This is an edition of Wednesday Words, a weekly feature on language. But it does mean that students will have to be inspired to want to know those words without necessarily getting points in return. Zimmer, like the College Board, emphasizes that eliminating lachrymose or obsequious or punctilious from the SAT doesn’t denigrate the value of knowing such words.
“You really need to appreciate the full range of meanings that a word can have.” “It’s necessary for them to be a little selective in what they emphasize,” he says. He is sympathetic to the College Board’s explanation that they can only test students on so many words and being able to understand the many meanings of intense is more pressing than understanding the single meaning of dilettante. The more they have to integrate, the more that reflects what you need to do with a vocabulary as a reader.”īen Zimmer, executive producer of, a site with the mission of fostering and expanding vocabularies, also sees worth in the SAT changes.
“It’s an integration of the sentence and the word that’s going to help us. “We don’t need to have a bunch of memorized definitions in our head,” McKeown says. McKeown believes Tier Two words are the ones that kids should be taught in school, given there is no “infinte time or brain space.” The method of teaching that she has championed for more than 30 years is that students need to go through three stages to learn a word: be taught a definition, be shown how the word is used and then use it themselves. Though not consulted, she applauds the SAT shift. Other Tier Two words, McKeown says, might be alleviate, consistent, coincide, congenial, indelible, discord, occur, mention, emerge, admit, perform, fortunate, require or maintain. The redesigned test will focus on deeply understanding more common words rather than being familiar with linguistic gems. A raconteur, by contrast, is a raconteur. The key point, as far as the College Board is concerned, is that intense is not only a word that students will regularly encounter but one that could mean A, B, C or D, depending on the context. Some regions could end up bloated beyond the capacity of their infrastructure, while others struggle, their promise stymied by inadequate human or other resources.Īs used in line 55, “intense” most nearly means The coming decades will likely see more intense clustering of jobs, innovation, and productivity in a smaller number of bigger cities and city-regions.
In sample questions released today, the College Board gives this example: They appear more in text than in conversation, and they repackage concepts a child could understand on a basic level with more nuance. The Tier Two words go across domains and might have many meanings in different contexts. Tier Three words usually teach a new concept, are relevant only in a particular discipline and have one meaning, like isotope or asphalt or even piano. Tier One words are those that kids will encounter naturally as they’re beginning to talk, like mother, ball, cup, food, run, walk, sit or bed. McKeown and Isabel Beck, who devised a system for classifying words into one of three tiers. That terminology comes from academics at the University of Pittsburgh, particularly Professor Margaret G. In materials released today, the College Board says they’ll be concentrating on what are known as “Tier Two” words. As Jim Patterson, executive director of assessment, says, “Students might well only know the word’s meaning from studying it in isolation, perhaps from an unofficial SAT preparation word list.” And memorization skills, the kind that would also put students in the position to know the definitions of the wrong answers in the above question, are not the skills the College Board wants to be testing.
One reason is that the one-sentence question provides little context, so it tests knowledge of knowing a word’s definition, not necessarily how to gather meaning from reading something.