Can Texting Support Vocabulary Growth? Results from the Text to Talk Study

• In Event: 3-248 - Text Me: Promoting Family Engagement and Child Outcomes Through Texting

Integrative Statement

Introduction
Children in poverty come to school with less vocabulary knowledge than more advantaged peers. This gap, which measures approximately 1 SD, appears prior to school entry (Dickinson & Tabors, 2001; Fernald & Marchman, 2012). Although families in poverty are involved in their children’s learning and deeply interested in building essential skills, research shows that there is often less talk and use of vocabulary in households in poverty, especially the academic vocabulary utilized in school settings, relative to middle-income households (Lareau, 2000; Wasik & Hindman, 2010). As a result, children in poverty enter school knowing fewer words, which can hinder their growth as a reader and in other subjects.

Children learn vocabulary through multiple, meaningful exposures to words; children may need more than 50 exposures to a word to achieve comprehension. (Biemiller & Boote, 2006; Bloom, 2000). Of particular importance in word learning are opportunities for children to use the new word themselves and receive feedback on their understanding from a caring adult. The home provides an excellent context for dialogue with children about new words, yet a key ingredient is missing: teachers rarely provide families with information about which words children are learning or how families could reinforce those words at home (Snell, Hindman, & Wasik, 2018).

Text to Talk was designed to bridge the school-home gap that exists around the communication of what is being learned in school. In Text to Talk, teachers text family members messages about the vocabulary words children are learning about that week in school. These messages are aligned with the vocabulary presented in the school district’s preschool curriculum. The goal is to increase children’s opportunities to hear and learn words at home and provide parents with opportunities to participate in their children’s learning.

Study Population
Text to Talk was implemented in the 2017-2018 school year in an East Coast school district serving a high population of low-income children. Public preschool classrooms were randomly assigned to participate in the Text to Talk project (24 classrooms) or Control (25 classrooms); 7 children and their families were randomly selected from each classroom to participate in the study (n=331 children). See Table 1 for study population descriptives.

Methods
Baseline demographics were collected on all teachers and participating families and children. Child outcomes included pre- and post-intervention measures of target vocabulary and a standardized measure of vocabulary (PPVT). Family outcomes included frequency of home learning activities. Implementation measures of teacher fidelity as well as parent take-up of the intervention were also collected.

Results
Analyses (Table 2) suggest that Text to Talk had statistically significant impacts on child word learning of vocabulary words that were sent over text to participating families. Classroom-level clustered regression results (Table 2) indicate that, controlling for baseline target word knowledge, baseline PPVT, ELL status, child age, child gender, parent education, and home learning environment, treatment group children learned about 1.5 more target words over the five months of the intervention, an effect size of .16SD.
 

Authors

• Emily Snell, Temple University
  Presenting Author

• Barbara Wasik, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• AnneMarie Hindman, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author