Vocabulary Fitness Reviewer's Comments

Vocabulary Fitness is a program offered by Merit Software, this provider also offers Vocabulary Stretch and Vocabulary Super Stretch. These three programs are nearly exact with the exception of the word lists included in the programs. Merit Software offers home use and multiple licenses.

Teaching Tools:  

The program is basically a series of questions and quizzes that are used to help students master the differences between words like miner and minor and alter and altar. In one of the exercises the program displays a sample sentence and asks the student to determine if the vocabulary words in the sentence are used correctly. We found this section particularly useful in training readers to be more aware and it discourages students from guessing what words mean.

Subjects Covered:  

Vocabulary Fitness is the middle Merit program in terms of difficulty and covers commonly misused words, such as the difference between proceed and precede and principle and principal. In total it includes 156 words. Comprehensive definitions are not included, just simple definitions and synonyms are taught.

Instruction Quality:  

The program has some errors, for example it would offer incorrect information on the differences between the words “duel” and “dual.” However, it was not in the entire program that this error occurred; we feel that the inconsistent information would make it difficult for new learners to master the words.

Help/Support:  

Merit Software can be contacted by telephone or email. The program also comes with embedded help and Merit Software hosts a user forum.

Summary:  

This program is good as an exercise but it is not an all encompassing program. For the price, we would recommend Vocaboly, which has over 12,000 words.