Big Word Club

Program overview

  • Web-based intervention to close the word gap: The Big Word Club is a classroom-based digital literacy program for children in prekindergarten through sixth grade. Students who were in classrooms that used the Big Word Club program scored higher on a customized receptive vocabulary assessment than students in control classrooms.

  • Web-based, year-round program: The Big Word Club uses video lessons with stories, songs, animation, and dance to introduce students to a new word each day. Each video lesson is less than 5 minutes long, allowing teachers to integrate the content alongside their regular instruction. Typically, videos are played for the whole class.

  • Weekly curriculum with teacher choice: Teachers can choose which Big Word Club video lessons to use each week, with five lessons per week being the typical dosage. The lessons are neither sequenced nor time-dependent.

  • No additional training for teachers: Implementing the Big Word Club does not require additional training for teachers. All content is provided digitally. This format also reduces cost for teachers and school districts.

A single study with a rigorous design provides some evidence for the Big Word Club program as a strategy for improving vocabulary for early education students.

  • A 2024 randomized controlled trial found that, after 4 months of usage, students whose classrooms participated in the Big Word Club scored around 0.30 standard deviations higher on a vocabulary assessment than students in a control group. These effects persisted two months later.

  • Pre-test to ensure vocabulary is new to students: The Big Word Club selects vocabulary that should be challenging to elementary students. However, a pretest is useful to ensure that students are being taught new words.

  • Continue usage even if daily use is not possible: Big Word Club is designed for daily usage. However, positive effects were still recorded among teachers who used Big Word Club on at least half of school days. As such, teachers should continue using the program, even when it cannot be implemented fully.

  • Evaluate student vocabulary retention: Teachers should use customized vocabulary assessments to evaluate vocabulary retention among students. These assessments can demonstrate the effectiveness of the program and be used to identify areas where students may need additional support.

  • Support regular use of Big Word Club: An evaluation of Big Word Club classrooms found that, in classrooms where the program was not implemented consistently, teachers most commonly said they had simply forgotten. Therefore, providing reminders may support greater usage of the vocabulary program. Integrating Big Word Club across a grade-level’s curriculum may also increase up-take and reduce the day-to-day effort required by teachers to include the lessons.