CONTENT TEACHERS’ PREDICTIONS OF STUDENTS’ KNOWLEDGE OF SPECIFIC WORDS

This study investigated the accuracy of content teachers and The Living Word Vocabulary (LWV) in predicting students’ know‐ledge of specific words. Subjects were 16 eighth‐grade teachers and 430 of their students. Forty word‐meaning combinations identified as being at the eighth‐grade level in the LWV were selected. Each teacher was asked to predict the percentage of students in a specific class that could read each word and assign it the meaning given. Then the students in the selected classes were given a multiple‐choice test on the 40 words. Results indicated that on the average the teachers underestimated students’ knowledge of the words by 12% while the LWV overestimated it by 3%. Results further indicated that the accuracy of individual teachers’ predictions varied markedly; two teachers underestimated their students’ word knowledge by 39%, while one teacher overestimated it by 20%. Conversely, the LWV predictions of the performance of each of the classes tested were consistently accurate; in no case was the LWV prediction off by more than 10%. The paper concludes with suggestions of ways in which teachers can use the LWV to improve their perceptions of their students’ word knowledge and to select words to teach.