INTRODUCTION Words open new worlds to children, empowering them to be literate, expressive, and successful in their endeavors in school and beyond. A robust vocabulary is inarguably a critical factor in becoming a confident reader (Ricketts, Nation, & Bishop, 2007; Sénéchal, Ouellette, & Rodney, 2006). Word knowledge is one of five “pillars” of reading identified by the National Reading Panel, a group of expert educators and scientists who reviewed research on reading instruction (National Reading Panel, 2000). Indeed, research suggests that a person’s vocabulary is one of the strongest predictors of how well they understand what they read (Quinn, Wagner, Petscher, & Lopez, 2015). However, many children enter school with insufficient vocabularies for the tasks required of them. Studies show that students living in low-income communities are likely to have substantially smaller vocabularies than their peers from middle- to high-income communities (Fernald, Marchman, & Weisleder, 2013; Larson, Russ, Nelson, Olson, & Halfon, 2015). This can adversely affect students who have limited vocabularies at a young age and never receive the supports to grow them. Students with below-grade vocabulary levels in lower elementary grades are often challenged as readers throughout their school careers and beyond (Lesaux & Kieffer, 2010; Raudenbush & Eschmann, 2015; von Hippel & Hamrock, 2019). Teaching vocabulary has been shown to improve reading comprehension for students, yet with tens of thousands of root words in the English language, educators can understandably feel daunted by the task (Rimbey, McKeown, Beck, & Sandora, 2016). While learning rare or unique words can be novel for students, exposure to and practice with the words that occur most frequently in the text they encounter is most beneficial. Research on which morphological word families are essential to know to boost reading comprehension—and how and when students best learn them—informed the creation of Scholastic W.O.R.D. (Words Open Reading Doors), an engaging digital program for Grades K–5 that builds vocabulary knowledge and deepens topic knowledge in a captivating, interactive way. Scholastic W.O.R.D. teaches the high-utility words that make up 90% of all texts students will encounter in school, ensuring that students have a solid foundation to understand what they read and the ability to effectively communicate their ideas. While building their vocabulary knowledge in W.O.R.D., students also learn about words and how words can be altered or combined to further express ideas—skills that extend far beyond the W.O.R.D. program and which will benefit them as they encounter all future texts.
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SCHOLASTIC W.O.R.D. FOUNDATION PAPER
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