Building Vocabulary to Improve Reading

Research shows that many adolescents in the United States struggle with reading, and one key reason is their limited vocabularies. Limited vocabulary, low reading ability, and low investment of time in reading often go hand in hand, since students usually learn more sophisticated words through reading, rather than from informal sources.

In response to administrators' and teachers' worries about the vocabulary skills of Boston Public School students, a group of researchers and educators — assembled by the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) in collaboration with the Boston Public Schools, and directed by Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Catherine Snow — designed a curriculum supplement called Word Generation, for sixth- to eighth-grade classrooms. This research-based intervention focuses on “all-purpose” academic vocabulary words — words that are relevant across disciplines, but that are infrequently used in casual conversation. Word Generation introduces new words by embedding them in brief texts about controversial issues of interest to many adolescents, such as steroid use among athletes, legalization of euthanasia, and censorship of libraries and popular music. The curriculum then provides opportunities for students to use the new words in classroom discussion, debate, and writing. Beyond teaching vocabulary, the program is designed to support students' oral language skills, argumentation strategies, and writing skills, while also educating students about issues of current public interest.

THE DESIGN OF WORD GENERATION

While in middle school, students need to read nonfiction texts that contain many technical, discipline-specific words, but these texts also include many ‘all-purpose’ academic words, such as factor, structure, function, and interpret. Neither type of word tends to be used in everyday conversation, but students need to be familiar with both to read and learn effectively. If teachers concentrate instruction only on vocabulary terms specific to their disciplines, then the more general words may not be explicitly taught. For these reasons, Word Generation focuses on all-purpose academic words and attempts to increase content area teachers' willingness to teach them.

The Word Generation curriculum is made up of a 24-week sequence of topics, each associated with five all-purpose academic words. Each week, the program activities follow this basic format:

• On Monday, typically in the English Language Arts classroom, students and their teacher read and discuss a brief text in which the target words are embedded, and which presents arguments on both sides of a controversy or dilemma. Then, teachers highlight the target words and provide context-related definitions.
• On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the math, social studies, and science teachers implement activities provided for them. Each activity incorporates the target words and controversial topic of the week:
  • The math teacher assigns and discusses one or two problems in a format modelled on the Massachusetts state math assessment.
  • In science class, students read a science-based text, fill in the target words left blank in the passage, and then discuss it.
  • The social studies teacher organizes a debate about the dilemma, using one of several possible formats
• On Friday, the students write an essay taking a stand about the dilemma.

To make program implementation more feasible in schools, the subject-specific activities can each be completed in 15 minutes. Also, school staff can decide which teachers are responsible for particular days of the week.

The key features of the Word Generation activities are based on instructional practices known from previous research to promote vocabulary learning. These features include:

• Encountering a target word in semantically rich contexts within motivating texts, rather than in a list of words
• Repeated exposure to the word, in varied contexts
• Opportunities to use the word orally and in writing
• Explicit instruction in the word's meaning
• Explicit instruction in word learning strategies, including analysis of the word's parts (morphemes), and its multiple subject-specific meanings (polysemy)

Word Generation zeros in on these research-based practices to promote students' learning of the target vocabulary words.

EXAMINING THE PROGRAM'S EFFECTIVENESS

Snow and her colleagues carried out a quasi-experimental study comparing nearly 700 sixth- to eighth-grade students in five Word Generation schools to more than 300 students in three other Boston Public schools that did not choose to implement the program. More than half of the students were language minority students, and the vast majority of students in both treatment and comparison schools were low-income. The treatment schools were in their first or second year of using Word Generation. The schools varied in the degree to which they used professional development to support program implementation, and in the eagerness with which teachers embraced the program.

To measure the effectiveness of the intervention, the researchers assessed comprehension of the target words using a multiple choice test.

The test was administered close to the beginning and end of the 2008 school year. The researchers also had access to most of the students' scores on the spring 2008Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) English Language Arts test.

The results of this initial trial are very promising. As expected, the students in Word Generation schools learned more of the target words than students in comparison schools, even though the latter group performed at a higher level at the start. Language minority students benefited more than native English-speaking students. Also, improvement on the vocabulary test predicted better performance on the state English Language Arts assessment.

Snow and her colleagues, Joshua Lawrence and Claire White, think that the positive link between Word Generation and state assessment scores can be explained by the program features that go beyond the teaching of individual vocabulary words. This curriculum taught deep reading and comprehension skills, discussion, argumentation, and writing. Since the Massachusetts test is relatively challenging (well aligned with the NAEP), students' performance is likely related to these complex skills, rather than to familiarity with specific words.

Another major design feature of Word Generation is that it organizes instruction around engaging topics. In future studies, the researchers will look at whether the level of teacher and student interest in certain topics explains the level of word learning. In this initial study, one topic that generated two high-ranking words was ‘paying students to do well in school’ (incentive, enable)—a topic directly related to adolescence. In contrast, the topic of ‘compulsory voting’ was associated with the two least-well learned words (enforce, apathy).

Snow and her colleagues caution that, even though these preliminary results are encouraging, the quasi-experimental design of this study—the fact that schools were not randomly assigned to treatment and comparison groups—prevents them from making strong conclusions that the program caused improvements in scores. The next major tasks for SERP's Word Generation team are to conduct a full experimental study of its impact, and to explore how to implement the program effectively at larger scale. The Word Generation team will continue moving forward, greatly encouraged by the preliminary evidence suggesting the effectiveness of the program, and its particular value for language minority learners.

