Allen (1999)

Allan (2009) discussed the need for vocabulary to be presented so that background information is useful, vocabulary is used multiple times in different contexts, and applied in a meaningful way (p. 35).  An interesting part of all reading strategies involves the way in which motivation is applied to the lesson.  In many cases the assessment of their knowledge is student created as an activity of listing their knowledge.  Due to the student input, it appears that this increases the student interest.  I have seen similar events in chemistry with simple examples of students providing key words comparing two processes or students providing numbers for sample problems.  

Although the dictionary might not be the most motivating and therefore effective method for learning vocabulary, I still tend to gravitate to using dictionaries for vocabulary learning.  This was largely due my personal experiences of learning vocabulary.  Over time I became more proficient at using the dictionary adequately.  The key problem of using the dictionary is that it takes much experience and learning what a valuable definition is can be very difficult.  To motivate students I could see that having the students supply as much of the information as a group could have great benefits with the extroverted learners and more social students.  The more introverted students may still gravitate toward the book work.

Of the many concept knowledge maps, I liked the concept attainment and knowledge charts the best.  These maps seemed to have the strongest connections to constructivism and may be the easiest to implement in science education.  Many of the words in science have prefixes and hints as to what the words mean so this will be very applicable to the concept attainment map.  The knowledge maps would be good to use when introducing a new topic that involves lots of past information.  If there are misconceptions that students have prior to the lesson then the student might be able to identify their own problem and this may cause the necessary cognitive conflict to help the student accept a new theory.