The Vocab App includes game-like activities based on morphology, analogy, synonyms and antonyms, and deciphering meaning, which help students develop dictionary skills by focusing on parts of speech, etymology, and multiple meanings. It pulls key vocabulary from lesson texts to help students increase their knowledge of the word, its contextual definition, and their vocabulary skills.

Students access the Vocab App through the first Activity in most lessons. For grades 6 and 7, all vocabulary activities in Sub-unit 2 are inside the lessons and students will get a link to the Vocab App starting in Sub-unit 3, Lesson 1. For grade 8, students get the link to the Vocab App starting in Sub-unit 2, Lesson 1. The Student experience is Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) 2.0 AA compliant and offers read-aloud functionality.

When students sign into the app from a new lesson, the app homepage displays the new words a student will work on for that day.

Each word has a series of dots next to it. The number of dots corresponds to the number of activities available for the word. Progress toward mastery is indicated by the dots next to each word. Open dots represent new activities or activities attempted incorrectly, closed dots represent activities completed correctly, and new lesson words have open dots.

Once encountered, a word will stay in a student’s backlog until they have mastered the word. The Vocab App gives students chances to encounter the word again and again—spaced over the course of several days—in different activity types in order to gain mastery. Students master a word when they correctly complete three activities with the word in a row.

A list of mastered words is accessible from a link at the bottom of the app.

The activities in the Vocabulary App offer students the opportunity to engage with vocabulary words in passages, answering questions to showcase their understanding of word usage, as well as participating in exercises focused on identifying synonyms and antonyms.

All text in your student’s Vocab App can now be read aloud. Read-aloud mode must be activated by the student. Once a student turns read aloud on, it will be saved across sessions.

Students can turn the read-aloud function On in Settings and choose the reader’s voice (TTS), the read-aloud volume, and the sound effects volume.

The Speaker button will appear next to all text in the Vocab App, so students can hear the prompt and words when they’re ready.

Instructors access the Vocab App through their Programs and Apps.

You can set the level of differentiation for students* in the Vocab App. Setting differentiation in the Vocab App is distinct from setting differentiation in the curriculum. The Vocab App includes six streams of content for each grade—three core streams and three English Language Learner streams.

If you don’t select a stream, students are automatically placed at the core level for their grade. You can move students to a different stream at any time from their individual reporting page.

The Vocab App automatically assesses student progress as they work and adjusts students’ assigned set of academic words to align to their performance. You can move students to a different stream at any time, but students will also move between streams depending on their correct and incorrect answers. If a student answers eight questions in a row correctly, they move to the next stream and vice versa (with the exceptions that the Substantial and Emerging/ELL Dev streams do not adapt down to a lower stream). Streams are not visible to students. They will only notice a change in hints from the Helper allowing them to focus solely on learning the words they need.

The app also provides students and teachers with current performance statistics. When students view their own statistics, the dials show total activities completed, the longest streak of correct answers, overall accuracy in the app, and the number of mastered words. The calendar shows activities completed vs. correct on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

You can access the teacher view of performance stats by clicking on a student’s name in the Student tab. In the Teacher stats view, you will see a link to each student’s word lists, which show all words in play for a student, progress toward mastery for each word, and a separate list of mastered words similar to the one students see. You can adjust dates to view students’ stats from activities completed within a particular time period.

You can also switch to viewing the Words tab and explore additional information about words in the App, the available activities, and which students will see them.

This tab provides a list that can be filtered by:

In addition, you can:

The Word Information view shows all the content and activities authored for a given word. Words have 1–5 activities each. You can interact with this view to explore both the word and its activities. Clicking on a synonym or an antonym of a word takes you to the synonym or antonym Word Information view. To preview any activity associated with a word, select the activity, click Launch, and a preview will appear.