The Big Word Club Evaluation

This project aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a classroom-based program intended to increase the vocabulary of preschool and primary school children. The program, called the Big Word Club (BWC), consists of videos, books and activities intended to help children learn one new word per day over a school year. The intent of the program is not only to teach specific new words, but also to increase children’s interest in words and literacy in general and thereby improve school success. The evaluation will assess the program’s success in achieving the narrow goal of increasing children’s receptive vocabulary. Specifically, we will test whether at the end of the program, preschool children randomly assigned to a school that participates in the BWC score higher than children assigned to control classrooms on a receptive vocabulary assessment that includes words from the BWC as well as a set of age-appropriate words not included in the BWC.