Reducing the Achievement Gap
By 18 months of age, there is a developmental difference of 6 months between high- SES (Socio-economic status) and low-SES populations.
At the Center of Infant Studies at Stanford University I researched this difference as it relates to rates of vocabulary growth and language processing, and how it is correlated to later academic success. What mediates this correlation is the interactions between the caregiver and the infant. During my Masters at Learning Design & Technology program at Stanford Education School, I developed an app, utilizing machine learning, to help the caregivers monitor the diversity and quantity of words spoken to their infant, and to increase the opportunities of these interactions. CuentameMas AppCuentameMas was my Masters project at the Learning Design & Technology program at Stanford Education School. It was an Android application for Hispanic parents that used machine learning to automate speech recognition and deliver real-time feedback to inform parents about their interaction with their children.
Many social interventions help parents to understand the importance of talking to their children on a regular basis. But changing behavior and creating new habits is hard. One main reason is that they can't measure their improvement and forget about implementing it. At the beginning of the project, I visited one of these interventions and observed and interviewed the potential users to understand the main obstacles in modifying their behavior. I prototyped with them several iterations of the app until they found it useful. Voice recognition technology in Android provides an off-the-shelf solution for measuring verbal interaction between parent and child. In this way parents can continuously be reminded about opportunities to use their new learned behavior and can track their improvement. To learn more, click through the presentation below: |
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Research at the Center of Infant Studies, Stanford University
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Infants differ substantially in their rates of language growth, and slow growth predicts later academic difficulties. By the time they enter kindergarten, children from disadvantaged backgrounds differ significantly from their more advantaged peers in verbal and other cognitive abilities, and these disparities are predictive of later academic success or failure. Research in western, industrialized countries has documented that infants who hear more rich and varied speech from caregivers become more efficient at processing language, learn vocabulary more quickly, and develop stronger language skills.
Caregiver talk has direct as well as indirect influences on lexical development. More exposure to child-directed speech not only provides more models for learning words but also sharpens infants’ emerging lexical processing skills, with cascading benefits for vocabulary learning. If increased opportunities for verbal interaction can strengthen critical processing skills that enable more efficient learning, then interventions aimed at increasing parents’ verbal engagement with their infants have the potential to change the course of vocabulary growth and, in turn, to improve later outcomes for disadvantaged children. |
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