academic vocabulary

Breakthrough! In constructivist terms, confusion is a good thing. It is the first step to new learning, new understanding ... Piaget refers to this learning process as dissonance. In my quest to understand RSS feeds, podcasting, and blogs, I suddenly found myself immersed in foreign vocabulary. Ah, academic content, the key to understanding any new subject material.

My appreciation for Marzano’s strong position on vocabulary development grows. He states, “One of the most glaring differences between successful and less successful students, across the grade levels, can be readily seen in their vocabulary knowledge and lexical skills.”

Some statistics lend perspective:

• High knowledge 3rd graders had vocabularies equal to low performing 12th graders.
• Top high school seniors knew 4 times the words of lower performing classmates.
• 1st grade students from high SES groups knew twice as many words as lower SES students.

Important teaching decisions include:

• Connecting new vocabulary to common terms comparisons. “An RSS feed is like subscribing to a newspaper. It comes to your house each day, rather than you having to drive down to the local market to retrieve it.”
• Visual clues … show a RSS feed.
• Hands on experience … create an RSS feed or examine one already created.
• Speak the word in authentic ways … “Where can I find the RSS feed to subscribe to this blog?”

Vital to remember when training teachers is to use these valuable classroom strategies.