Closing the Word Gap with Big Word Club: Evaluating the Impact of a Tech-Based Early Childhood Vocabulary Program

Vocabulary is an important part of literacy skills development, and understanding the effectiveness of various types of programs can help parents, schools, and states decide what to invest in. Programs that use entertainment to engage students to learn (“Edutainment” programs) are popular, but experimental evidence on their effectiveness at teaching vocabulary is sparse. In this paper, we use an RCT to evaluate the effectiveness of a program that uses technology and entertainment to teach vocabulary to children. The program, Big Word Club (BWC), is a web-based platform consisting of animated book videos, dance videos, and music videos intended to help children learn one new word per day. Our field experiment was conducted with 818 Pre-K and Kindergarten students in 47 schools across 3 U.S. states. We randomly assigned schools to a control condition or to use the BWC platform in their curriculum. We find that the program was effective in teaching the vocabulary words that were targeted by the program (0.30 SD) after four months of use. Further, this effect persisted in a follow-up test 2 months later, but only for girls. Treated students also scored higher on a standardized vocabulary assessment (PPVT), but this difference was not statistically significant.

词汇是读写能力发展的重要组成部分，明晰各类教学项目的成效，有助于家长、学校及各州政府确定投资方向。以娱乐形式吸引学生学习的“教育娱乐（Edutainment）”项目虽广受青睐，但相关验证其词汇教学成效的实验证据却较为匮乏。本文采用随机对照试验（Randomized Controlled Trial, RCT），评估一款融合技术与娱乐元素的儿童词汇教学项目的成效。该项目名为“大词汇俱乐部（Big Word Club, BWC）”，是一款基于网页的平台，包含动画绘本视频、舞蹈视频及音乐视频，旨在帮助儿童每日学习一个新词汇。本实地试验覆盖美国3个州47所学校的818名学前及幼儿园学生，我们将这些学校随机分配至对照组，或在课程中使用BWC平台。研究发现，在使用四个月后，该项目对项目指定词汇的教学效果显著（0.30 SD）。进一步分析显示，该效果在两个月后的追踪测试中仍得以维持，但仅对女生有效。此外，干预组学生在标准化词汇评估（PPVT）中的得分更高，但该差异未达到统计学显著性。