In Florida, the grade 5 English language arts curriculum includes complex text. To be successful, students must have a deep knowledge of multisyllabic words in informational texts. Therefore, district leaders in a large school district in central Florida wanted to examine the efficacy of a new curriculum designed to enhance the word knowledge of grade 5 students and improve their reading achievement. Consisting of 15-minute lessons taught 4 days a week for 20 weeks, the Word Knowledge Instruction (WKI) curriculum covers 20 prefixes and suffixes that address state standards.
REL Southeast tested the impact of WKI and found that it had a positive effect on student ability to correctly extract and spell a base word from a derived word, one of the skills explicitly taught by WKI. However, WKI had no effect on two other related reading skills that were not directly taught by WKI (student ability to select a nonword that best fits the grammatical context of a sentence or to use knowledge of word parts to infer meaning of new words) or on student vocabulary or reading scores.
Read the report at: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/projects/project.asp?projectID=4565
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The Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) build the capacity of educators to use data and research to improve student outcomes. Each REL responds to needs identified in its region and makes learning opportunities and other resources available to educators throughout the United States. The REL program is a part of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in the U.S. Department of Education. To receive regular updates on REL work, including events and reports, follow IES on Facebook and Twitter. To provide feedback on this or other REL work, email Contact.IES@ed.gov.
The Institute of Education Sciences, a part of the U.S. Department of Education, is the nation’s leading source for rigorous, independent education research, evaluation and statistics