An Open-Source Assessment Tool for Evaluating Growth in Expressive Vocabulary

• In Event: 2-011 - Interactive Poster Session and Reception

Abstract

Vocabulary growth has traditionally been measured by means of standardized assessment tools of single words: examiners ask children to point at or label pictures. These tasks, however, fail to measure changes in the words that children are using spontaneously to hold conversations and tell stories; furthermore, although they are often psychometrically sound, these norm-referenced tests may provide biased results for children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. This poster describes our work with an open-source tool for assessing children’s use of rare vocabulary, the words that can add color or precision to their language.

We evaluated narratives from 119 school-age children, largely from high-need communities, to assess the following research questions:

1. Does spontaneous use of rare vocabulary increase with age among school-age children?

2. Is spontaneous use of rare vocabulary associated with performance on standardized language assessments?

3. Does rare vocabulary use distinguish reliably between children in gifted and general education classrooms?

4. Is use of rare vocabulary correlated with use of non-mainstream American English (NMAE)?

We addressed these questions using an open-source tool called WERVE (Mahurin-Smith, DeThorne, & Petrill, 2015) that functions within the free language analysis software package known as CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000). WERVE generates a tally of the rare vocabulary used in a language sample, based on a comparison with a corpus of 1.2 million words used in conversations and narratives by school-aged children. Though WERVE is drawn from language samples produced by a large sample of European American children from middle-income backgrounds (Mahurin-Smith et al., 2015), our prior work shows that African American children perform similarly (Mills, Mahurin-Smith, & Steele, 2017).

Our analyses indicated that rare vocabulary use does increase with age and is significantly correlated with results from standardized language tests. Additionally, it was a reliable indicator of gifted classroom placement. Finally, use of rare vocabulary was a dialect-neutral measure:. children’s use of rare vocabulary was independent of their production of NMAE.

These results indicate that WERVE offers a culturally fair and sensitive means of assessing language ability among school-age children, with the potential to aid in identifying both gifted children and those who may be facing language challenges.

Authors

• Monique Mills, Ohio State University

• Jamie Mahurin-Smith, Illinois State University
  Presenting Author