7 Vocabulary assessment tips to evaluate students’ growth

While educators will agree that vocabulary is the foundation of language and vocabulary growth is related to school achievement, conducting assessments to gauge individuals’ vocabulary acquisition can be challenging. When we talk about vocabulary acquisition, we are speaking to the processes and skills needed to learn unfamiliar words and their meanings. From pronunciation to definition and use, strong vocabulary acquisition equips students with a robust understanding that bolsters their overall communication, comprehension, and expressive skills. Vocabulary instruction is multifaceted, mixing direct instruction with immersive experiences designed to mimic real-world use cases. But what is the best way to assess students’ vocabulary knowledge?

Why are vocabulary assessments important?

Effective vocabulary assessment is crucial for tracking student progress academically, socially, and emotionally, as it encompasses academic, everyday, and personal vocabulary. All of these are essential for comprehension, communication, and developing emotional intelligence.

While we often think of vocabulary assessment in terms of academic vocabulary—formal, abstract, and technical terms—it’s equally important to assess everyday and emotional vocabulary. Academic vocabulary appears in textbooks and exams, while everyday vocabulary strengthens communication skills in various situations. Emotional vocabulary is key to emotional intelligence, helping students express feelings and understand others. Assessing vocabulary in reading, writing, speaking, and active listening contexts is vital, as it ensures a comprehensive evaluation of student progress across different areas of communication. For English language learners, these assessments can be particularly valuable, as they often require targeted support.

The power of Flocabulary

Flocabulary’s unique instructional approach keeps the power of vocabulary at the heart of the platform’s content and methodology through immersive storytelling. The research-backed lessons elicit emotional connections with students, making the learning memorable and meaningful.

Did you know that hip-hop songs have two times as many words per song as other genres? Through multimedia hip-hop videos, Flocabulary embeds meaningful ways to engage with vocabulary. Each video is accompanied by these key vocabulary activities from the lesson sequence:

• Vocab Cards
• Vocab Game
• Break It Down
• Read and Respond
• Quiz
• Lyric Lab

There are various approaches Flocabulary takes for selecting words and teaching vocabulary overall. When it comes to word knowledge, Flocabulary moves students beyond Tier 1 vocabulary (those basic words that commonly appear in spoken language) and toward Tier 2 vocabulary (high-frequency words that we tend to see across a variety of domains) and Tier 3 vocabulary (low-frequency and domain-specific words that often require explicit instruction).

Here’s an example of the engaging videos you can find on Flocabulary!

New to Flocabulary? Teachers can sign up for a trial to access our lesson videos and assessment activities. Administrators can get in touch with us to learn more about unlocking the full power of Flocabulary through Flocabulary Plus.

7 Vocabulary assessment tips to evaluate students’ growth

1. Take a cross-curricular approach

While vocabulary can be taught explicitly as part of an English Language Arts program one word at a time, vocabulary acquisition should be a goal that is woven throughout all subject areas, across the curriculum. To promote word retention and retrieval, find ways to link and connect word families to help students decode, encode, and decipher meanings.

Flocabulary’s Word Up is a research-based and standards-aligned vocabulary program that provides close to 140 instructional lessons for grade levels 2-5 and 6-8, teaching over 1,000 terms pulled directly from standardized tests. With pre-and post-assessments, Word Up is a great diagnostic tool to determine where to start and how best to proceed with data-informed instruction. Teachers have found a variety of ways to use the multimedia approach of Word Up throughout their instructional strategies in order to support students with vocabulary and reading development.

2. Read, read, and read some more

Vocabulary instruction and reading comprehension are often thought of as a reciprocal relationship. Whether leveraging fiction or nonfiction passages, there are a host of evidence-based strategies to bolster students’ literacy skills. When it comes to vocabulary acquisition, Hirsch (2003) found that students need to know over 90% of the words in a text to comprehend them. Marzano found that students need as many as 17 exposures to a word in a range of different contexts for that word to move into their long-term memory.

Flocabulary’s 1,300+ video-based K-12 lessons provide a host of instructional strategies that support the Science of Reading. To start with, in every lesson, you can encourage students to construct a deeper understanding of new vocabulary using Flocabulary’s Vocab Cards, which are based on the Frayer model. These Vocab Cards provide students with scaffolding to unpack a word’s definition, relate it to an image, brainstorm about synonyms and antonyms, and craft a sentence using the word in another context. Effective assessments can also enhance students’ oral vocabularies, providing a foundation for better reading comprehension.

3. Challenge higher-order thinking

When it comes to comprehension, teachers often start with skills tied to basic remembering and understanding such as recalling, defining, and memorizing, or grouping, expressing, and paraphrasing. Yet, as you teach and assess tiered vocabulary, consider the ways you can engage students’ higher-order thinking skills (“HOTS”) by crafting questions that challenge kids to apply, analyze, and evaluate—key objectives outlined in the framework of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Flocabulary’s lesson sequence and multidimensional learning experiences guide and support kids in your reading program to push beyond basic comprehension skills. They can test their own knowledge through one of Flocab’s interactive activities, such as Vocab Game, where they practice and reinforce new vocabulary by answering questions in order to unlock sounds and build an original beat of their own. This added creative angle to the game addresses the pinnacle skill of Bloom’s Taxonomy to demonstrate mastery: CREATE.

