Measures and References: Vocabulary

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Measures

Numerous measures exist to gain a full picture of a student's learning strengths and challenges. Following are examples of measures used to assess this Learner Factor. These measures should be administered and interpreted by experienced professionals.

Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test Fifth Edition (Dunn, 2018): Measures receptive vocabulary in students of all ages.

Nominalization measure (Al-Adeimi, 2017): Measures student use of nominalizations in academic writing.

References

Al-Adeimi, S. 2017. From persuade to persuasion: Comparing nominalizations across subjects in sixth grade persuasive essays. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Beers, S. F., & Nagy, W. E. (2007). Syntactic complexity as a predictor of adolescent writing quality: Which measures? Which genre?. Reading and Writing, 22(2), 185-200.

Duin, A. H., & Graves, M. F. (1987). Intensive vocabulary instruction as a prewriting technique. Reading Research Quarterly, 22(3), 311-330.

Dunn, D. M. (2018). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test: PPVT-5. Minneapolis, MN: NCS Pearson.

Fagan, M. K. (2016). Spoken vocabulary development in deaf children with and without cochlear implants. The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies in Language, 132-145.

Farah, M. J., Shera, D. M., Savage, J. H., Betancourt, L., Giannetta, J. M., Brodsky, N., Malmud, E.K., Hurt, H. (2006). Childhood poverty: Specific associations with neurocognitive development. Brain Research, 1110, 166-174.

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2013). Background knowledge: The overlooked factor in reading comprehension. New York: McGraw Hill Networks.

Geers, A. E., & Sedey, A. L. (2011). Language and verbal reasoning skills in adolescents with 10 or more years of cochlear implant experience. Ear and Hearing, 32(1 Suppl), 39S.

Harmon, J. M., Hedrick, W. B., & Wood, K. D. (2005). Research on vocabulary instruction in the content areas: Implications for struggling readers. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 21(3), 261-280.

Lawrence, J. F., Lervag, A., Hwang, J. K., Lin, G., & Hagen, A. M. (2018). Academic vocabulary and reading comprehension: exploring the relationships across measures of vocabulary knowledge. Reading and Writing, 1-22.

Lee, H. L., Devlin, J. T., Shakeshaft, C., Stewart, L. H., Brennan, A., Glensman, J., Pitcher, K., Crinion, J., Mechelli, A., Frackowiak, R.S.J., Green, D.W., & Price, C. J. (2007). Anatomical traces of vocabulary acquisition in the adolescent brain. Journal of Neuroscience, 27(5), 1184-1189.

Lee, C.D., & Spratley, A. (2010). Reading in the disciplines: The challenges of adolescent literacy. New York, NY: Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Kievit, R. A., Lindenberger, U., Goodyer, I. M., Jones, P. B., Fonagy, P., Bullmore, E. T., The Neuroscience in Psychiatry Network & Dolan, R. J. (2017). Mutualistic coupling between vocabulary and reasoning supports cognitive development during late adolescence and early adulthood. Psychological science, 28(10), 1419-1431.

Nagy, W., Anderson, R. C., & Herman, P. A. (1987). Learning word meanings from context during normal reading. American Educational Research Journal, 24, 237-270.

McQuillan, J. (2006). The effects of print access and print exposure on English vocabulary acquisition of language minority students. The Reading Matrix, 6(1).

Morra, S., & Camba, R. (2009). Vocabulary learning in primary school children: Working memory and long-term memory components. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 104(2), 156-178.

Nippold M. A. (2017). Reading Comprehension Deficits in Adolescents: Addressing Underlying Language Abilities. Language, speech, and hearing services in schools, 48(2), 125-131. doi:10.1044/2016_LSHSS-16-0048

Oslund, E. L., Clemens, N. H., Simmons, D. C., Smith, S. L., & Simmons, L. E. (2016). How vocabulary knowledge of middle-school students from low socioeconomic backgrounds influences comprehension processes and outcomes. Learning and Individual Differences, 159.

Prior, A., Goldina, A., Shany, M., Geva, E., & Katzir, T. (2014). Lexical inference in L2: Predictive roles of vocabulary knowledge and reading skill beyond reading comprehension. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 27(8), 1467-1484.

Rose, L. T., & Rouhani, P. (2012). Influence of Verbal Working Memory Depends on Vocabulary: Oral Reading Fluency in Adolescents With Dyslexia._ Mind, Brain, and Education_, 6(1), 1-9.

Shahar-Yames, D., & Prior, A. (2018). The challenge and the opportunity of lexical inferencing in language minority students. Reading and Writing, 31(5), 1109-1132.

Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 40-59.

Sharkey, P. (2010). The acute effect of local homicides on children's cognitive performance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(26), 11733-11738.

Shefelbine, J. L. (1990). Student factors related to variability in learning word meanings from contest. Journal of Literacy Research, 22, 171-197.

Suggate, S., Schaughency, E., McAnally, H., & Reese, E. (2018). From infancy to adolescence: The longitudinal links between vocabulary, early literacy skills, oral narrative, and reading comprehension. Cognitive Development, 47, 82-95.

van Steensel, R., Oostdam, R., van Gelderen, A., & van Schooten, E. (2016). The role of word decoding, vocabulary knowledge and meta‐cognitive knowledge in monolingual and bilingual low‐achieving adolescents' reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 39(3), 312-329.