Writer: Maria Fusaro

Source: Usable Knowledge

Research at Its Best

The mantra of “publish or perish” still lingers in the halls of higher education, so how might institutions best support faculty when it comes to making time for and funding their research?

In myriad and creative ways, it seems, according to the responses captured in a white paper issued by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education(COACHE) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

As part of its “Benchmark Best Practices” series, COACHE surveyed faculty at its member institutions — more than 200 colleges and universities across the United States — about their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the ways their employers encourage their research, from the amount of time spent, expectations for external funding, availability of course release time, and other institutional supports.

“I’ve heard many senior faculty admit that they couldn’t have earned tenure under today’s standards, so institutions have a responsibility to put their money where their expectations are,” says Kiernan Mathews, director and principal investigator of COACHE. “Yet, the campuses where faculty are most satisfied with research aren’t necessarily the wealthiest, but those who protect professors’ time and foster engagement with students and colleagues.”

While different institutions received high marks from faculty for their own means of support — from the provision of travel to additional funding to the emphasis of quality over quantity — key recommendations garnered from institutions with “exemplary results” included the following:

• Provide leadership from the top. Presidential and provostial leadership in stressing the importance of excellence in research is critical substantively and symbolically, especially in the face of external forces skeptical of its value. This means that resources directed at supporting faculty work — across the creative lifecycle — are crucial, as is the messaging that goes along with the financial support.
• Establish formal offices and programs to support faculty research. Visibly dedicating resources to support faculty work clearly demonstrates how important faculty members are to institutional success. This study identified the following areas of focus for full-time college staff:
  • Grant support. Many universities offer pre-award support to faculty preparing proposals for outside funding. What is less common, but equally important, is post-award support.
  • Internal grants. Faculty are grateful for internal funding, even in small amounts. Well-designed programs can foster interdivisional collaboration, extramural mentoring, and other innovations.
  • Research institutes. Such institutes may be a source of internal grant support, but beyond that, they are places where faculty can find collaborators and engage in interdisciplinary work—something many find fulfilling.
  • Colloquia, workshops, and seminars. All faculty, and especially pre-tenure faculty, appreciate opportunities to present their research at colloquia on campus, receive feedback, and fine-tune their work prior to presenting at a national conference. Workshops and seminars for writing grants, running a lab, getting published, mentoring undergraduates and graduates, getting tenure and “getting to full” are all programs that support faculty collaboration and engagement in fulfilling work.

In addition to offering general advice on how to best support faculty and research, the white paper cites specific programmatic examples from a range of institutional types: Hamilton College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, College of the Holy Cross, Kenyon College, Loyola University Maryland, Middlebury College, Stonehill College, Tulane University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and University of St. Thomas.

Writer: Mary Tamer

Source: Usable Knowledge

No Child Left Out

 On a recent visit to a camp for Syrian refugees in Turkey, I witnessed some of the most powerful displays of human endurance that anyone can imagine. And yet, amid all the stories of trauma and loss, what affected me the most was these refugee families’ unquenchable thirst for education.

The children I spoke to told me of their continued desire to learn in the camp’s makeshift schools, crammed into classes and taught in shifts running from before dawn until after dark. Their parents spoke of the hope they place in the transformative power of education.

Syria once boasted universal education. Now, with more than four million people forced to flee their homes because of the violence wracking the country, it has become one of the world’s many places suffering from what can only be described as a global education crisis. There are an estimated 58 million primary-school-aged children out of school worldwide, and those affected by conflict and natural disasters are among the hardest to reach.

Worse, the number of child refugees cut off from school – in places like Nepal, Myanmar, and Yemen – is increasing at an alarming rate. If the international community does not act to nurture and educate these children, the cycle of poverty and conflict will be reproduced for generations to come.

The fact that so many children are cut off from education constitutes a clear failure on the part of the world’s governments, which promised in 2000, when the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were adopted, to ensure primary schooling for all children by 2015. To achieve this, it is not enough to enroll children in school; they must be kept there and provided a quality education. UNESCO estimates that at least 250 million of the world’s children of primary-school age are unable to read, write, or do basic arithmetic.

This week, the international community will have a chance to do something about this scandalous state of affairs. Policymakers from around the world will meet in South Korea at the World Education Forum to agree on the global education targets that are set to replace the MDGs.

It is truly fitting that South Korea is hosting this forum, because it is so often seen as a model of what investment in education can deliver. Some 8% of South Korea’s GDP is spent on education, and UNESCO estimates that every dollar invested in primary schools generates $10-$15 in economic returns. South Korea, which has lifted itself up from the ranks of the world’s poorest countries to among its richest in just two generations, is living proof that education pays off.

The new Sustainable Development Goals that are to be agreed this year underscore the challenges that world governments must address by 2030. I insist that quality universal primary education must be one of the SDGs’ top priorities. The emphasis here is on quality. Success is measured not only by the number of children we enroll, nor by their achievements on standardized tests; the most important outcomes are the tangible and intangible impacts of education on the quality of students’ lives. This is the unfinished business of the MDGs.

Wherever I travel with the Education Above All foundation, I encounter bright, motivated children who have been denied the chance to learn. As the world moves on to new priorities, we cannot forget our responsibility to those who have been failed by our complacency. The job is not done. We must remain committed to achieving the goal of quality primary education for all children – not some, and not even most – wherever they live.

Writer: Moza Bint Nasser

Source: Project Syndicate