By Annie MartinThe Daily Northwestern

For Nichols Middle School eighth-grader Chris Corttier, knowing words is a family legacy.

Three years ago his older sister earned a near-perfect score on the WordMasters Challenge, a competition consisting of three rounds of tests in which students have to correctly use words in analogies. On Thursday, Corttier scored a 19 out of 20 on the second test, bringing his cumulative score to 39 out of 40. He received a perfect score in the first vocabulary challenge.

“I’m pretty pleased because it was a pretty hard test,” Corttier said.

Three other Nichols eighth-graders also achieved perfect scores on the first test: Elijah Doetsch, Max Fink and Matthew Foster. One seventh-grader, Sammy Straus, earned a perfect score.

The WordMasters Challenge is a critical-thinking exercise in which students learn new words and use them in analogies.

The competition is divided into two divisions, the Blue Division and the Gold Division. Nichols competes in the Blue Division, the less competitive of the two. Schools send in the top 10 test scores to determine how they are ranked compared to other schools in their division.

According to wordmasterchallenge.com, “Gold Division is for students (such as those in Gifted and Talented programs) who have clearly superior abilities.”

Seventh- and eighth-grade students at Nichols Middle School took the first test in December. Only 118 eighth-graders nationwide received a perfect score.

On the first test, the school’s eighth-graders tied for seventh in the nation out of 304 teams, while the seventh-graders tied for eighth out of 293 teams.

Nichols started participating in the program about 10 years ago because teachers were frustrated with the traditional methods of teaching vocabulary, eighth-grade literature teacher Judith Artwick said. Since then, Nichols Middle School has never placed below the top 10 in the WordMasters Challenge and has placed first in the nation for the last five years.

“WordMasters teaches many things at the same time, such as prefixes and suffixes, which are difficult to learn in isolation,” Artwick said.

Teachers and students are given a list of 25 words to learn for the tests three times each year. The tests are cumulative, so students must remember the words from previous tests. Artwick said she gives the students a variety of exercises leading up to the test, including vocabulary games and fill-in-the-blank problems.

“The parents like that they have to learn analogies,” Artwick said. “You can make an analogy for everything.”

Corttier’s mother, Laura Tilly, said she’s proud of how much her children have learned through WordMasters. Her daughter, now a high school junior, received an overall score of 59 out of 60 when she was in eighth grade. Tilly said her daughter uses her WordMasters words all the time in school, especially in her writing.

Tilly said her son even has a hand sign where he makes a “W” and an “M” with his fingers whenever he uses a WordMasters word.

“I think he’s gaining an appreciation of vocabulary that he didn’t have before,” Tilly said.

Tilly, a lawyer, said she sees many of the words her children have learned in the WordMasters Challenge in a legal setting. She also said she likes that the analogy format requires students to use logical reasoning.

“When I try to do these analogies, I think they’re baffling,” Tilly said.

Corttier said he thinks the best way to study for the WordMasters Challenges is to look at the words every day for a few minutes rather than trying to cram it all in the night before.

The school had a WordMasters breakfast Thursday morning for students to look at the words one last time before the test. Corttier said the last-minute review helped him with one of the words that he had been struggling with.

The students will get their new WordMasters words next week and find out when the next challenge will be. Corttier’s main goal is to tie his sister’s near-perfect score of 59, he said.

“I just concentrate really hard and look over each word to see how it could fit,” Corttier said.

Reach Annie Martin at [email protected].