The 2015-16 Vocabulary Bowl ended April 30 and the results are in: Over 580,000 students from over 23,000 schools competed to master a total of over 14 million words.
Students of Los Alamitos High School in Los Alamitos, California, mastered 146,205 words, the most of any California school competing in the Vocabulary Bowl. The students’ hard work also propelled them to seventh place in the overall competition.
The 2015-16 Vocabulary Bowl ended April 30 and the results are in: Over 580,000 students from over 23,000 schools competed to master a total of over 14 million words.
Students of Los Alamitos High School in Los Alamitos, California, mastered 146,205 words, the most of any California school competing in the Vocabulary Bowl. The students’ hard work also propelled them to seventh place in the overall competition.
In the Vocabulary Bowl, schools vie to see who can master the most words and come out on top of the yearly leaderboard, which ran from October 1, 2015 to April 30, 2016. Los Alamitos students’ strength was their consistent effort: the school was the California State Champion title in six of the seven months of the competition. In March, Los Alamitos was runner-up to Ladera Vista Junior High School, which finished the national competition in 50th place.
Beyond the bragging rights of being the top school, administrators and teachers see the value in the adaptive learning tool. Principal Brandon Martinez believes that Vocabulary.com “has taught students to take charge of their learning as many of them incorporate time on Vocabulary.com as part of their daily learning schedules,” and that students find the experience fun and engaging.
Debby Brosius, who teaches Modern Literature, AP Language and Composition at Los Alamitos High School has seen changes in students’ comprehension abilities. She said that in previous years when teaching The Scarlet Letter, for instance, “test scores were dismal and the kids didn’t understand the text–they weren’t looking at the words in context. Now in using Vocabulary Lists from Vocabulary.com, they are using the words, speaking the language of the text. They’ve seen the word enough they can get a sense of it in the context. Students understood the text better because they understood the vocabulary better.”
Assistant Superintendent Josh Arnold credits Vocabulary.com’s data tracking and progress monitoring capabilities with “revolutionizing the way teaching and reading instruction is delivered across all of our district schools. The days of flashcards and cramming for Vocab Tests are long gone, and students can now be found competing with each other for word supremacy on their mobile phones during lunch, or working on some practice questions from their custom Vocabulary List their teacher created last week. The game has changed for vocabulary acquisition in Los Al.”
The overall winner of the Vocabulary Bowl, with 344,043 words mastered was Houston’s Chavez High School. In second place overall in this year’s Vocabulary Bowl, and winner of the Middle School division, was Lanier Middle School, also of Houston, Texas, with 230,034 words mastered.
Rounding out the top three in the high school division were Bellaire High School of Bellaire, Texas (169,619 words mastered) and First Colonial High School of Virginia Beach, Virginia (164,082 words mastered). Second and third place in the Middle School division went to Midlothian Middle School of Midlothian, Virginia (206,685 words mastered) and Tomahawk Creek Middle School of Midlothian, Virginia (146,369 words mastered).
The top 100 finishers in the 2015-16 Vocabulary Bowl can be found at https://www.vocabulary.com/leaderboards/bowl/.
Find out more information on Vocabulary.com and the Vocabulary Bowl at http://www.vocabulary.com/bowl or contact Chris Strausser, Chief Marketing Officer of Vocabulary.com, at cstrausser@vocabulary.com.