VU Word Detectives

Our Assessment

Word Detectives Assessment

What is morphology?

Morphology is the study of the structure of words, specifically looking at roots, affixes, and parts of speech. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning within a word.

Morphological knowledge is closely related to vocabulary knowledge. Students’ knowledge of vocabulary is high correlated with their reading ability.

Our Test

Main Goal of Project: Develop a middle school assessment of morphological knowledge that adapts to efficiently and accurately measure students’ skills. The assessment will be easy to administer, using ipads, and offer easily interpretable scores for researchers and teachers.

Assumptions we are making:

Morphological knowledge is being defined broadly as the ability to identify, manipulate, and use units of meaning in word recognition, spelling, accessing& communicating word meaning (in reading & writing). In terms of this assessment, we are interested in assessing identification, manipulation, and use of morphemes for the following literacy tasks.

MK is multidimensional. The identification, manipulation, and use of morphemes will depend primarily on three areas which interact (for example, form like suffixes will interact with role)

For task, we are considering

  • format (see Table 1—sentence completion, morph judgment, analogy, definition, spelling, word reading, etc)
  • modality (oral, written, both)
  • text (isolated word, comparison, sentence, passage)
  • difficulty of content (frequency, transparency, length)

For role, we are considering

  • semantic , syntactic, phonological, orthographic
  • importance

MK is likely developmental. We are exploring minimal time (gr 5-8), so we will use differences that we expect between gr. 5-8 will function as expectations of difficulty. *(if we have power, we will try to see differences by grade, but we are more interested in difficulty!)

MK integrates with other language systems (vocab, syntax, etc) within assessment to gain broader picture

 

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