Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children / Edition 1

by Betty Hart, Todd R. Risley

Overview

This study of ordinary families and how they talk to their very young children is no ordinary study at all. Betty Hart and Todd Risley wanted to know why, despite best efforts in preschool programs to equalize opportunity, children from low-income homes remain well behind their more economically advantaged peers years later in school. Their painstaking study began by recording each month - for 2-1/2 years - one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families, categorized as professional, working class, or welfare families. Years of coding and analyzing every utterance in 1,318 transcripts followed. Rare is a database of this quality. "Remarkable," says Assistant Secretary of Education Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, of the findings: By age 3, the recorded spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families. Between professional and welfare parents, there was a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour. Extrapolating this verbal interaction to a year, a child in a professional family would hear 11 million words while a child in a welfare family would hear just 3 million. The implications for society are staggering: Hart and Risley's follow-up studies at age 9 show that the large differences in the amount of children's language experience were tightly linked to large differences in child outcomes. And yet the implications are encouraging, too. As the authors conclude their preface to the 2002 printing of Meaningful Differences, "the most important aspect to evaluate in child care settings for very young children is the amount of talk actually going on, moment by moment, between children and their caregivers." By giving children positive interactions and experiences with adults who take the time to teach vocabulary, oral language concepts, and emergent literacy concepts, children should have a better chance to succeed at school

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781557661975
Publisher:	Brookes, Paul H. Publishing Company
Publication date:	01/01/1995
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Betty Hart, Ph.D., began her career in the early 1960s at the Institute for Child Development at the University of Washington, where she participated in the original demonstrations of the power of learning principles in influencing young children. With Montrose Wolf and Todd Risley, she introduced the basic procedures of adult attention and time-out now routinely taught and used in teaching and parenting. She also helped introduce the procedures for shaping speech and language widely used in special education. In 1965, she and Todd Risley began more than 35 years of collaborative work at the University of Kansas, when they established preschool intervention programs in poverty neighborhoods in Kansas City. Their study of what children actually do and say in day care and preschool and their publications on incidental teaching from the empirical base for contemporary child-centered teaching practices in preschool and special education. Dr. Hart is now Professor Emeritus of Human Development at The University of Kansas, and Senior Scientist at the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies at The University of Kansas. She has remained focused on the language development of preschool children.

Todd R. Risley, Ph.D., began his career in the early 1960s at the Institute for Child Development at the University of Washington, where he participated in the original demonstrations of the power of learning principles in influencing young children. With Montrose Wolf and Betty Hart, he introduced the basic procedures of adult attention and time-out now routinely taught and used in teaching and parenting. He also helped introduce the procedures for shaping speech and language widely used in special education. In 1965, Hart and Risley began more than 35 years of collaborative work at the University of Kansas, when they established preschool intervention programs in poverty neighborhoods in Kansas City. Their study of what children actually do and say in day care and preschool and their publications on incidental teaching from the empirical base for contemporary child-centered teaching practices in preschool and special education. Before his death in 2007, Dr. Risley was Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Alaska and Senior Scientist at the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies at The University of Kansas. He served on many national boards and commissions, as Editor of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, as President of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy and of the behavioral division of the American Psychological Association, and as Alaska's Director of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpted from Chapter 1 of Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children
By Betty Hart, Ph.D., and Todd R. Risley, Ph.D.
©1995. Brookes Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

Intergenerational Transmission of Competence

America in the 1960s found a cause worth committing to: the War on Poverty. The aim was to interrupt the cycle of poverty—the economic disadvantages that resulted from employment disadvantages that resulted from growing up in poverty. An attack was mounted on two fronts: breaking down barriers to the advantages mainstream society enjoyed, and providing a boost up through job training programs and early educational institutions. Job training programs and early education programs provided a boost up into the job market and the school system.

Because poverty was differentially prevalent among minorities, racial discrimination had to be targeted. But race, rather than cycle of poverty, was a central issue only in designing strategies to preserve cultural identity within mainstream society. Early education programs such as Head Start were funded to serve African American children in inner-city ghettos, Native American children isolated on reservations, and white children in rural Appalachia. All across the country, experts in early childhood education designed intervention programs to give children isolated in poverty the social and cognitive experiences that underlay the academic success of advantaged children. It was thought the War on Poverty could change children's lives within a generation.

