An important aspect of ACT/SAT preparation that can’t be neglected is the development of students’ vocabulary. While we are years removed from the days when the ACT and SAT asked “tricky word” questions, both tests require students to read several lengthy passages that include challenging vocabulary. The questions students need to answer might not focus on these words, but to fully understand the passages, a highly developed vocabulary is essential.
Method Test Prep's Vocabulary Builder helps students to expand their personal lexicons. It works like a flash card game with the objective of "mastering" words by getting them correct at least twice. The Vocabulary Builder contains hundreds of words, so it can take some time for students to be able to see all of them--this means it is something that they can keep coming back to over days, weeks, or months, all the while improving their vocabularies. Teachers across the country use the Vocabulary Builder as a source of extra credit assignments for students, schools use it as part of intramural academic competitions, and, of course, students use it to broaden their vocabularies--the options are quite varied!
Students using the Vocabulary Builder are randomly assigned words to define. One point is awarded for every word they get right; if they answer the same word correctly a second time, they receive two points and have “mastered” the word. If the student gets the word right for a third time, they are awarded an additional 2 points, and the word is removed from the list and will not appear again.. Students lose ⅓ of a point for every word they get wrong. The Vocabulary Builder score makes it easy to see if your students are making use of this feature, and very easy to give them credit for their work. To access this report, go to the vertical grey bar on the left of the screen and choose Reports -> Vocabulary Score. As with all of our reports, every column is sortable and reverse-sortable by clicking the header row.
Towards the bottom of the Staff Homepage teachers will see two other reports relating to the Vocabulary Builder:
Clicking “View Report” for the Vocabulary Leaderboard lets teachers see every word that their students have attempted to define, and the colored squares indicate whether or not a student has mastered the word.
The Legend shows what the colored squares indicate:
If you hover your mouse over any of the squares, you will see time/date stamps as well:
Finally, clicking “View Report” for the Words Mastered/Words Missed gives a “big picture” view of how your students are doing. Some schools use the Vocabulary Builder with younger students (grades 8 and 9) and this report lets teachers easily assess weak areas in the vocabularies of those cohorts; if they then reinforce those words with the next group of students, it is possible to compare year to year results to see if their students are learning those words earlier.
If you would like to brainstorm ways to use the Vocabulary Builder with your students, or just want help with how to use Method Test Prep, please contact us.
