Getting More Academic and Grade-Assigned Words from the Lexile WordBank

This topic explains how we developed WordBank and why relatively few words have domain and grade assignments and suggests some ways you can use WordBank to meet your needs for larger numbers of academic words or more words with grade assignments.

To understand how you can use the additional columns in WordBank to find more words for a domain or at a specific grade level, we will present a series of examples of filtering and sorting by various WordBank columns to find additional words by domain and grade. Two sets of columns are useful for this: a) the by-grade frequencies and b) the "Likelihood" columns for each domain and for general that indicate the degree to which a word could be considered a 'science' or 'social studies' academic word.

As you can see, most of them are indicated as being science academic words and are assigned to a grade, but not all are. The words ribose, dipeptide, and brachiopod are not added to our list. There can be multiple reasons why we would not add a word, but it is probably because the overall frequency of those "non-list" words is very low. One decision we made to produce lists that we thought would be generally useful was to limit to words we suspect students would be more likely to encounter repeatedly. However, if you have a goal of building more extensive word lists, you could make different decisions and choose to include lower-frequency words.

More specifically, let’s consider finding more grade 1 science words. First, a word about our logic for grade assignments is just one of many ways to assign words to grades or choose which words are appropriate at which grades and for which purposes. Because of the uneven volume of reading/content at different grades, we wanted to create appropriately sized lists by grade. Many fewer words and concepts are discussed in first grade than in 2nd, 3rd, or 9-12th grade. Therefore, we assigned several target words for each grade and domains based on each grade's relative volume of content. We also chose to make grade designations mutually exclusive (not necessary for all purposes). To accomplish this, we took the top X most frequent science, social studies, math, and general academic words and assigned them to 1st grade, then excluded them from assignment to any other grade. So grade 2 is the most frequent (in grade 2 books) words in 2nd grade that were NOT assigned to 1st grade, and so on. Again, you might choose different conventions or criteria for grade assignments depending on your purposes.

There are a few different cases here, so we'll go over them. The words nutrient, hypothesis, and repel are all identified as general academic words. Our model chose not to assign them to the science academic word list for two of those words. You might choose to include them or have them on two lists, the science and general lists. The other thing you see is that the words are all assigned to grades other than grade 1. Again, we chose to assign proportionally appropriate numbers of words to each grade, so many words that are identified as grade 2 words indeed occur in grade 1 but less frequently than other words. So they are assigned instead to grade 2. You might choose to have overlapping lists of words by grade, depending on your purpose. Or you might choose to move these words from second grade into first grade and find more words for second grade.

What we see now are several "marginally sciency" words, meaning their likelihood of being identified as an academic science word by a trained human rater is less than .50 but not near 0 as many words are. You can imagine why words like flipchart, instrument, or inventor might be considered science words. They did not meet all the criteria for inclusion in our lists. In these cases, the words may be used enough in other domains or in our oral language corpus to be excluded from identification as an academic science word. For example, the words food, water, and rain almost certainly have a marginal likelihood of being a science word because of their use in everyday language (i.e., occurrence in the oral language corpus). You might choose to include these words depending on your goals. Food, water, and rain can and should be discussed in a scientific context (and in 1st grade no less) even if they are words that are likely to be familiar from an everyday conversation (i.e., not "academic" words).

We hope this gives you a sense of how you can use the information in WordBank to meet your specific needs.