4. Evaluate, assess, and check for understanding

Educators are masters at formative assessment, conducting multiple checks for understanding within a lesson and across a given school day, or even a full unit of study. Throughout the school day, teachers then can listen for clues as to how students are or are not testing out their understanding of such key vocabulary. When designing vocabulary assessments for the classroom, it’s important to consider various elements such as phonological awareness and word parts, which are crucial for students’ language development.

Vocabulary formative assessments can be observations about students’ general behaviors, such as:

• Do they challenge themselves to try to use newly acquired vocab?
• Are they using the words accurately and in the correct context?
• How might they use the words fluently in their daily conversations?

In addition to observations and informal vocabulary assessments, you can lean on the student data shared in your analytics dashboard and make it actionable with Flocabulary’s Vocabulary Practice Sets. Under any given subject in your dashboard, you can see which students have a low proficiency score. Simply click on “Assign Vocab Practice,” and that student will receive Vocab Flashcards, additional videos, and a customized Vocab Game featuring the 10 words that they need to practice most—all personalized without your having to create any additional content. These personalized Vocabulary Practice Sets provide a powerful tool to individualize instruction, supplying you with more data to inform your upcoming instruction—all of which speaks to the power of vocabulary formative assessment strategies.

5. Introduce test-taking strategies

Although you don’t want to teach the test, standardized testing often does evaluate vocabulary in an isolated and disconnected way. Instead of raising the flag come spring around states’ standardized testing periods, find opportunities to use formative assessment for vocabulary throughout the school year to support students in analyzing words for meaning.

Make sure to support your students with sleuthing strategies for when they encounter a word they do not know, by asking questions such as:

• Can you tell the part of speech?
• What other words does it look or sound like?
• Can you break apart the word to decipher root words, prefixes, or suffixes?
• Can you use context clues? 
• Can you find any related synonyms or antonyms?
• Can you restate the word in another sentence?

Flocabulary’s Break It Down* challenges students to answer questions about the content area and academic vocabulary they’ve learned by selecting video clips to cite evidence for their answers. Such strategies are helpful for students to lean on when they encounter a word they do not know. With Flocabulary’s Read & Respond, students similarly can challenge their comprehension by evaluating key vocabulary in another context through an additional reading passage, and then answering text-dependent questions—great test prep!

*This feature is available to teachers with a school or district Flocabulary Plus license only. Schedule a call to learn more.

6. Be insight-rich

In this day and age of seemingly endless technologies, it is too easy to be data-rich yet insight-poor. Find ways to collect data and analyze trends to inform and personalize your instructional strategies. When it comes to vocabulary assessment, look for individual and group patterns that illustrate what your students are grasping or where they might need more support when it comes to multiple exposures and acquisition of words.

Flocabulary offers a suite of analytic tools, including My Analytics for Flocabulary Plus. These tools provide access to data that can help identify areas of strength as well as opportunities for remediation with students. This real-time data highlights word exposure as well as word practice and proficiency through Flocabuary’s videos and vocabulary assessment activities.

With Flocabulary Plus, you can assign students extra practice for vocabulary acquisition by subject area: Language Arts, Math, Social Studies, Science, and Vocabulary. These auto-generated, personalized vocabulary practice sets support data-driven instruction by facilitating teachers’ personalization of shared resources.

7. Play with your words

Wordplay is actually a literary technique, where one can explore vocabulary words and their nuanced meanings in clever and fun ways. With wordplay, students can express their understanding of academic or abstract terms, or they can showcase their comprehension in a personalized and creative way.

In Flocab’s Lyric Lab, students demonstrate their mastery by writing and creating their own raps using hip-hop instruments. A mix of project-based learning, cultural responsiveness, and music in the classroom, Lyric Lab uses Bloom’s Taxonomy to challenge students’ higher-order thinking skills while putting them in the driver’s seat of their own learning.

Start using Flocabulary today

In this ever-changing world of technology, you will find a plethora of tools and platforms that can support robust vocabulary instruction and aid students’ learning journeys. However, you will want to constantly make sure that you are assessing student progress to make sure the activity or resource at hand (or at one’s fingertip!) is truly supporting the end learning goals. Flocabulary’s proven methodology and robust library of multimedia content and activities support students’ vocabulary acquisition throughout grades K-12. Try out some of the suggested vocabulary assessment ideas to see how Flocab’s cross-curricular vocabulary exposure and targeted practice lead to stronger literacy skills overall.

• 95% of educators who use Flocabulary daily or weekly find their students are very or highly engaged with Flocabulary lessons
• 91% of students agree that after watching a Flocbaulary video, they have a better understanding of what they’re learning
• 97% of educators who use Flocabulary daily or weekly find that students who are challenging to engage will engage more readily with Flocabulary lessons

New to Flocabulary? Teachers can sign up for a trial to access our lesson videos and assessment activities. Administrators can get in touch with us to learn more about unlocking the full power of Flocabulary through Flocabulary Plus.