High-Tech Vocab Drills: Engaging But...

Sites like vocabulary.com interest students and show promise as instructional tools, but we won't know for years if digital is really a better path to mastering words.

Recently my students have begun experimenting with the vocabulary building website vocabulary.com. Compared with the paper model of vocab instruction–10 words and their definitions on Monday, a multiple choice quiz on Friday and make sure you study kids–-engagement is super high. Nearly all my students have plugged away happily and reported back that they want to continue using the site, even now that the novelty has waned. So far, retention seems high. On a quiz that I gave twice in the space of 12 days, with no drilling in between and with questions scrambled, the percentage of correct answers actually rose a few points on retest. Additionally, a few students who hadn't been particularly high achievers in other assessments rose near the top. Now my sample size is far too small to draw any conclusions from, and that's a point worth remembering for all the enthusiasm and money that's now pouring into digital literacy gadgetry. We won't really know if it works, or what the downsides are, for years. Plenty of research suggests that teaching vocabulary in the context of reading is more effective than word instruction in isolation, but if you ask English teachers what their students' biggest deficits are, you'll hear "vocabulary" as the first or second response a lot of the time. So there's the desire to do more. Into this gap comes vocabulary.com. It's hot, has gotten good press, and now is used in over 16,000 schools. (Disclosure: I have a professional friendship with one of the principals of the site's developer.) The site allows a teacher to create assignments for classrooms using pre-selected words from literary works or to make up individualized lists. My colleagues and I are using word lists from current class readings, Fahrenheit 451 and Of Mice and Men. To engage students, vocabulary.com uses techniques you'll find in video games: a running point tally to foster competition, badges for accomplishments, a variety of tasks, difficulty levels that vary by a user's mastery, etc. The site is unquestionably "much more fun than studying for a quiz," nearly all of my students report. Basic use is free but to track student progress your school needs a license at $3 per pupil per year. For more, watch the video in this article.

Vocabulary.com certainly looks promising--ask yourself how often as a teacher or a parent you've had to nudge your kids, as I did recently, to stop working on their vocabulary skills to go do something else. But it remains to be be seen whether the site, or whatever its successor turns out to be, can really have a long-term impact on reluctant readers who suffer a vocabulary deficit or is just a cool way (and think about how fleeting "cool" is) for high achievers to study SAT words. For all the breathless TED Talks about what digital learning can do for kids and the $5 billion that will go into ed tech start-ups in 2015, the jury is out on the efficacy of these tools. You can't run "long-term" studies without the "long" part. That's not an argument for sticking to old instructional methods, but it is a reminder that the digital tools coming fast and furious at us are based on hypotheses, not theorems, which vocabulary.com succinctly defines as propositions or statements that can proven to be true every time.

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