The Teacher Dashboard provides you with the data you need for guiding your practice, for determining grades, and for motivating your students to keep learning words.
Using the Class Stats and Class Leaderboards to Drive Competition
Clicking on the “Student View” tab will bring you to the Class Stats and Class Leaderboards that your students can see as well. You can use this page in a variety of ways to help motivate your students through some friendly (or not-so-friendly) competition. For example, you could set up an inter-class competition among all of your different classes to see which class can master the most words in a given period of time and award the winning class with a class celebration or some other type of academic carrot -- like extra credit, or bonus points on a test. You could also reward students who make it into the top five on the class leaderboard.
Grading Assignments with the Teacher Dashboard
Clicking on the “Assignments” tab for a class will take you to the word lists that you have assigned to that class. And, when you click on a particular word list, you will see in the “Student Progress” view where students are sorted by percentage completion for the practice activity on that list. Practicing a list makes an ideal homework or pre-reading assignment. Achieving 100% on a practice session indicates that a student has reviewed all of the words on a list and has answered a certain number of questions correctly on each of those words. The easiest way to grade students for such assignments is to use those percentages as you would traditional grades (i.e., 90-100: A; 80-89: B; etc.). To facilitate transferring the practice session grades into your gradebook, you can view the class list alphabetically by clicking the word “Student” above the list of names.
Taking Advantage of the Trouble Words List
The “Activity by List” view on the Teacher Dashboard provides you with a list of trouble words that many of your students are struggling with. You may want to dedicate whole-class instruction to the words on the top of that list, or you can also click on individual trouble words in the list to see which specific students struggled with those words. Looking at individual performance on words gives you the option to set up partnerships or small groups to collaboratively work on trouble words they may share. Directing students to visit usage examples on the Vocabulary.com Dictionary pages for the trouble words can provide students with models to study and emulate. It’s always better to show students authentic sentence examples of a word “in the wild” before asking them to use newly acquired words in original sentences.
Clicking on a particular trouble word will also allow you to see which questions students most often answered incorrectly on that word. This type of information can guide you to provide helpful mini-lessons based on the questions. For example, if many students missed the following sentence-completion question for the word monopoly, you could display the sentence only (hiding the answer options) and ask students to highlight or underline any context clues that could help them to figure out the missing word. In this case, seeing that ‘regulators are pressuring __________ to lower their charges to spur competition’ can lead students to come up with a working definition of the word that is missing (e.g., “something with high rates that impedes competition”). Once students develop their own working definitions for the missing word, you can visit the dictionary page for monopoly and compare those working definitions with the real deal.
A question on "monopoly" that you might cover in class