blog posts and news stories

New Research Project Evaluating the Impact of EVERFI’s WORD Force Program on Early Literacy Skills

Empirical Education and EVERFI from Blackbaud are excited to announce a new partnership. Researchers at Empirical will evaluate the impact and implementation of the WORD Force program, a literacy adventure for K-2 students.

The WORD Force program is designed to be engaging and interactive, using games and real-world scenarios to to teach students key reading and literacy skills and understand how to use them in context. It also provides students with personalized feedback and support, allowing them to work at their own pace and track their progress.

We will conduct the experiment within up to four school districts—working with elementary school teachers. This is our second project with EVERFI, and it builds on our 20 years of extensive experience conducting large-scale, rigorous randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies. (Read EVERFI’s press release about our first project with them.)

In our current work together, we plan to answer these five research questions. 1. What is the impact of WORD Force on early literacy achievement, including on spoken language, phonological awareness, phonics, word building, vocabulary, reading fluency, and reading comprehension, for students in grades K–2? 2. What is the impact of WORD Force on improving early literacy achievement for students in grades K-2 from low- to middle-income households, English Language Learner (ELL) students, by grade, and depending on teacher background (e.g., years of teaching experience, or responses to baseline survey about orientation to literacy instruction)? 3. What is the impact of WORD Force on improving early literacy achievement for students in grades K-2 who struggle with reading (i.e., those in greatest need of reading intervention) as determined through a baseline assessment of literacy skills? 4. What are realized levels of implementation/usage by teachers and students, and are they associated with achievement outcomes? 5. Do impacts on intermediate instructional/implementation outcomes mediate impacts on achievement ?

Using a matched-pairs design, we will pair teachers who are similar in terms of years of experience and other characteristics. Then, from each pair, we will randomize one teacher to the WORD Force group and the other to the business-as-usual (BAU) control group. This RCT design will allow us to evaluate the causal impact of WORD Force on student achievement outcomes as contrasted with BAU. EVERFI will offer WORD Force to the teachers in BAU as soon as the experiment is over. EVERFI will be able to use these findings to identify implementation factors that influence student outcomes, such as the classroom literacy environment, literacy block arrangements, and teachers’ characteristics. This study will also contribute to the growing corpus of literature around the efficacy of educational technology usage in early elementary classrooms.

For more information on our evaluation services, please visit our research services page and/or contact us.

All research Empirical Education has conducted for EVERFI can be found on our EVERFI webpage.

Meet Our Newest Researchers

The Empirical Research Team is pleased to announce the addition of 3 new team members. We welcome Rebecca Dowling, Lindsay Maurer, and Mayah Waltower as our newest researchers!

Rebecca Dowling, Research Manager

Rebecca (box 8 in the pet matching game) is taking on the role of project manager for two evaluations. One is the EVERFI WORD Force project, working with Mayah Waltower. The other is the How Are The Children project. Rebecca’s PhD in Applied Developmental Psychology with a specialization in educational contexts of development lends expertise to both of these projects. Her education is complemented by her experience managing evaluations before joining Empirical Education. Rebecca works out of her home office in Utah. Can you guess which pet works at home with her?

Lindsay Maurer, Research Assistant

Lindsay (box 6 in the pet matching game) assists Sze-Shun Lau with the CREATE project, a teacher residency program in Atlanta Public Schools invested in expanding equity in education by developing critically conscious, compassionate, and skilled educators. Lindsay’s experience as a research assistant studying educational excellence and equality at the University of California Davis is an asset to the CREATE project. Lindsay works out of her home office in San Francisco, CA. Can you guess which pet works at home with her?

Mayah Waltower, Research Assistant

Mayah (box 1 in the pet matching game) has taken on assisting Rebecca with the EVERFI WORD Force and the How Are The Children projects. Mayah also assists Sze-Shun Lau with the CREATE project, a teacher residency program in Atlanta Public Schools invested in expanding equity in education by developing critically conscious, compassionate, and skilled educators. Mayah works out of her home office in Atlanta, GA. Can you guess which pet works at home with her?

To get to know them better, we’d like to invite you to play our pet matching game. The goal of the game is to correctly match each new team member with their pet (yes, plants can be pets too). To submit your answers and see if you’re right, post your guesses to twitter and tag us @empiricaled.