Children's Competency, Adults' Conversations
"Here's an Alaska scientist whose work I bet you don't know," said the boss, smiling as she handed me a book. Maybe it was a mischievous grin, since the book absorbed my weekend. Its co-author was a University of Alaska Anchorage professor of whom I'd never heard, but it proved to be a captivating account of interesting research.
Even better, the research points to practical advice that could improve any child's chances of success in adulthood.
For UAA's Dr. Todd R. Risley and his colleague Dr. Betty Hart, the research began decades ago as one skirmish in the War on Poverty. In those hopeful days, "early intervention" was one battle cry--if poor children's learning could be enriched before they started school, they should do better in school and their ensuing lives. But it wasn't that easy. For example, in programs such as Head Start, children from impoverished homes could get a big learning boost, but as they went on through the grades, they eventually lagged behind more privileged children. Vocabulary acquisition seemed to be a key. The pattern was consistent through time, so that children who had been at a loss for words at age five were so far behind their privileged classmates by age sixteen that they couldn't understand their high school textbooks--they just didn't have the vocabulary to deal with the concepts demanded.
Since the children arrived at preschool with considerable differences in their language skills, Hart and Risley reasonably decided they needed to study what happened earlier. They set up a program to study children during the two years when they blossomed into verbal creatures, from the end of their first year to the end of their third. Put so baldly, such research may seem a simple enough matter. Hah! Studying humans is tough work. Children can't be treated like lab rats; a scientist doesn't have unlimited freedom to manipulate variables. The best place to observe nonmanipulated youngsters is their natural habitat--their own homes--but that means their families must tolerate the presence of observers with tape recorders. And that, in turn, means the scientists had to recruit observers who would be acceptable, in style and personality, to the families as well as being competent and reliable in their professional capacity (and willing to devote two full years to the study). Then the observers had to train together, so they could be certain that what they reported and recorded would be comparable. And so on, and on, everything proceeding with great care so other scientists could confirm or even replicate the work.
Hart and Risley had selected healthy families of different socioeconomic status, from welfare recipients to professionals, and of different races. The children were cherished members of these families, and the parents all valued learning and hoped the children would do well in school. Given those similarities and dissimilarities, the scientists found that the single most reliable predictor of how well children would do later in school was how, and how much, parents and other caregivers spoke with these toddlers just learning to talk.
Children who later did well in school had parents who used more than three times the number of words talking to them over the course of a day than did the parents of the children least likely to succeed. The competent children were more likely to have been prompted by questions or suggestions rather than given imperative directions and to have received more praises than prohibitions. They'd learned that knowledge--of how to behave, of how to communicate--made a difference in their lives.
You'd have to read the book--"Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children"--to verify that Risley and Hart did it right, but they certainly convinced me. It looks as if they got consistent, trustworthy results from their study. And what those results show is that talking with very little kids makes a very big difference.
