How Academic Performance Can be Improved by Vocabulary Learning Games

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As a teacher, it is your responsibility to put your students on the path of academic success. However, many teachers are trying different and path breaking educational tools that cater to different students and help improve the performance. But, often, the teachers fail to analyze the fact that the basic building block for any type of lesson plan and learning any new subject is the powerful vocabulary. Therefore, the teachers should focus on building vocabulary skills. Strong vocabulary is the cornerstone for the academic success of the students.

Teachers and parents know that students do not love to learn new vocabulary words. They often memorize the words when it comes to spelling and vocabulary tests. These are the temporary solutions. Therefore, the need of the hour is an innovative vocabulary solution. Many teachers are using interesting vocabulary learning games to increase the enthusiasm of students and develop longer recall of learned vocabulary words, while giving the contextual formation of the vocabulary words. There are many free online educational resources (carson dellosa)that provide learning games for free. There are different variants of the vocabulary games, such as spelling game, crosswords and vocabulary matching games. These vocabulary games are interactive and simple to play, therefore, students spend long hours in front of their computer screens while building vocabulary skills.

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Create Quizzes With Sounds

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You can learn a lot when you listen!

Sound quizzes stimulate young minds. This activity encourages  learners to use their sense of hearing to interpret the world around them. That  is where a sound quiz helps!

If you are a language teacher of English, Chinese or any other, you should  use spelling tests a lot for frequently misspelled words. For tutors who are  giving music lessons, they need to incorporate audio clips into the testing  content.  As you teach ear training to your students, you need to present a  specific sound in your quiz.

Then where to start making a sound quiz? A lot of people may give you the  answer:  Macromedia Flash.  But it sounds more good than practical. Without any  Flash programming experience or a tech guy’ help, it could be a task impossible  to be completed.

Fortunately, technology is made easy these days. If you dig into the web, you  can find some, although few, teacher-friendly tools and teacher supplies that can do this for you,  making testing with sound without the need of any multimedia production  expertise.  We may call it “What you see is what you get”.

In the market of educational supplies, such kind of tools is available now.   You can design professionally-looking quiz in an easy way.

Unlike Macromedia Flash, with minutes of getting familiar with the tool, you  are able to make Flash quizzes in different question types and insert audio  clips to the questions.  That also means that the sound become an integrated  part of the quiz and you not have to worry about broken link to the audio clip  when you play it on different computers or with different browser settings.

Now you can use this tool to create sound quizzes at your own for your  language, music or sound-related training classes.

The Teacher’s Quiz Guide

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In recent years, there has been much discussion in the outside community that students are leaving school with less knowledge than their parents. There have been calls to return to the old ways of teaching which would include the use of a class quiz from time to time. However, what parents and others have forgotten is that, right from primary school, students are now exposed to a greater number of learning areas than the old ‘Three Rs’.

Consequently, the students have less time on the traditional subjects than was the case in years gone by. Thus, we teachers still need to look for efficient ways and modern teaching supplies to ensure students get all the necessary essential learning so that they are ready to enter the real world at school’s end.

Syllabus writers have tried to counter this loss of subject time by reducing content and therefore encouraging teachers to concentrate on teaching for understanding rather than for a body of facts. However, there is still, as ever, a need for students to know basic facts on which to build their learning and to have an understanding of the language of the subject area they study. The quiz is an effective way to enhance this learning and understanding.

The strengths of a quiz are many. They include the following.

  1. They are time efficient. They can be as little as 5 minutes long or as long15 minutes.
  2. The teacher can create a quiz, for each topic, of questions that are often done poorly by students.
  3. These quizzes can be recorded and used over and over again.
  4. The teachers can ask students as a homework exercise to write quiz questions on the topic which they find difficult. These questions then become a revision exercise plus extra quiz questions that the teachers can use in the future. These questions also lead the teacher towards areas of the topic that the students find more difficult.
  5. The quiz also allows young teachers a great opportunity to develop and practice their questioning skills.

The quiz can help develop:

  • better basic skills and subject content knowledge
  • better problem solving skills
  • an understanding of subject terminology
  • a fun environment
  • listening skills
  • a desire for more success
  • self-discipline
  • learning through the back door
  • better self esteem
  • learning through competition
  • more self confidence
  • educational classroom decorations

In addition, a quiz can be used:

  • as a revision lesson (part or all of one).
  • as a review of a topic before the teacher begins a new lesson.
  • as a review of a lesson just taught.
  • as a development lesson into a new topic, i.e. questions are used to develop new ideas in a subject area by using students’ own personal experiences.
  • as a diagnostic test.
  • to develop a better understanding of a subject’s language.
  • to develop better communication skills in subjects.
  • to allow the teacher to find areas of learning where he/she needs to revisit.

In conclusion, there are many types of quizzes. In my early career, after a year teaching in a primary school for one year, I taught a variety of high school subjects in Years Eight to Ten including Maths, Science, English, History and Geography. These gave me many opportunities to use the quiz as a teaching strategy. What it also taught me is that the quiz is an effective teaching and learning tool across all subject areas from lower primary school classes up until junior high school.