San Francisco Field Site

Current Research Collaborations

• WordSift: How do visualizations of text support teacher and student understanding of academic language and content area literacy?

  Within the context of our partnership with SFUSD, researchers from Stanford University developed an online tool that visually displays academic language and high-frequency vocabulary found in academic texts. The researchers, working together with a team of SFUSD teachers and district administrators, are developing instructional uses for an online text preview tool (www.wordsift.com) aimed at helping content area teachers work successfully with their students using academic language and developing content area literacy.

  Timeline: November 2008 to present

  District Collaborators:
  Jeanne D'Arcy, Supervisor, Mathematics and Science
  Deb Farkas, Content Specialist, Middle School Science
  Ritu Khanna, Senior Executive Director, Research, Planning, and Accountability
  Nine teacher co-developers

  Researchers:
  Ed Haertel, Professor of Education, Stanford
  Kenji Hakuta, Professor of Education, Stanford
  Diego Roman, Graduate Student, Stanford
  Karen Thompson, Graduate Student, Stanford
  Greg Wientjes, Graduate Student, Stanford

  The first phase of this work involved exploring and developing instructional uses for WordSift. This online tool has been developed for teachers and possibly students to use in previewing text to increase comprehension. The site takes in text that is pasted into a field and then creates a tag cloud (list of the most common words, with the size of the words related to its frequency in the text). It also marks the “academic vocabulary” such as process and procedure in a different color. The most common word is displayed in the Visual Thesaurus with the results of picture and video searches of the top two common words from Google. These functions are intended to help the teacher and student preview the text, allow teachers to assess student understanding of the vocabulary, and generally talk about the content of the relevant text.

  The second phase of this work involves setting up a 'micro-experiment' to determine the effect of previewing text in WordSift on students' reading comprehension. A team of middle school science teachers with research support has conducted micro-experiments with at least one section of their classes. In the “treatment” condition, students previewed the text in WordSift, then read the text and took a comprehension assessment. In another class session, the “control” condition, the students previewed the text without using WordSift, read the text and took a comprehension assessment. The research team has worked with teachers in moderating, coding, and analyzing the results this summer.