million words, a
  working-class family 6 million words, and welfare
  family 3 million words (Hart and Risley, 1995).

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Walsh (2003) reports that the five most widely
used basal readers do not provide the kind of
sustained vocabulary instruction essential to
increase reading comprehension.
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Chall and Jacobs (2003) report that for
low-income children in grades 4-7 the first
skill to slip by fourth grade is word meaning.
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McKeown, Beck, Omanson, and Pople (1985) found
that while four encounters with a word did not
reliably improve reading comprehension, 12
encounters did.
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Student generated sentences based on dictionary
definition.

• Sixty-three percent of the student sentences were
  judged to be odd (Miller and Gildea, 1985).
• Sixty percent of students responses were
  unacceptable (McKeown, 1990 and 1993).

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In the upper grades, those who enter 4th grade
with significant vocabulary deficits show
increasing problems with reading comprehension,
even if they have good reading (word
identification) skills (Biemiller, 2003)
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Vocabulary assessed in first grade predicted over
30 of reading comprehension variance in 11th
grade (Cunningham and Stanovich, 1977)
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To recap.. additional Research
about vocabulary..

• Kindergarten students vocabulary size is a
  predictor of comprehension in middle school.
  (Scarborough, 1998)
• Students with poor vocabulary by third grade have
  declining text comprehension scores in fourth and
  fifth grade. (Chall, Jacobs and Baldwin,1990)
• Vocabulary instruction has a strong connection to
  comprehension. (McKeown, Beck, Omansin and
  Perfetti, 1983)
• Pre-instruction of words gave fourth grade
  students greater gain. (Brett, Rothlein and
  Hurley, 1996)

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• To close the gap between students who come from
  disadvantaged backgrounds and those who do not,
  schools should use systematic programs of
  vocabulary instruction throughout the grades.
• Becker,1971

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They say it works.

• Students comprehension will increase by 33
  percentile points when vocabulary instruction
  focuses on specific words important to the
  content they are reading as opposed to words from
  high-frequency lists. (Stahl and Fairbanks,1986)

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Think and Reflect

• Which factoid was especially meaningful to you
  and what does it mean for your teaching?

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You have asked for district support to
systematically address academic background
knowledge
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• Our charge is to come up with a list of words
  focusing on the terms and phrases students will
  encounter in their academic subjects

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Our task today..

• Which terms are essential for students to know
  regardless of whether they intend to go to
  college?

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Words to Consider

• Enduring.
• Lifelong.
• Content AreaNot Course Specific
• Newspaper, Newsweek