McREL helps struggling students find a love for words
It’s dinnertime and a hungry three-year-old bangs on the table while her mother gets her a spoon. When she knocks over her bowl and vegetables scatter across the table and onto the floor, her mother cries, “Stop it! Sit still!”
A few neighborhoods away, another anxious toddler spills his vegetables. His mother laughs and shakes her head. “Oh, I see, you’re so excited to eat your peas and carrots that you can’t wait for a spoon. What a hungry boy you must be!”
Later that year, these two children enter the same preschool class. The first child, who has a vocabulary of about 500 words, has an IQ of 75. The second child, with a vocabulary more than twice as large, has an IQ of 118.
And thus begins the achievement gap.
According to University of Kansas researchers Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, the number of words that parents speak to their children – and whether those words are positive or negative – directly affects vocabulary and IQ levels, even as early as three years of age. In Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, Hart and Risley (1995) report that in professional homes, children hear an average of 487 utterances an hour, most of which are “encouragements”; in low-income homes, they hear about 187, most of which are “discouragements.”
Such a “vocabulary gap” also affects a child’s ability to learn new things, reading comprehension, and writing effectiveness, write Diane Paynter, Elena Bodrova, and Jane Doty in the McREL publication For the Love of Words: Vocabulary Instruction that Works (2005). In short, experts agree that vocabulary development is important to a child’s overall success in school and, later, in life.
The need to close this gap is particularly urgent for schools struggling to meet No Child Left Behind’s goal that all students—white, black, Hispanic, rich, poor—be 100 percent proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014. But for teachers who are plenty busy teaching basic reading and writing skills, explicit vocabulary teaching can be an overwhelming task.
Systematic vocabulary instruction is at the core of McREL’s work with two groups of high-poverty, low-performing schools in Missouri and Tennessee. Though different in size, level, and scope, both groups urgently wanted to raise the achievement levels of their students, regardless of, or perhaps in spite of, their backgrounds. And both have found that focusing on the most basic unit of learning can most profoundly affect the success of struggling students.
Missouri closes the “vocabulary gap”
In 2004, several high schools and middle schools in St. Louis, Kansas City, and the southeastern part of Missouri had experienced a major demographic shift. As the number of low-income and minority students grew, so had the achievement gap. That same year, McREL helped set up a consortium of 25 of these schools, called Project Success: Close the Gap, in order to address a specific gap: On the state assessment, the percentage of African-American students proficient in communication arts and mathematics was significantly lower than the statewide average for white students.
McREL consultants and consortium members embarked on a three-year plan to create “instructional coherence” across multiple districts and implement practices that could have an impact on achievement among diverse groups of students.
To level the learning field, McREL set up a step-by-step process to systematize vocabulary instruction. “We saw that kids were missing assessment items because they misunderstood the difference between [words like] synthesize and analyze,” said Michelle Jansen, an instructional specialist at Jennings High School in Jennings, Missouri.
The first step was developing key vocabulary lists for each content area,
including words that should be taught directly and those that students could
learn “incidentally.” Then, McREL guided teachers on the most
effective instructional strategies to use with vocabulary, such as the Frayer
model, concept maps, non-linguistic representation, and advanced organizers.
McREL consultants monitored closely the degree to which the lists and
strategies were being used in classrooms and helped to create tools to assess
implementation.
“[These strategies] have really changed the way teachers teach,” said
Howard Jones, an associate director of the Office of Social and Economic
Data Analysis at the University of Missouri and the project coordinator of
Project Success. Direct instruction of key vocabulary, in particular, has
been a catalyst for teachers in trying new strategies to address deficits
between socio-economic groups. “It’s a critical element, especially
on a standards-based assessment, where students must integrate a lot of information
and apply it in new ways,” said Jones.
Although McREL consultants were concerned that some strategies might be considered “too elementary” for secondary students, they were impressed with how seriously students took them. McREL Senior Director Salle Quackenboss related this story: “One day, I went into a cafeteria (at one of the participating schools) and asked the students about their vocabulary work and the strategies they use. No matter what table I went to, they knew what I was talking about. Their demonstration of the automatic use of the strategies is the ultimate evidence of success.”
Jones said the research-based strategies McREL introduced to their schools have had a “profound influence” on not only what goes on in the classroom but also what they look for in the school accreditation process. Vocabulary instruction is now part of what they expect in low-performing schools.
In addition, he has observed that not only are the schools instructionally coherent around vocabulary, but they also share a common vision and practice that has brought teachers together and united schools in the mission of raising achievement.
A shining example of this coherence and unity lies in southeast Missouri, where the Sikeston R-6 district is the first school district in that part of the state to be acknowledged for its exceptional professional development program. In early 2006, Sikeston became the recipient of the Commissioner of Education’s Award of Excellence for Professional Development—an early indicator of success in the consortium’s quest to Close the Gap.
Vocabulary instruction takes learning in Memphis City Schools to higher
levels
The twelve “high-priority” elementary schools in the Memphis
City Schools (MCS) district were in the throes of school improvement when
McREL began working with them in 2006. Required by the Tennessee Department
of Education to adopt a single improvement program or model, administrators
looked to McREL, whose research-based strategies they already knew.
However, with several initiatives already in place, they were concerned about how another program would “fit in,” according to Joyce Anderson, principal of Klondike Elementary. “[The other programs] were already demanding a lot from teachers. To add one more thing would be like adding flame to the fire,” she said.
McREL consultants took special care to make sure its professional development was aligned to the specific needs of MCS schools and to the existing programs. Once aligned, “all parties saw McREL as an enhancement rather than an addition,” said Kevin McCarthy, MCS elementary academic superintendent, who oversaw the project.
First, MCS teachers developed grade-specific vocabulary lists, which are aligned with state standards and indicators and are now embedded in the curriculum. To do so, teacher groups identified conceptual words that were needed to learn content and categorized them by grade, scope, and sequence in each content area. Curriculum specialists and State Exemplary Educators reviewed the lists along with the State Department of Education to create final lists.
The greatest challenge, McCarthy said, was reaching a consensus on which words should be taught directly and which should be part of “planned incidental” teaching. This differentiation, along with the use of strategies like concept mapping, has provided the most meaningful change, he said.
Using the McREL approach has helped teachers at Klondike Elementary be better able to tailor instruction to meet the needs of students, said Principal Anderson. As a result, teachers now give students more responsibility in the learning process and students “develop definitions of their own words and retain knowledge longer. They internalize the learning.”
The teachers, she added, “like to see children thinking at higher
levels. Some are surprised at what the children are able to do, absent of
a lot of lucrative early life experiences which are normally not available
to children of high poverty.”
While the level of commitment to and implementation of the program
has been exceptional so far, McREL and MCS are confident that, as teachers
increasingly embrace the importance of effective vocabulary instruction,
student understanding and achievement levels have no where to go but up.