Notes from the research desk
A growing collection of essays on the research and pedagogy behind Vocabulous! — what the evidence actually says, what we've taken from it, and where we're still figuring things out.
Why Vocabulary?
The Quiet Lever Behind a Generation's Inequality
An evidence-based look at the problem we're trying to solve, what we believe is the lever that moves it, and how good teaching can make a difference.
Read essayThe Quiet Researcher Who Showed Us How Vocabulary Really Grows
Andrew Biemiller and the fifty-year case for teaching words on purpose
How a Toronto professor's half-century of research reframed early reading, mapped the sequence in which children acquire words, and made the equity argument the field had largely avoided.
Read essayThe Two Thousand Five Hundred Words That Unlock Reading
Elfrieda Hiebert and the corpus that reframed vocabulary instruction
Of the four hundred thousand words in English, which ones actually matter? A corpus analysis of school texts turns an unbounded memorisation problem into a tractable, network-based one.
Read essayThe Cliff at Fourth Grade
Jeanne Chall's diagnosis of the slump that hides until it can't
A Harvard reading researcher built a stage model of how children learn to read, then documented exactly where that development breaks down for poor children — and why most school systems have still not absorbed it.
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