Field Data from One School

This brief summary does not capture everything that was offered by teachers and students. The goal is only to provide an idea of what one group of students offered about a few words, several of which were not included in either the pre- or post-test.

For one student, the pretest words were beautiful, bird, cheese, sing, and tree; the additional post-test words were fox, crow, delicious, swallow, and beak.. Within the context of a riddle game, this student provided several examples of aspects (parts of, etc.) of crow and fox. The student also applied the word delicious to describe pizza, engaged in a discussion of examples of the concept of beware of, and offered hairbrush in a discussion of compound words.

Although it was not determined whether the student already knew aspects of some of the post-test words, it seems clear that she was able to offer information in the classroom that supported the data on these words on the post-test. The student also appeared to have some understanding of beware of, which did not appear on either the pretest or post-test because she did not identify it in print.

For a second student, the pretest words were bird, crow, mouth, beak, and tree; the additional post-test words were fox, swallow, cheese, sing, and piece of. Within a classroom setting, this student was observed using words such as tasty and piece of to refer to food. This student also remarked that one can make a table (the phrase used was “like a table”) out of wood, which was motivated by the word woods. When asked to focus on woods and to notice the s, the student responded that it referred to many trees. Finally, the student was able to provide examples of the concept of beware of.. In essence, the field data for this student provided additional information on words that were not tested: tasty, woods, beware of, and perhaps indirectly, tree (the student used trees).

For another student, the pretest words were fox, drop, bird, mouth, and cheese; the additional post-test words were woods, tiny, beak, beware of, and tree.. This student remarked that tasty was “like delicious [another target word] and yummy.” This student mentioned that wood is “a log, stick”; then, the student modified the response to “same as forests, trees,” after noting the s. In addition, the student mentioned that flattery means “tries to trick you,” and learned a lesson means “do not do it again.”

The student participated in a riddle game about crow and fox, offered examples of the concept of beware, and used the compound words watermelon and bathingsuit. Even with the inclusion of woods and beware, which were tested, these field data provided interesting information about word knowledge for this student, especially given the number of examples for a few target words.