Nov 16

Ben a long time; I've been out for a conference and am just now getting back into the swing of things. I hate that I missed the discussion on a couple of chapters! I'm continuing to think about how we teach and assess vocabulary. Clearly some children are memorizing definitions by just remembering a couple of words and then they're able to remember on the quiz. Not exactly the best for long-term memory. One problem is that we're giving them words in the definitions they can't understand, or definitions they can't understand. I'd say we should use open-ended questions instead of matching, but using matching is considered a good accommodation for students with disabilities who have memory / recall issues. What about using synonyms for definitions and retaining matching? That way students would really have to know the meaning of the definition, rather than the exact wording of the definition. Students are continuing to do really well on the single vocab quizzes, but when they get the test over four chapters of vocabulary, even though it's broken up into chunks of 8 or so words, they do not do as well. I'd really consider continuing to review as we go through the book.