Educational Effects of a Vocabulary Intervention on Preschoolers' Word Knowledge and Conceptual Development: A Cluster‐Randomized Trial

By S. Neuman, E. Newman, Julie Dwyer. Reading Research Quarterly, 2011

202 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A B S T R A C T The purpose of this study was to examine the hypothesis that helping preschoolers learn words through categorization may enhance their ability to retain words and their conceptual properties, acting as a bootstrap for self-learning. We examined this hypothesis by investigating the effects of the World of Words instructional program, a supplemental intervention for children in preschool designed to teach word knowledge and conceptual development through taxonomic categorization and embedded multimedia. Participants in the study included 3- and 4-year-old children from 28 Head Start classrooms in 12 schools, randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Children were assessed on word knowledge, expressive language, conceptual knowledge, and categories and properties of concepts in a yearlong intervention. Results indicated that children receiving the WOW treatment consistently outperformed their control counterparts; further, treatment children were able to use categories to identify the meaning of novel words. Gains in word and categorical knowledge were sustained six months later for those children who remained in Head Start. These results suggest that a program targeted to learning words within taxonomic categories may act as a bootstrap for self-learning and inference generation.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/56fa28f835322610a1d7a316c75743763c96361a

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Closing the 30 Million Word Gap: Next Steps in Designing Research to Inform Practice (2016, background): “teach, including Beck and McKeown’s tiers (19), academic vocabulary (20), root words (41), and categories of words (42).”
Paucity and Disparity in Kindergarten Oral Vocabulary Instruction (2014, background): “Evidence from intervention studies with young children (French, 2004; Leung, 2008; Neuman et al., 2011) supports this view, with studies finding increased vocabulary development as well as conceptual learning when vocabulary is taught within science and social studies lessons and activities.”
Teaching for breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge: Learning from explicit and implicit instruction and the storybook texts (2019, result): “…studies that have found Matthew effects (Authors, under review; Loftus et al., 2010; Marulis & Neuman, 2010; Roskos et al., 2008), but different from studies and have used additional activities to supplement book reading (Neuman et al., 2011) or that have reversed (Authors, 2016b) this effect.”
Supporting Kindergartners’ Science Talk in the Context of an Integrated Science and Disciplinary Literacy Curriculum (2017, background): “Providing vocabulary instruction through read-alouds supports young children in making connections between words and concepts, accelerating children’s vocabulary growth and comprehension (Neuman et al., 2011).”
Reading and Language in the Early Grades (2016, unknown): “28 World of Words focuses on teaching words that fit together into conceptual structures; for example, words related to insects may be taught in science units about insects that also teach about the characteristics of insects that distinguish them from other organisms, and so on.”
The language of play: developing preschool vocabulary through play following shared book-reading (2018, methodology): “Word selection was also driven by feasibility of child-friendly deﬁnitions, semantic and phonological distinctness, difﬁculty, frequency of use (Biemiller, 2010; Chall & Dale, 1995), and the likelihood of words’ unfamil-iarity, based on prior data from this project.”
Building Content Knowledge to Boost Comprehension in the Primary Grades (2020, unknown): “Some intervention studies have explicitly taught meanings of words connected to concepts, as well as relations among the words, and have demonstrated positive effects on vocabulary outcomes in early grades (e.g., Gonzalez et al., 2011; Kim et al., 2020; Neuman et al., 2011; Neuman & Kaefer, 2018).”