Underprepared Students

How are well-prepared students different from underprepared students?

Over ten years of extensive field-testing of student performance on the assessment tasks (note-taking from lecture, reading, summarizing, dictation, vocabulary self-assessment, and other diagnostic language tasks) have resulted in the following generalizations about how underprepared students differ from well-prepared students.

Students who are underprepared in academic language:

• are less able to distinguish between important and unimportant information in lectures  and text,
• are less able to recognize or produce correct affixes,
• are misled by text cues such as bolding,
• are less able to restate and summarize information,
• are less able to summarize text,
• are more likely to misunderstand lecture and text meaning, and
• take fewer lecture and reading notes.

The main barrier to student comprehension of lectures and text is lack of academic vocabulary knowledge.