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Membean
Pros: Individualized vocabulary learning meets all students where they're at.
Cons: It has an outdated design, and it's pricey, especially for classroom or campus-only subscriptions.
Bottom Line: Membean has the potential to push students and grow their vocabulary while providing teachers with data they'll love.
Assign students a weekly vocabulary practice goal and provide time in class for practice, or assign as homework. Students get a notification when they've reached their daily goal. They can continue practicing or quit early if necessary. Teachers can schedule assessments in regular intervals or push out an assessment immediately. Teachers get immediate reports of the student's accuracy, practice time, assessment results, and more. Even dubious minutes are noted -- alerting teachers if students may be multitasking (or cheating) with multiple browser tabs open or if students are answering too quickly, signaling they may not be reading the text.
Membean is a vocabulary website that offers programs for classrooms or for personal studying and test prep (SAT and GRE). Teachers can set up classes, pre-assess students through the tool, and then set weekly practice goals. Settings can be further customized for special education students, ELLs, and students with dyslexia. The teacher dashboard provides extensive data on student performance, tracking minutes, accuracy, words missed, and more.
When training, students see a word, hear it pronounced, and read several sentences using the word as well as a plain-language explanation of the word. Some words also include video clips that demonstrate the word or visual representations of the word's origin and related words. After answering a question to assess understanding, students have to spell the word correctly before advancing to another word. The words then appear repeatedly, giving students multiple exposures to cement understanding and recall.
Membean challenges every student -- from advanced readers with a broad vocabulary to English language learners --where that student is at. The algorithms make differentiation simple for teachers and discreet for students. Students are challenged at their individual level after taking a "calibration" quiz when they create their account. Through repetition and a multisensory approach using visuals, text, and media, students learn new words efficiently. Fun bonus: Teachers can train, too, from within their teacher dashboard.
Learning Rating
Community Rating
Out of date and uses bad teaching methods
I have a long list of grievances with membean. What membean doesn't take into account is context and uses old outdated definitions not commonly used anymore. It's severely difficult for students with dyslexia to use since spelling counts and many of the words look alike. Some days you're given up to 15-20ish new words and when you have to do this 3-5 times a week it ends up being overwhelming. They try to teach you definitions by showing pictures that have nothing to do with the word (for example the picture for "arbiter" is a man in jorts holding a dog, and "frivolous" is a toddler in a shirt that says "i love my mom). The site is fine during stage 1 but as soon as you move on from that you have multiple words that start with the same 2 letters and have the same meaning and you just have to guess what it is, and when you have 300ish words in play it just becomes a guessing game for the spelling ones.
I think it has to potential to be good, it just needs a lot of changes.