Vocabulary for the Common Core. Robert J. Marzano
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the differences between drawing and sketching. Second, the teacher can provide examples of past students’ nonlinguistic representations for terms. Third, the teacher can allow students to discuss their ideas for nonlinguistic representations in groups before they work individually on their pictures. Finally, the teacher can help students look for images on the Internet that represent the terms. For instance, a student depicting the term time zone might print out a picture of the United States and color the states to represent the different time zones.
In summary, steps 2 and 3 are designed to deepen students’ knowledge of a term through multiple exposures. Students record their linguistic and nonlinguistic descriptions of the term in their vocabulary notebooks, where they can revisit them to clarify or add to their initial understandings as they become more familiar with the term.
Step 4: Engage Students Periodically in Activities That Help Them Add to Their Knowledge of the Terms in Their Vocabulary Notebooks
Steps 1, 2, and 3 are designed to be implemented in order, with the teacher describing, explaining, and exemplifying a term and students subsequently describing, explaining, and exemplifying the term on their own, both linguistically and nonlinguistically. Steps 4, 5, and 6 are less sequential. Each is an important element of the process described here, but it is not necessary to perform them in order. For example, step 4 involves activities that help students add to their knowledge of vocabulary terms, and step 6 involves games that allow students to play with terms. In some cases, students might play games with a word (step 6) before completing comparison activities with the word (step 4). This is completely acceptable. In fact, a teacher might use steps 4, 5, or 6 only once per week or once every two weeks. No matter how frequently or infrequently steps 4, 5, and 6 are employed, it is important for students to continue revising and adding to their vocabulary notebook entries as their knowledge of a word deepens and grows.
There are many activities that help students add to their knowledge of terms as directed in step 4. Some are very simple. For example, a teacher might ask students to say or write any words they think of when they hear a target word. When used orally, this is an excellent activity for small intervals of time, such as when students are waiting in line to go to lunch or recess or during the last minutes before it is time for students to change classes. Students can complete this activity as a class, in small groups, in pairs, or individually. The teacher should allow students to brainstorm related words for a specific period of time and then ask students to stop. If students have been saying words aloud, the last person to say a word then briefly explains how that word is related to the target word. If students have been writing individual lists of words, students could trade lists and ask their partners to explain any words that are unfamiliar or don’t make sense.
Other activities for augmenting students’ vocabulary knowledge could involve identifying similarities and differences or examining affixes and root words. Here we provide a number of activities for each.
Identifying Similarities and Differences
Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock (2001) identified four strategies that students can use to identify similarities and differences: (1) comparing and contrasting, (2) classifying, (3) creating metaphors, and (4) creating analogies. Comparing and contrasting involves identifying attributes that are the same or different between two or more items or concepts. Classifying involves grouping like items or concepts into categories based on their attributes or characteristics. Creating metaphors involves finding connections between ideas or concepts that do not seem connected at a surface level. Finally, creating analogies involves describing the relationship between a pair of items or concepts by comparing the pair to another pair.
Comparing and Contrasting
When comparing and contrasting terms, students can think about ways that terms are similar and different by using sentence stems provided by the teacher. This sort of structure helps students both make substantive comparisons and compare terms logically. Following are a few examples:
_________ and _________ are similar because they both:
• _________
• _________
_________ and _________ are different because:
• _________ is _________, while _________ is _________
• _________ is _________, while _________is _________
These stems help students structure their thinking and clearly express their thoughts. Thus, a student might compare circle and sphere as follows:
Circles and spheres are similar because they both:
• Have circumferences, radii, diameters, and surface areas
• Have perfect symmetry
Circles and spheres are different because:
• A circle is two-dimensional, while a sphere is three-dimensional
• A circle does not have volume, while a sphere does have volume
In this case, the student found similarities between the measurements and symmetries and differences between the dimensions and volume.
Venn diagrams are another structure that can help students compare and contrast characteristics of two to three terms. For example, a student might compare adage to idiom as shown in figure 2.4.
Figure 2.4: Venn diagram comparing adage and idiom.
Note that in the Venn diagram, each characteristic under adage corresponds to a characteristic beneath idiom. So, the first characteristic involves the term’s specificity to a certain language, the second involves literal meaning, and the third involves veracity.
Similar to the Venn diagram is the double bubble diagram. Here, students compare two terms by identifying their shared and unique characteristics. For example, if a student was comparing the terms base 10 and base 60, he or she might create a double bubble diagram like the one shown in figure 2.5. Each term is placed in a bubble, one on the right and one on the left. Characteristics of each are written in the surrounding bubbles. Shared characteristics are placed between the two terms; unique characteristics are placed around the outside of each term. Then, lines are drawn to show which characteristics are unique and shared. The double bubble diagram in figure 2.5 indicates that both the base 10 and base 60 systems used finger counting methods and were used in ancient cultures.
Figure 2.5: Double bubble diagram.
Like the diagrams presented previously, the double bubble diagram is a structure that can help students make and organize substantive comparisons between two terms.
Sometimes students need to compare and contrast more than two terms at a time, however. In these cases, students can use a comparison matrix, which examines several items according to several attributes. Like the Venn and double bubble diagrams, the matrix structures students’ comparisons and helps them identify meaningful similarities and differences between terms. The matrix, however, has the added advantage of accommodating a larger number of terms for comparison. For example, the comparison matrix in table 2.4 shows how a student might compare the three terms argumentative, informative/explanatory, and narrative.
The student first fills in his or her observations about each term relative to each attribute in the matrix. For example, the student observed that the purpose of argumentative writing is to convince someone of something. Once each cell has been filled in, the student examines the matrix and draws conclusions about similarities and differences between the terms, which are recorded