A Case in Which Teaching Trumps Poverty

The blog Inside Schools Research reports on a study that finds that introducing advanced vocabulary to children in kindergarten results in an increased vocabulary in first grade. (I'm going to hold off on the snark for this one.)

It's been known for a while now that children from low-SES* households enter school with only a portion of the vocabulary of a high-SES child. This has been pointed to as one of the roots of the achievement gap. What's more, a certain faction of the education establishment likes to point to outside-of-school factors and conclude that schools cannot possibly do better than they are doing with the students they have.

So, a study showing that those outside-of-school factors can be mitigated is kind of a big deal.

The intervention used in the study was simple: Teachers were taught how to introduce vocabulary to small children.

Each teacher gets a list of thematically related and complex words; for example, "temperature," "exhaust," "steam," and "boil," or "pineapple," "banana," and "kiwi." The teacher reads stories that incorporate the words with the students and opens conversations with the students.

"One of the strategies is building bridges, having conversations with students whatever they want to talk about," [....] "The teacher learns how to have these conversations. Take 'apple,' 'banana' and 'Kiwi.' Students in the Delta may never have heard of a kiwi or seen the fruit. So the teacher shows them and they talk about it."

The study was robust, with classrooms randomly assigned to either the intervention condition or to the no-intervention (control) condition. Over 1300 students were tested, so we can be certain that the results seen are the effect of the intervention and not of other variables.

The effect was modest, with the students exposed to the richer vocabulary only one month ahead of students in the control group. Still, it's nothing to sniff at when you consider that vocabulary impacts so much of a student's academic achievement, and may be the driver behind the marshmallow-test effect (kids who can wait longer before eating a marshmallow are found to do better in school even into adolescence...read more about it here).

So maybe, bigger vocabulary -> better self-control -> higher achievement. If so, the effect may be pretty big after all.

*Socio-economic status