Events continue to remind us that the War on Poverty did not succeed. After barriers were removed and a boost up was provided, the people who had the knowledge and skills that could influence the and motivate the next generation of children moved away and left those less competent isolated in communities riddled with drugs, crime, unemployment, and despair. Like most wars, the War on Poverty was more successful in destroying the past than in creating the future, the competencies for participating in an increasingly technological society.

Competence as a social problem is still with us. American society still sees many of its children enter school ill-prepared to benefit from education. Too many children drop out of school and follow their parents into unemployment or onto welfare, where they raise their children in a culture of poverty. The boost up from early intervention during the War on Poverty did not solve the problem of giving children the competencies they need to succeed in school. We recognize now that by the time children are 4 years old, intervention programs come too late and can provide too little experience to make up for the past.

Early Intervention Programs

The intervention programs of the War on Poverty, the first efforts, were modeled on the booster shot. It was assumed that a concentrated dose of mainstream culture would be enough to raise intellectual performance and lead to success in mainstream schools. Children disadvantaged from living in isolated areas were brought into preschool programs similar to those advantage children attended. The programs offered the enriched materials and activities available in such preschools, but replaced the traditional emphasis on social development with an emphasis on compensatory education, especially language and cognitive development.

Innovative curricula were designed and field tested. The content and objectives of the curricula were selected to teach in the preschool the competencies advantaged children apparently acquired at home. All of these curricula programmed successive educational experiences using materials especially designed to help children master basic academic skills in the style originated by Montessori for teaching poor children in Italy. DARCEE of Gray and Kalus, Karnes's GOAL, DISTAR of Bereiter and Engleman, and others are examples of the language and cognitive development curricula that were designed during the War on Poverty.

Programs differed in emphasis and teaching methods, depending on theoretical orientation. Psychodynamic theory led to an emphasis on motivation and self-concept in the Bank Street Program. In the Perry Preschool Project, the program, derived mainly from Piagetian theory, emphasized learning through activities and experiences to stimulate children to construct concepts and develop logical modes of thought. The behavioral orientation of the Bereiter-Engleman program emphasized highly structured direct instruction, including pattern drill.

Major improvements in language and cognitive performance were often immediate and large and were not unique to any particular curriculum or theoretical approach. The improvements in performance were apparent in the preschool and carried over into the home. Although parents did not necessarily appreciate the change in their children's behavior, they accepted the increase in activity and curiosity that resulted from the enriched experiences. Lateral and horizontal diffusion of the curricula content spread the effects beyond the child into the family and community. Head Start is still in existence because long-term benefits did accrue from early intervention programs; the children did adapt better to school and many stayed through school into adulthood with their age-mates.

But the academic headstart was temporary. In kindergarten, children who had not attended preschool programs caught up with the children who had. By the third grade the effects of the boost had washed out, and there was little difference in the academic performance between children who had and had not taken part in early intervention programs. Scholastic achievement scores were similar to those before the War on Poverty. By the 1970s, intervention experts were wondering how they could have possibly have believed that a single shot of mainstream culture would be sufficient to make substantial changes in intellectual performance in all or most children raised in poverty.

Intervention at the Turner House Preschool

Early in the War on Poverty, civic leaders in an African American community, the improvised Juniper Gardens area of Kansas City, Kansas, joined representatives of the Bureau of Child Research at the University of Kansas in Lawrence to develop a community-based program of research designed to improve the educational and developmental experiences of the neighborhood children. They persuaded the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas to tear down a church in Juniper Gardens and build a community center, Turner House, and then called in a cadre of applied psychologists expert in remediating and generalizing behavior. We (the authors) brought our experience with clinical language intervention to design a half-day program for the Turner House Preschool. Instead of focusing on a theory-based curriculum designed to affect a hypothetical construct we could measure or estimate only from tests, we designed an intervention focused on the everyday language the children were using.

