Vanderbilt Word Detectives

Have you ever wondered how to learn the more than 200,0000 words that are present in academic English? Memorizing all those definitions would take forever!  Our project focuses on figuring out words rather than memorizing them. The goal of our VU WORD DETECTIVES project is to develop a new computer adapted assessment of word reasoning for middle school students with teacher reports. This will allow teachers to gather information about their students efficiently and target instruction to improve their reading skills.

More About Us

Many of the difficult words we encounter can be figured out by thinking about word families! For example, if you are reading a chemistry text and have to figure out what the word reactivation means (like reactivation of certain chemicals), you can think of all the related words like active, activate, and action or the root word act or the prefix re or the suffixes ate and ion to figure it out.

Our project will take three years. We just completed the first year, piloting our assessment with over 500 students. We’re taking some time this summer to analyze our findings, improve our questions, build in more interactive iPad formats, and build relationships with more schools. Please have a look around to discover more about morphology, get resources for improving instruction, and learning more about our project.

Follow Us

Follow us on twitter and facebook. We are regularly posting updates about our work, interesting articles or instructional ideas, and ways you can get involved.

Twitter: VU Word Detectives @worddetectives

Facebook: VU Word Detectives