Parents often have the best intentions to work with their young kids on the alphabet, rhyming words, and other literacy skills. But with the rush to make dinner and get the kids to bed, it can be difficult to carry through on those intentions.
In an effort to provide assistance, Stanford University researchers have developed a program that sends texts providing literacy-development tips to parents of preschoolers, and now, a new study shows that participating in the program improved the kids test scores. At a cost of less than $1 per parent, it’s an affordable intervention that catches parents at moments during the day when they just might find five minutes to squeeze in reading a book with their kids.
The researchers implemented a pilot program, called READY4K!, during the 2013-2014 school year at 31 San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) preschools. These facilities that have long collaborated with Stanford as a sort of learning lab — testing the latest education techniques that the researchers develop. Of the 440 families with four-year-olds that participated in the program, half were sent literacy activity and fact texts three times a week such as, “By saying beginning word sounds, like ‘ttt’ in taco & tomato, you’re preparing your child 4 K,” or “Let your child hold the book. Ask what it is about. Follow the words with your finger as you read,” according to Motoko Rich of the New York Times. The other half received texts with school announcements and other placebo messages.
The results? Parents who received the literacy prompts spent more time engaged in reading-related activities with their kids than those in the control group did. Plus, their kids achieved higher scores on literacy tests than did kids in the control group, and that group of parents engaged with teachers more, too.
Susanna Loeb, the director of Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, tells May Wong of Phys.org, “The barrier to some of these positive parenting practices isn’t knowledge or desire, but it’s the crazy, busy lives. It’s difficult to have the time or focus to make all these choices as parents, and we’re helping parents do what they know they should do and what they want to do.” She also notes, “We know that changing parental behaviors has proven to be very difficult, so to get these positive effects from our texting program was very exciting.”
What might be even more exciting is the fact that this technique works for low-income and minority families, whose children often enter kindergarten with a significant vocabulary gap compared to higher-income peers.
“Parents really are the first teacher that a student has and are the most important teacher at that [early] age,” Loeb tells Wong. “They don’t have to do it the way teachers do it; they just have to work things in with their daily life.”
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Tag: preschool
Why the U.S. Should Adopt the “Finnish Way” of Education
In life, quality almost always trumps quantity. (Just think: You’d probably rather have one bite of Green and Black’s chocolate instead of an entire Hershey’s bar.) And interestingly, the same appears to hold true in education.
Some of the smartest students in the world don’t start school until they’re 7 years old — a full year later (or more) than we do here in the United States. This is the “Finnish Way” of education, and the American school system could learn a lot from it.
Recently Krista Kiuru, Finland’s minister of education and science, visited Washington, D.C. to talk to U.S. education officials about how to bring some of this coveted “Finnish Way” here to America. Despite the country’s small size — it’s roughly the size of Minnesota — and the fact that students start school later, Finnish students greatly outperform Americans in math, reading and science. In fact, Finland’s students are some of the smartest in the world, outperforming all but a few countries. Kiuru owes most of this to a high-quality, universal and free preschool system — something that U.S. President Barack Obama has pushed for but seems unlikely to catch on, due to resistance from legislators and lobbyists.
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In Finland, every child has a legal right to childcare and preschool, regardless of income. Because of this, more than 97 percent of 3- to 6-year-olds attend some variety of preschool program, which makes them better prepared to start school when they’re 7 years old. “First of all, it’s about having high-quality teachers,” Kiuru told NPR about the preschool program. “Day care teachers are having Bachelor degrees. So we trust our teachers, and that’s very, very important. And the third factor: we have strong values in the political level.” That’s something we’re not finding here in America.
Amanda Ripley, author of The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way, visited Finland and other countries with top-performing students — Singapore, South Korea and Japan, to name a few — to determine what these countries do right in terms of education. Finland’s preschool and childcare programs, both of which meet the country’s stringent National Curriculum Guidelines, stood out to her in terms of their approach and effectiveness. “Kids are almost all in some kind of day care, all of whom are working in the same curriculum that’s aligned with what they’re going to learn in school,” Ripley told NPR. “That’s a level of coherence that most U.S. kids will never experience because we don’t have a coherent system with highly trained people in almost every classroom.”
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Why don’t we have a coherent system? First, we can’t seem to agree on one. There’s no national consensus about what such a program would look like here in the U.S. Second, we don’t invest in early childhood education. (In Finland, the taxes are much higher to provide free preschool and day care.) And lastly, our child poverty rate — which is five times higher than Finland’s — is holding us back. “It’s very clear from the research in the U.S. that our problems with inequality [and] school failure are set when children walk in the school door,” Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, told NPR, noting that in the U.S., 60 percent of 4-year-olds from low-income families don’t attend preschool.
“If you invest in early childhood education, in preschool and day care, that will lead [to] better results,” Kiuru says. Sounds like common sense. So why can’t the U.S. adopt at least some of the “Finnish Way” and make it “American Way”?
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Here’s Why We Should Be Investing in Single Moms
What happens if you give a single mom high-quality childcare, higher education and a place to live? A whole lot, actually.
The Jeremiah Program in Minneapolis has helped more than a thousand low-income single mothers and their children build better lives and break the cycle of poverty since it began in 1998. The program provides the mothers with affordable housing at its campus and free preschool for the children so their moms can pursue their education at nearby Minneapolis Community & Technical College. Ninety-five percent of the kids leave the preschool ready for kindergarten, and ninety-percent of the mothers are able to maintain steady employment after they finish the Jeremiah Program. This program works so well because it addresses the problems faced by two generations at once—low-income moms often struggle to complete their educations or hold a job while dealing with the demands of caring for young children, while their kids often receive sub-standard childcare or don’t attend preschool at all, setting back their educations before they even begin.
It costs about $25,000 to see one mom and her children through the program, but an independent analysis found a $4 return to the community for every dollar invested in these families, and a $16 million lifetime benefit for every 100 families elevated from poverty. The Jeremiah Program has expanded to Austin, Texas, Fargo, N.D., and St. Paul, Minn., while cities including Boston, Rochester, Minn. and Dayton, Ohio are working to replicate the program. Amira Masri, who participates in the Jeremiah Program with her daughter Arcadia, told Mary Stegmeir of the Des Moines Register, “My mom was a single mom, and her mom was a single mom. I feel like I’m the (one) that’s going to change our pattern … and end the cycle of poverty here, now with Arcadia.”
40 Years Ago, Researchers Sent Half These Kids to Preschool. And What an Amazing Difference It Made.
It might look like kids at preschool are just coloring pictures, playing with clay or running around on the playground, but what they’re really doing is laying the foundation for their futures as productive Americans. Indiana Governor Mike Pence is urging his state legislature to increase funding to pre-K for needy kids after analyzing the results of a study that began in the 1960s. Back then, researchers assigned 123 black children from low-income homes in Ypsilanti, Mich., to either a research group or a control group. The research group attended preschool, the control group did not. Although members of both groups emerged with similar IQs, the preschool group was much more likely to achieve employment stability, stay out of jail, and engage in healthy behaviors overall. The lessons preschool teaches about interacting with teachers and other kids, and building self-control apparently last a lifetime. That’s all the more reason to invest in the next generation by providing preschool to as many low-income children as possible.