NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

That is, correct responses do not differentiate between words that are known well and
words that are known vaguely; and incorrect responses do not distinguish between
completely unfamiliar words and words about which, one has a glimmer of knowledge,
but not enough to distinguish a correct meaning choice.

Kameenui, Dixon & Camine (1987) evaluated in general the multiple-choice tests in the
most pessimistic light by concluding that “such multiple choice vocabulary tasks are
useless at best and dangerous at worst” (p. 138). Further, they suggest that because so many
conclusions about vocabulary learning are drawn from such tasks, one might well question
what is really known about vocabulary.

3.5.2 Alternatives to multiple-choice test measurement

In sorting out issues related to assessment of vocabulary knowledge, it is useful to return
to the notion that word knowledge falls along a continuum, and to consider where along
the continuum word knowledge is assessed by different measures (Beck & McKeown,
1991). It is the case that multiple-choice tests do not measure the full continuum of word
knowledge since a multiple choice task taps only at the sense of a word. However,
according to Lyons (1977) (see chapter 2) a word’s meaning is also characterised by the
reference and the denotation-on which a multiple choice task does not tap. There have
been several attempts to create assessment techniques that tap the various aspects of
word’s meaning. A range of such assessments is presented at the following subsections.

Multiple true false tasks

As early as 1942, Cronbach pointed out the need to determine the degree to which a
student’s understanding of a word was complete rather than merely whether the word was
known or unknown. Cronbach (1943) then devised a test based on what he viewed as
components of true understanding of a word, which included recognizing examples of its
use and how it contrasts with semantically related words. In Cronbach’s test, students were
asked to distinguish between examples of a word and non-exampies that might be
confused with the word. For instance, an item to test understanding of the concept
“element” asked students to choose examples of elements from among the following:
“brass”, “iron”, “water”, “sulfur”, “fire”, and “oxygen”.

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