#196: Writing Goals for Vocabulary (Part 1)

Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. I will be your host and presenter today. We're continuing the goal series and today we are going to chat about vocabulary goals, starting with kind of more of the foundational skills. And then next week we're going to dive into more complex vocabulary goals.

Before we dive into the goals that we're writing, I want to take a quick moment to think about the importance of these goals and why we might want to include vocabulary goals because we do have very limited time in our sessions and we only get to write a handful of goals for our students. And we want to be selecting the goals that are going to make a meaningful impact and allow them to access the curriculum and just make their lives a little bit better. So I want to start off by revisiting the Matthew Effect. This was shared by Stanovich in 1986. The Matthew Effect is the effect where students who read more tend to learn more words, which results in improved comprehension.

If we're trying to read a passage and we don't understand the words, then that is going to significantly impact our comprehension. But on the other hand, if students struggle with reading, they are reading less, they're learning fewer words, and they're having poor comprehension as a result because they aren't able to read as much, they're not getting as much exposure, they're not learning as many words, and because they have a smaller vocabulary, they've struggled with their comprehension. And so it's just this not so fun effect where a lot of our students continue to fall behind because they have that initial struggle to be able to read and then they're reading less and learning less words, which then impacts their comprehension.

That is some of the rationale behind targeting vocabulary is just helping our students catch up in that way. And of course, targeting reading and improving their ability to read would make a big impact as well. But today we're focusing on vocabulary. And then another compounding effect here is that a lot of the students that we work with often don't learn words indirectly. And they struggle to learn words directly and they need to be taught words in a more direct way. And this is, this was discussed by Pence and Justice in 2004. I'll share the research citation in the show notes, which you can find at slpnow.com/196.

So our students are reading less, they're learning fewer words and they're just getting less exposure. And with the exposure that they're getting, they're not learning words. They're learning fewer words indirectly as well. And they need to be taught words directly. So you can see how that continues to compound and compound and compound. And it's interesting too, there's a lot of research around how many exposures a student needs to a word for it to become a part of their vocabulary. And Marzano in 2004 said that the average child needs 15 meaningful exposures for a word to become automation.

And then Pence and Justice in 2004, again, shared that children with language impairments need more exposures than the average child. We need to be thinking about that when we're writing goals in terms of, OK, so what is realistic for our students and how do we want to tackle this? And we'll revisit that in just a little bit.

But some other things that I wanted to share. So Snell et al. in 2015 talked about vocabulary being identified as a key factor in the achievement gap. Children from low income families know significantly fewer words when they enter school. And if we go back to that Matthew effect, because they know fewer words, that results in poorer comprehension.

And then they struggle with reading more and it's just this cyclical cycle. And the number of words in a child's vocabulary is an indicator of their linguistic health and it's a factor in their ability to use language in varied context. So we have a lot of rationale behind why we might want to target vocabulary for our students.

But how do we know if this is an area that we want to target? So one huge red flag for me, and of course, we have our formal assessment data and there is going to be, there will be vocabulary subtests that, and if they score below, like if they score lower in those areas, that might be an indicator that we want to look at vocabulary.

But we also want to be looking at parent and teacher report. Are parents and teachers reporting that these students struggle with comprehension? Are they struggling readers? Are they falling behind on the measures that teachers are collecting in terms of reading progress? And when we're observing them in the classroom, do we see anything that might be indicative of challenges or difficulty with vocabulary or less less linguistically healthy kiddo in terms of their ability to use vocabulary in a number of contexts, whether it's comprehension or production.

And so there's a lot of things to think about, and that's why we want to collect different data in addition to that formal assessment so we can look at the parent teacher report, work samples, classroom observation, maybe some curriculum-based assessments or criterion reference test just to help us get a better idea of where they're at with their vocabulary. I've broken this down into different areas. So today I want to focus on more foundational skills.

Basic concepts and categories and object functions. I think these are a precursor skill for students. So if they don't have those basic concepts, they're really going to struggle with following directions. And they really need that basic vocabulary, whether it is those basic concepts or the categories and object functions and describing words.

If they are going to giving definitions, one of the, or like defining new words and defining unknown words and learning to understand them, if they don't have that foundational vocabulary, that's going to be really challenging because that gives us that many more hurdles. Because when we are introducing unknown words.

If we're looking at tier two words, for example, the student has to understand the definition to be able to add that vocabulary word to their mental dictionary, so to speak. So we wanna give them some of those words because it'll be really important for things like following directions and that initial comprehension, but they'll need it as a foundational skill as we start targeting more complex vocabulary. So that's where we're starting today.

