The twelve words your class is losing

Almost every classroom language platform reports the same thing: how far each student got. Lessons finished, percentage complete, minutes on task. It is easy to collect and it is nearly useless, because it measures attendance rather than knowledge.

A per-word mastery model can answer a different question. Not how far did they get, but which specific words is this class losing, ranked by how many of them are losing each one.

What the report is actually counting

For every word every student has met, the app holds when they last saw it, how stable that memory is, and whether the last few answers were right. A word appears near the top of the trouble list when a lot of students are answering it wrong, or when the interval keeps collapsing back to minutes.

That second signal is the interesting one. A word that is answered right but keeps needing to come back every two days is not learned; it is being rescued. It will disappear over a holiday.

How to read it without over-reacting

• Two or three students on a word is noise. They were away, or they are new, or they guessed. Leave it.
• A third of the class on one word is a hook problem. Not a class problem. Something about the picture is not landing, and the fix is one edit rather than a lesson.
• A whole cluster of related words is a teaching problem. If the top eight are all past tense forms, the trouble list has just told you what tomorrow is about.
• One student across many words is a person, not a data point. That is the case for a conversation rather than a worksheet.

The class hook

When a word is failing for a third of the room, you can write one hook and push it to everybody in the class at once. It takes about thirty seconds and it lands in the next review each of them does. Their own hooks, if they have written any, still win over yours, which is deliberate and is the right order.

What this does not tell you

It does not tell you whether they can speak. It measures recall of vocabulary, honestly and in detail, and vocabulary is necessary and not sufficient. A student who holds twelve hundred words and has never spoken a sentence is still a student who has never spoken a sentence.