Teaching Tools:  

WordSmart includes flash cards, multiple choice quizzes, word matching, games, sentence completions and audio pronunciations. It can also track the student’s progress and advances the student once they sufficiently pass the study area.

Subjects Covered:  

The vocabulary disks include 10,000 pronounced words, 2,800 defined words and 400 core words. These disks are intended to be difficult for 10th grade high school students and easy for 1st and 2nd year graduate students. The F and G disks contain words like morbid, burl, criterion and pariah. We found the words familiar, but since all of our reviewers have bachelor degrees, familiarity is on target for this vocabulary group. The range of vocabulary words is perfect for high school and college students and is a great refresher series for adults.

Instruction Quality:  

The main WordSmart disks seemed to have accurate word associations and acceptable grammar. However, the extra disk, “Progressive Reader,” had grammar errors or typos in the speed reading evaluation. The second problem we had with this program is that you have to change your screen display to get the program to work We had to change ours from 1280 X 1024 pixels to 800 X 600 pixels for the software to display properly and than we had to change it back when we were done, this was a bit annoying.

Help/Support:  

WordSmart can be contacted by telephone or email should you need help. There is also help within the program and additional help online.

We found WordSmart Adult Excellence easy to use and effective. In addition, the information imparted through this program was more accurate than most of the programs that we evaluated. This is a great vocabulary program than can definitely increase your vocabulary with just fifteen minutes of study per day.