A Study of the Effectiveness of a Small-Group Intervention on the Vocabulary and Narrative Development of At-Risk Kindergarten Children

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of a small-group storybook-based intervention on kindergarten students’ vocabulary and narrative development, which is important to later reading achievement. Twenty-eight kindergarten children from a high-poverty urban school, all significantly behind their peers on standardized measures of language development (semantic and syntactic) and narrative (understanding and production), were randomly assigned to the intervention or control group. The intervention students engaged in three 30-minute storybook-based lessons per week for 12 weeks, focused on vocabulary and narrative development. The intervention students made greater gains on both standardized and nonstandardized measures of vocabulary and narrative achievement than did control-group children.

Acknowledgments

This study was supported in part by the University of Kansas Graduate Research Fund, grant number 2301111, and School of Education summer-research funds. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the position of the University of Kansas.