And then next week we'll dive into more of the tier two words and affixes and all of that good stuff. But starting with basic concepts, basic concepts have been demonstrated to be incredibly important for future academic achievement. And if we are, if we observe in the classroom, we can see that kindergarten teachers and early elementary students teachers use basic concepts with intense frequency when they're giving directions and giving instruction. So this is very, very relevant as a foundational skill because it's a building block to be able to access more complex vocabulary. But it is also very relevant to the curriculum at this age and being able to access the curriculum and following directions.

Again, I'm going to be a broken record throughout this series, but that's why it's so important to get teacher and parent report and to get work samples and to do a classroom observation to see how these things are coming up. I'm going to share two formal assessments that we can use to look at basic concepts.

We likely won't be administering these tests to every single student. So it might be helpful to look at the parent and teacher report and those work samples and observations to see if this might be an area of need. Like is the student demonstrating that they're having difficulty following directions or do they seem to be struggling with comprehension?

If so, it might be worth assessing this a little bit further with a formal assessment or just some informal assessments too. But two formal assessments that we have are the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts. And I don't know if I pronounced that correctly, but it's B-O-E-H-M. And again, I'll link to these tests in the show notes, which you can find at slpnow.com/196.

So those are some options. And of course, again, again reiterating that we want to use multiple pieces of data to help decide what we want to do. And I want to share some really cool things. hopefully we're convinced how important basic concepts are for our students. And then there's some cool studies and like inspiration for how we might tackle this. So a study by Lund et al in 2019, there were three conditions. So the SLP only, the adapted PE teacher only, or the third condition was where the SLP and the PE teacher co-treated. And every week they selected five concept words.

They did this co-treating in 30 minute large group lessons and there was a more significant effect. They found a more significant effect when the PE teacher and the SLP were co-treating, which was really interesting to see. And so that can be a fun strategy or idea if you are writing a basic concepts goal.

Although the purpose of this episode isn't to start diving into treatment, but that could give you some ideas on maybe what types of goals you want to write. So they identified five words each time. And so that could be something that we do. Where we work with the teacher to select X number of basic concepts, maybe the basic concepts that occur most frequently or seem to be the most impactful, and then use that to write a goal. And then there was a follow-up study by Schmidt et al in 2023, and they found that teachers were able to effectively adapt the intervention that we just talked about, and they used it with autistic preschoolers.

So if you're looking for some activity ideas, jumping head to intervention, Lund et al. 2019 and Schmidt et al. 2023 might be some good resources to look into. So in terms of the goals for basic concepts, we can look at comprehension or production. So whether we have students identify basic concepts, like show me the one that is big.

Given a field of choices, for example, or we can have students name them. So there's different ways that we can tackle those goals and we can identify specific concepts that we want students to use. One way that I've done this in the past is I've administered like an informal basic concept assessment and I've identified the number of concepts that a student has mastered and I

Sometimes have written a broader goal of like they'll increase their score on this informal assessment from like 20 out of 50 to 30 out of 50, for example. And then I would just select the words that I want to, or the concepts that I want to target. Or you can get more specific and identify the concepts that you want the student to master by the end of the year.

Attach a list of those to the IEP, and then that would guide your intervention. And you would know, OK, I'm going to cycle through these words and target them until we master them. And I've done other podcast episodes about how to structure that intervention as well. that could be, those are some strategies to set up your goals, whether it's increasing the score on an informal assessment.

Or building a list of specific concepts that you want to target and using that to guide intervention. I think the latter might be a little bit more impactful and effective. then now that brings us to the second section, which is categories and object functions. So again, I'm writing goals for categories and object functions based on multiple data points. So maybe there's something in a formal assessment that indicates students could use support with like categories, object functions, describing words.

I would also consider teacher and parent report and look at work samples and classroom observations and maybe a language sample and see like, do they seem to have difficulty following those directions that incorporate those types of words, do they have vocabulary, describing vocabulary? And again, those will all be critical foundational skills when it comes to advancing their vocabulary as well. So some things that we might, some goals that we might write is like naming X number of items when given a category or an object function.

And then the reverse is naming a category or object function when given some exemplars. And then of course, we want to get as specific as possible. If we can attach a specific probe, that can be really impactful. And if we can identify the types of like categories and object functions that we want to target throughout the year, that can be effective again for guiding intervention and measuring progress too.

And then another goal could be to describe a picture or a word using X number of descriptors. And so those descriptors can include category, object function, appearance, parts, location, color, et cetera, et cetera. So we can write goals around that and helping them use their words to describe items.

or using their vocabulary to describe items or other words. So those are some ideas on how we can tackle some of those foundational vocabulary goals. And again, I'll link to additional, because these quick episodes don't do the topic justice, but I will share links to some other episodes if you want to continue diving in and getting some ideas for.

intervention and exactly narrowing down exactly how you might want to structure this for your students. So that is a wrap on part one of vocabulary and I'll see you next week for continuation on the vocabulary topic.