Charles Perfetti

Vocabulary knowledge is an important component of academic success and impacts skills across academic disciplines. It is a critical component of literacy development. However, the vocabulary skills of high school students in the U.S. are insufficient to meet the demands of college and career. Furthermore, there is very little vocabulary instruction taught in U.S. high schools. The current project will develop a high school vocabulary intervention that builds on the fully developed Dictionary...

Research indicates that explicit vocabulary instruction benefits students' word learning and comprehension of text. However, major instructional challenges remain, for example, determining how to teach enough words to matter and how to teach them so that they are actually learned and retained. The purpose of this project is to develop, iteratively refine, and evaluate the usability and feasibility of an automated tutorial intervention to help children in grades 2-3 learn vocabulary necessary...

The program trained three postdoctoral fellows for research careers in educational science with a special emphasis in reading research.

In this project, the researchers explored how vocabulary-related instruction in schools might reduce the differences in reading achievement between students who enter school with large vocabularies and those who enter school with substantially smaller vocabularies.