This article describes how researchers take a multidisciplinary approach to investigating how middle grades students learn science vocabulary. The authors investigated teaching strategies for increasing retention of science vocabulary with seventh graders and stumbled upon an interesting finding that was not even a target for their study, yet it offered some possible explanations for why students mix up some words. Following this offshoot of evidence led them out of their fields of education and psychology in and down a path to linguistic studies of morphological awareness and to possible explanations of their unexpected results. In this article, they present a review of the literature on prefixes and memory confusions due to similarity among terms to provide some context for their findings. They analyze word morphology and cite studies on morphological instruction, noting that the use of morphological instruction to improve retention of vocabulary words is inconclusive, especially with prefix study. (Contains 1 figure.)