I spend a solid week introducing journalism vocabulary to my freshmen. Lede versus lead. Graf. Nut graf. Hard news versus feature. Inverted pyramid. Cutline. We go through the slideshow, we talk about examples, we look at real newspaper articles. It’s comprehensive. And halfway through the unit, I realize: I have no idea if any of them actually retained this stuff.
That’s when I learned the hard way that teaching something and knowing it stuck are two completely different things. You can’t assume students understand just because you walked them through it. They need to be tested on it. The vocabulary is foundational—if they don’t know what a nut graf is, they can’t write one. If they don’t understand the difference between a lede and a hard news structure, they’re going to flounder.
I built a 51-question multiple-choice test that covers everything a beginner journalist needs to know: parts of a news story, types of news stories, and news ethics. It’s straightforward, it works, and I’ve tested it (pun intended) over years in the classroom. Start with the introductory vocabulary slideshow to teach the terms, then use this test to see what actually stuck.
Your students will know the vocabulary. More importantly, you’ll know they know it. Grab the test here and stop wondering if they got it.
Starmaker English and Journalism Tools 
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