and how to assess and track students’ vocabulary knowledge.
Part II contains the academic terms (in this case, cognitive verbs) that we identified from the CCSS, organized into twenty-four categories. These verbs describe how students should interact with the knowledge and skills they learn in class.
Part III contains the domain-specific English language arts (ELA) and math terms that we identified from the CCSS, organized into 116 measurement topics (groups of related words that can be taught together).
The appendix lists all academic and domain-specific terms alphabetically with identifiers so readers can easily find specific words.
PART I
Vocabulary Instruction for the Common Core State Standards
1
The Importance of Vocabulary
Students’ vocabulary knowledge is directly tied to their success in school. This is partly because vocabulary is an important aspect of reading comprehension (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997; Hattie, 2009; National Reading Panel, 2000; Petty, Herold, & Stoll, 1967; Scarborough, 2001; Stahl, 1999; Stahl & Nagy, 2006) and reading is an important part of learning in school. However, vocabulary knowledge helps students in other ways as well. Knowing what words mean and how they interconnect creates networks of knowledge that allow students to connect new information to previously learned information. These networks of knowledge are commonly referred to as prior knowledge or background knowledge (Marzano, 2004). Studies have shown that students with greater background knowledge about a topic learn more, remember more, and are more interested when that topic is taught than those who have less initial background knowledge (Alexander, Kulikowich, & Schulze, 1994; Dochy, Segers, & Buehl, 1999; Tobias, 1994). For example, a student learning to measure temperatures would benefit greatly from previous experience with terms such as Fahrenheit, Celsius, degree, positive number, negative number, or number line. A student learning to write argumentative pieces would probably understand the task and purpose better if he or she had even a rudimentary understanding of terms such as claim and support. Conversely, a student who has never heard these terms and has no experiences associated with them may require more time and effort to understand their meanings and the concepts they signify.
Vocabulary Development
The creators of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) explained that children initially develop their vocabularies through oral conversations, wherein context clues and background knowledge can help them determine word meanings:
Such conversations are context rich in ways that aid in vocabulary acquisition: in discussions, a small set of words (accompanied by gesture and intonation) is used with great frequency to talk about a narrow range of situations children are exposed to on a day-to-day basis. (NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 32)
For example, most children can easily identify different parts of their face and body at a young age because their parents spend lots of time asking them where their nose, mouth, ears, hands, and feet are, using gestures to help them associate words with parts, and praising them (“That’s right! Good for you!”) when the child identifies the correct part. However, not all children have equal exposure to the same quantity and kinds of rich oral conversations necessary for early vocabulary development.
The critical role of oral conversation in the development of vocabulary was brought into sharp relief by the research of Betty Hart and Todd Risley (1995). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they conducted a study designed to observe forty-two young children and their families in their homes at regular intervals over the course of two and a half years (beginning at age one and concluding when the children were three or four). They concluded that “what parents said and did with their children in the first 3 years of language learning had an enormous impact on how much language their children learned and used” (Hart & Risley, 1995, p. 159). Although they found that the quality of the talk that went on in households at all socioeconomic status (SES) levels was about the same, children in higher socioeconomic families simply experienced more talk, as shown in table 1.1. Hart and Risley also found a correlation between children’s vocabulary size and their IQ scores.
Table 1.1: Correlations Between Socioeconomic Status, Talk, Vocabulary Size, and IQ Score
Source: Adapted from Hart & Risley, 1995, p. 176.
As shown in table 1.1, children whose parents talked to them more began preschool and kindergarten with larger vocabularies and higher IQ scores than children whose parents talked to them less. In 2003, Hart and Risley published “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3.” In that article, they used their 1995 data, along with further data collected on the same children in the years since the original study, to extrapolate that in the first four years of life, “an average child in a professional family would accumulate experience with almost 45 million words, an average child in a working-class family 26 million words, and an average child in a welfare family 13 million words” (p. 9). The eponymous 30 million word gap between children in professional families and children in welfare families highlights the powerful role that socioeconomic status plays in vocabulary development.
Although not as extensive as Hart and Risley’s work, Erika Hoff’s 2003 study of over sixty high- and middle-SES children’s interactions with their mothers found similar results. However, she also highlighted the fact that children in higher SES families not only hear more words, but they also have more language-learning experiences around which to interact. She stated that “aspects of experience that support vocabulary acquisition are not equally available to children across socioeconomic strata” (p. 1375). When considered together, Hart and Risley’s (1995, 2003) and Hoff’s (2003) research paint a worrying picture of the vocabulary challenges that lower-SES students face.
Vocabulary progresses in rather predictable ways beyond oral conversation. For example, students develop vocabulary associated with their interests. Jill Castek, Bridget Dalton, and Dana Grisham (2012) explained that in addition to learning vocabulary through interactions with parents, siblings, and other important people in their lives, children learn new vocabulary “as a result of socialization into various communities of practice” (p. 305). A student interested in Greek and Roman mythology will probably develop a larger vocabulary of terms related to that topic than a student interested primarily in cars and motorcycles (who would probably develop rich vocabulary knowledge in that field).
One of the biggest challenges in developing academic vocabulary, like the terms important to the CCSS, is that it might not initially seem related to students’ interests. Additionally, many CCSS terms tend to be intangible and not commonly used in everyday interactions. Castek and her colleagues (2012) observed that “learning to use academic language is one of the greatest challenges of schooling because this register tends to be abstract and distant from spoken vocabulary” (p. 305). Explicit descriptions and examples are necessary to help students understand and use many of the academic vocabulary terms critical to their success in school.
Vocabulary Knowledge
In addition to their findings about socioeconomic status and vocabulary, Hart and Risley (1995) found that children with larger vocabularies acquired
