User:Colleenrushnak/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
word wall

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I have chosen to evaluate word walls because I am interested in them as an pedagogical vocabulary tool in my classroom. Visual aids are important for Multilingual Learners. I am particularly interested in the effectiveness of word walls on different cohorts of students- Multilingual Learners, secondary education students, and primary school students. Multimodal activities involving student led inquiry can be beneficial as a data collecting tool to gauge students' vocabulary knowledge over time. In the article Data Use as Instructional Reform, the authors mention that educators typically will use data that appears legitimate. The lack of effort in the current word wall Wikipedia page can be discouraging to a beginning educator.

Evaluate the article
The lead sentence is accurate, but a bit clunky. Additionally, I think it needs to be specified that they are not just any "words". They are high frequency words that are essential to understanding. I do not like that it says that word walls are usually in alphabetical order. In content areas, it is common for word walls to be separated by unit or area of study. There also needs to be a photo of a word wall as an example.

There is only one citation for the article, which is not positive for a good Wikipedia article. The one citation is a 2004 news article from the Seattle Times, written by Lynn Thompson, a local Seattle news reporter who covers the suburbs of Seattle east of Lake Washington. This includes a range of sports, politics, health, and education, among others. The link to the article itself does not work and brings you to the newspapers' home page. "Word wall" is mentioned once in the article and is not defined at all. It mentions that it can introduce students to new vocabulary, but nothing besides that. The cited article is not about word walls, but is about an improvement made to literacy in a Seattle public schools in general. The Wikipedia article has also sparsely been updated, with a high of 5 edits (made in 2006, 2007, and 2023.) The author that has made the most edits was in 2010.

The article has not yet been rated on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It also has a warning headline that the page has multiple issues- it may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline, contains original research, and needs additional citations for verification, as of May 2017.

There is only one message posted on the Talk page from 2012. This editor questions the use of word "families" in the article. Word family is actually a real term, and this article could benefit to linking the word family page. There is no reply to the editor on the Talk page. World walls have been taught as a legitimate tool to benefit students, yet the Wikipedia article does not match the legitimacy it has been treated with in educational training programs.

I think there needs to be an included history on word walls. Patricia Cunningham is credited with creating word walls in her 1991 book Phonics They Use: Words for Reading and Writing. I think it would be valuable to include insight on why Cunningham chose to popularize word walls.

The article uses a neutral tone. There is one error that should be corrected; the article slips into second person by saying "it can help you." The article is also placed in the "culture" category. I think a better place for it to be categorized in is "general reference", subcategory "Education", subcategory "Educational materials". Realia, mock election, and other contemporaries of word walls fall in the "Educational materials" subcategory.