We focused on children's spontaneous speech as the best dynamic of cognitive functioning and as the behavior most likely to influence the educational value of people's responses. Rather than evaluate the results of an intervention program by how children performed on IQ tests administered outside the intervention setting, we looked for improvements in how the children functioned in their daily activities in the preschool. We wanted the children to know more, but we also wanted to see them applying that knowledge, using language to elicit information and learning opportunities form their teachers in the preschool. We watched what the children were doing to guide what we were doing.

We developed reliable recording methods so that we could sample each child's spontaneous speech during preschool free play every day, recording all the utterances the child produced during a 15-minute observation. When data from a particular child were processed by computer, for each observation a list was derived of each different word encountered in the data; that list was compared to the master of all the different words so far recorded for that child, and any word not already on the list was added. In this way an individual dictionary was compiled for each child that contained all the different words the child had produced during the observation. We used this dictionary as a measure of the child's vocabulary.

Table of Contents

Foreword
A Preface for 2002
Preface
About the Authors
Acknowledgments

1. Intergenerational Transmission of Competence
2. Sampling Children's Developmental Experience
3. 42 American Families
4. Everyday Parenting
5. Quality Features of Language and Interaction
6. The Early Experience of 42 Typical American Children
7. Accomplishments of the 42 Children at Age 3 and Later
8. The Importance of the First 3 Years of Family Experience
9. Intervention to Equalize Early Experience

References
Appendix A: Quality Features
Appendix B: Figures
Index

Editorial Reviews

Meaningful Differences was quoted in The Washington Post (Nov. 17th) in a follow up to a column written by William Rasberry in The Wash. Post from August 2003: Reaching Parents Early. The follow-up column is a summary of the columnist’s experience in his hometown of Okolona, Mississippi after applying practices from Meaningful Differences to his small town community and the results he observed.

The Washington Post - William Rasberry

Referenced in US News & World Report (November 24th ed.) in an editorial about why minority groups still fall behind on the education front and what works vs. what doesn’t work and why in these classrooms. The article highlights the importance and influence of family on educational results and references the Hart/Risley research revealing that differences in the quantity of language interactions between children and their parents, up to the age of 3, have an enormous impact on learning trajectories.

US News & World Report

"Alerts us to how much each person's future intellectual ability hinges upon his or her experience in the first year of life."

U.S. Senator - Thomas Daschle

A detective story of the most serious academic kind.

Lois Bloom

The book is a model of how environmental factors in intelligence formation should be studied.

H.J. Eysenck

"From age 2 on, there exist large differences in children's familiarity with unusual words, standard pronunciation, and complex syntax, a fact that was long suspected, but not well documented and quantified until the monumental research of Betty Hart and Todd Risley."

Professor Emeritus of Education and Humanities, University of Virginia - E.D. Hirsch

"Some of the most eye-opening research ever produced on children's early lives."

author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, Fifth Edition - Jim Trelease

"Remarkable findings . . . ground-breaking"

Assistant Secretary of Education for Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education - Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst

"A benchmark for anyone interested in how children acquire intellectual skills, or in the policy implications of educational interventions in this area."

Contemporary Psychology

"Hart and Risely's simple, clear writing style provides a succinct product... Read it yourself. Send one to your congressional representatives."

Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis

"[This] book may very well change our thinking abut how we arrange early experiences for our children, if not revolutionize our approach to childhood. It should be required reading by anyone seriously involved in early education and intervention as well as policy makers."

Journal of Early Intervention

"This book has the potential to shape the lives of future generations."

Remedial and Special Education

"This book has the potential to shape the lives of future generations."

From the Publisher

Taking on the nature vs. nurture debate, Hart and Risley studied the daily lives of 1- and 2-year-old children in American families of all socioeconomic classes. The families showed huge contrasts in the amount of interaction between parents and children--differences that translated into striking disparities in the children's later vocabulary growth rate, vocabulary use, and IQ scores. The link exists regardless of a child's race, the researchers found, offering an important answer to those such as the controversial authors of The Bell Curve who attribute intelligence to genetics. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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