New York Times: Vocabulary.com Signals "Real Progress" in Online Learning

The New York Times today praised Vocabulary.com as a sign that "real progress is finally being made in computer-assisted education." 

Vocabulary.com's success in personalizing instruction, the Times states, illustrates how the "potential of computing in education is less about reach than depth. That is, the ability to tailor learning experiences to the skills, strengths and weaknesses of individual students. The goal has been pursued for decades, but it is within reach now because of the increasing ease in handling large amounts of data and steadily improving tools from the field of artificial intelligence like machine learning." The article continues:

The vocabulary-building Web site went up in 2011, open to the public. It has received enthusiastic reviews and awards, attracting users who have answered questions 60 million times. That user information goes into improving the system and adding to the site’s continually growing collection of more than 100,000 vocabulary questions. This works much as Google uses the billions of search queries by users and tracks their responses to refine its search engine.

Having grown and matured, a version of Vocabulary.com was introduced to the education market last month, with online dashboards and graphic tools for teachers to track the progress of individual students in real time.

Educators who are familiar with Vocabulary.com are impressed by the technology. It is a sign, they say, that real progress is finally being made in computer-assisted education — at least in the domain of learning words and their meaning.

“Vocabulary.com is a good example of what is becoming possible and the direction we should be heading,” said Lee Ann Tysseling, an associate professor of education at Boise State University. “We’re seeing the blooming of good academic ways to use computers. It builds on good academic theory and not just what’s easy to program.”

For years, educators say, computer-aided learning amounted to the equivalent of digital flash cards and other rote drills. By contrast, Vocabulary.com has a variety of sentences, typically several for a given word. So if a person misses a definition, the same word may come up in a different sentence, several questions later.

The goal is to nudge each student ahead, according to his or her level of knowledge, delivering questions that are challenging, not too hard or too easy.

“The crux of this is the adaptive technology, a system that works with the student and grows with the student,” said Sandra Schamroth Abrams, an assistant professor in the school of education at St. John’s University.

Read the full text of the review here. We hope this exposure will lead more users to play Vocabulary.com, make free interactive Vocabulary Lists, or check out the learning resources in our ad-free Dictionary.