The Effectiveness of a Program to Accelerate Vocabulary Development in Kindergarten (VOCAB)

Improving the ability of at-risk children to read and comprehend text has been a high
priority in education policy over the last two decades. Low levels of reading achievement have
been related to low academic performance, and one critical factor in reading achievement is
adequate vocabulary knowledge. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds often lack general
and academic vocabulary to enable them to acquire knowledge and comprehend text when they
learn to read.
State education departments, in discussions with Regional Educational Laboratory (REL)
Southeast, identified low reading achievement as a critical issue for their students and expressed
an interest in identifying effective strategies to promote the foundational skills in young students
that might improve reading achievement. The Mississippi State Department of Education has
focused specifically on interventions that might enhance students’ vocabulary knowledge. The
Mississippi state legislature established a high priority on meeting the early education needs of
students in or near the Delta, a primarily rural area of the state with a high level of poverty and
historically low performance on reading achievement. To address these concerns, the current
study tests the impact of a kindergarten vocabulary instruction program on students’ expressive
vocabulary when used across a range of districts and schools in the Mississippi Delta by
kindergarten teachers as a supplement to their regular instructional program. Previous research
on the program showed that a preschool version of the curriculum was associated with improved
student vocabulary acquisition but did not provide a test using methodologies that can establish
causal relationships.
Kindergarten PAVEd for Success (K-PAVE) was selected to be tested in Mississippi for
three reasons. First, there were only a small number of vocabulary interventions appropriate for
this age group to be considered. Second, among these, PAVE—the preschool version of the
intervention—was the only one for which an impact study had been completed that provided
some evidence of effects. Third, K-PAVE was the only curriculum that had developed teacher
training materials and a training protocol, which meant that it could be implemented with
sufficient fidelity across a variety of districts and school settings. The experimental design of this
evaluation addresses limitations of earlier research and ensures a valid basis for estimating the
effect of K-PAVE, implemented across a range of settings in the real world, on vocabulary
knowledge of students in kindergarten.