Q&A Hero

Q: Dictionary entries are often confusing and ambiguous for students.

Q: Contextual analysis is the best technique for building students' independent word learning skills.

Q: Teachers should seek out ways to build students' interest and awareness of words.

Q: Language arts teachers are the ones who should be responsible for increasing students' vocabulary knowledge.

Q: Students fully understand what is means to "know a word."

Q: Teachers need a variety of ways to reinforce and evaluate students' vocabulary knowledge. List at least three ways teachers can do this.

Q: Explain the word sort activity that can be used with concept cards.

Q: List three vocabulary strategies that students can use independently to enhance their understanding of content area vocabulary words.

Q: List some activities that content area teachers can use to enhance their students' understanding of key vocabulary.

Q: Explain how teachers can model the processes involved in contextual analysis.

Q: Discuss contextual analysis as an independent word learning strategy, noting advantages and disadvantages.

Q: Because there are so many words that could be taught in a content area classroom, discuss the steps for narrowing down and selecting the targeted words.

Q: What are the types of vocabulary words that content area teachers can teach and reinforce in their classrooms? Give an example of each from your own content area.

Q: Discuss some ways that you can stimulate students' awareness and interest in words.

Q: Explain what it means to "know" a word.

Q: KWLpromotes engaged and purposeful exploration of the topic as students search for answers to their own questions.

Q: Working with anticipation guides helps create the urge in students to know more and sustains interest in topics, at least within the context of a single day's lesson.

Q: SQPL uses students own questions to sustain attention to a text, lecture, video, or other information source.

Q: Books youth would prefer to read are often scarce to non-existent in school libraries.

Q: The same students who may be disconnected from academic life and are aliterate within the domain of school-related reading may also be active readers and users of new media at home and in their communities.

Q: Students must have both the skill or the will to learn in order achieve academic success.

Q: Students with high, school-related self-efficacythe belief and confidence that they have the capacity to accomplish meaningful tasks and produce a desired result in academic settingsare more engaged and motivated than students with low self-efficacy.

Q: Youth from the lowest socio-economic status (SES) who were highly engaged readers, do not performed as well on the assessment as youth from the middle SES group.

Q: Adolescents who identified themselves as being interested in reading not only achieved better scores on the NAEP but had better high school grade point averages than their less interested peers.

Q: An individual youth's motivation to read and learn is linked closely to the social worlds that are part of that youth's daily life.

Q: Youth from across the globe exhibit an increase in performance and interest as they move from primary to secondary school.

Q: Motivation can be detached from social contexts, such as classrooms, families, and communities.

Q: Why are guest speakers a good resource for increasing motivation in reading and learning?

Q: Name the five strategies used in increasing student engagement outlined in the chapter and provide examples on how they can be demonstrated in the classroom.

Q: Explain how teachers employ the lesson impressionstrategies to motivate students to focus more closely on the reading material on any given day.

Q: How are anticipation guides useful in generating local interest?

Q: Why is choice important in the disciplinary classroom?

Q: Why has developing self-efficacy in students become important in academic success?

Q: If teachers can keep students engaged in reading and learning do you believe they will be able to enable students to overcome what might otherwise be insuperable barriers to academic success?

Q: How can teachers have control over the arrangement of conditions within the classroom that can effect positive academic motivation for adolescents?

Q: What do researchers attribute the decline in academic motivation by youth between primary and secondary grades?

Q: How can content area teachers engage and sustain efforts in reading, writing and thinking in the disciplinary classroom?

Q: When designing a cloze procedure for your students, you should systematically delete every ___________ word.

Q: Readability formulas are based on the principle that difficult texts are ones that have _________ sentences and ____________ words.

Q: Grades will be more useful if teachers make _________________ how they will determine students' course grades and how they will evaluate assignments.

Q: To be successful, it is important that portfolios be ________________________________ with other classroom activities.

Q: If a student correctly answers 80% of the questions on a Content-Area Inventory, that information suggests that the textbook is ____________ for him.

Q: Teachers can discover more about students' background knowledge, interests and belief systems by asking them to write a ___________________.

Q: Word fluency, focused listing, and fill-in concept maps are examples of _______________ that can be used for assessment and evaluation.

Q: The amount of error associated with grade equivalents may be anywhere from half a year to a _____________________.

Q: Standardized tests offer teachers only a gross ______________________ of their students' reading ability and skills.

Q: The most common scores generated by standardized tests include _____________ and __________________.

Q: Many students believe learning is something that is _____________ and happens ____________, with very little effort on their part.

Q: Effective assessment requires planning, __________________, and managing a variety of data.

Q: Because there is no single "best" way to assess students and capture the teaching/learning process, content area teachers should use ______________ data sources over a period of time.

Q: Assessment should guide and inform ____________________________ and should be integrated into the daily classroom routine.

Q: One way teachers can make explicit how they will evaluate an assignment is to provide students, in advance, a checklist specifying the criteria.

Q: In order to be successful in a content area classroom, portfolios should have a physical and conceptual structure.

Q: Reliability, as a characteristic of standardized tests, means that the test measures what the authors claim that it measures.

Q: Assessment should focus entirely on students' skill needs and strengths.

Q: Readability formulas are reliable and valid ways of determining the appropriateness of a textbook for a group of students.

Q: Checklists are one way to involve students in self-evaluation and reflection of their written products.

Q: The Content Reading Inventory is the only way to assess the match between students and their textbook.

Q: There are a variety of informal assessment procedures that can be used across the content areas.

Q: Formal assessment procedures such as standardized tests offer teachers no particular advantages.

Q: Assessment involves teachers in a process that begins the school year.

Q: List three techniques that teachers can use to determine whether their textbooks are appropriate and suitable for their students.

Q: Discuss the guidelines that should be considered when content area teachers use grades as a form of evaluation.

Q: What types of work can be included in a portfolio?

Q: In order to capitalize on the usefulness of portfolios, what are the principles suggested by research studies?

Q: Explain the two basic parts of a Content-Area Inventory and the information it would provide teachers about their students.

Q: Discuss some specific ways in which content area teachers can use their classroom activities as opportunities for assessment.

Q: Imagine that you are talking to a parent group about standardized tests and they want to know more about grade equivalents. How would you explain this concept to them?

Q: Discuss the uses and limitations of standardized tests.

Q: Explain why it is important to include students' belief systems in the assessment process.

Q: Describe some ways in which students can be involved in the assessment process.

Q: Skillful disciplinary teachers understand that the meaning making and meaning using process occurs more readily within supportive social contexts.

Q: Opinionniares are not beneficial in promoting deep and meaningful understandings of content area topics.

Q: One strategy for sensitizing students to both micro- and macrostructures of expository and informational prose is process mapping.

Q: Text-based processing is literal-level comprehension, or right there thinking.

Q: Comprehension theory holds that students learn best when they are taught how to create or generate their own learning prompts and demonstrations.

Q: It has been demonstrated that acts of meaning making and meaning using decrease when teachers exploit the social world of the classroom and socially-derived texts from their students.

Q: The social dimension takes into account that making, extracting and using meaning is a social process.

Q: Issues of engagement, identity, agency, and goals comprise the personal dimension of comprehension.

Q: A class textbook's structure and design will not impact on a student's ability to achieve a moderate degree comprehension.