page 4.2

meaningful differences

                                                  rethinking the brain 
old thinking new thinking
how a brain develops depends on the genes you are born with. how a brain develops hinges on a complex interplay between genes you are born with and the experiences you have.
the experiences you have before the age of three have a limited impact on later development. early experiences have a decisive impact on the architecture of the brain, and on the nature and extent of adult capabilities.
a secure relationship with a primary caregiver creates a favorable context for early development and learning. early interactions don’t just create context, they directly affect the way the brain is “wired.”
brain development is linear. the brain’s capacity to learn and change grows steadily as an infant progresses toward adulthood. brain development is non-linear. there are prime times for acquiring different kinds of knowledge and skills.
a toddler’s brain is much less active than the brain of a college student. by the time children reach age three, their brains are twice as active as those of adults. activity levels drop during adolescence.




Meaningful Differences
the seminal research that explains the devastating learning
gap that at begins at home and then comes to school.
by jim trelease, 2001

<< eds. - the essence is, that the number of words a very young child hears, and how many rare words, makes a fantastic difference in later development. as they grow older, the gap between the advantaged child and their peers grows wider and wider. >>

conversation is the prime garden in which a child’s vocabulary grows, but those conversations vary greatly from home to home.

consider the important findings of drs. betty hart and todd risley at the university of kansas. it is some of the most eye-opening research ever produced on children’s early lives. I once had the honor of sharing lunch with docotor penelope leach, the great english pediatrician, and I asked her what research she’d read lately that excited her the most. she cited the hart/risley project immediately.

published as “meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young american children,” it began in response to the differences among four-year-olds in the university lab school. with many children, the lines were already drawn. some were so far advanced and some far behind. when these same children were tested at age three and then again at age nine, the difference held. what caused the difference so early?

the research began by identifying 42 normal families:
•    no drug, alcohol, or spouse abuse, and non-transient.

three socio-economic groups were represented:
•    welfare, working class, and professional.

beginning when the children:
•    were seven months old,
researchers visited the homes for one hour a month, and continued their visits
•    for two and one-half years.
during each visit, the researcher tape-recorded and transcribed by hand any conversation and actions taking place in front of the child.

through 1,300 hours of visits, they accumulated 23 billion bytes of information, the equivalent of fifteen books, for the project database. every word said in front of the child was categorized:
•    noun, verb, adjective, etc.
they also defined three types of sentences used with the child:
•    question – “can you find the ball?”
•    affirmative – “you’re so smart!”
•    prohibitive – “”stop that! bad boy!”

the project held some suprises: regardless of socio-economic level, all forty-two families said and did the same things with their children. in other words, the instincts of good parenting are there for most people, rich or poor.

and then the researchers received the data printout and saw the “meaningful differences” among the forty-two children. when the daily number of words for each group of children was projected over four years, the four year old child:
•    from the professional family will have heard 45 million words,
•    the working class child will have heard 26 million words,
•    and the welfare child will have heard only 13 million words.

all three children will show up for kindergarten on the same day, but one will have heard 32 million fewer words,  which is a gigantic difference.

none of this has anything to do with how much a parent loves a child. they all love their children and want the best for them, but some parents have a better idea of what needs to be said and done to reach that best.

they know the child needs to repeatedly hear words in meaningful sentences and questions, and they know that plunking a two year old in front of a television set for three hours at a time is more harmful than meaningful.  << eds. - we think he is bending over backward to be fair here. many people, including the well off, don’t know this, or often just don’t care. >>

types of sentences
[in addition], the child
•    of the professional heard 32 compliments an hour.
•    of the working class parents heard 12 compliments and hour.
•    and a “poverty level” child heard just 5 compliments an hour.

conversely, the child
•    of the professional heard only 5 negative comments.
•    of the working class parents heard 7 negative comments.
•    of the poorer parents heard 11 negative comments.
 
for america’s most at-risk children that comes to a total of 104,000 encouragements and 228,000 discouragements by the age of four. the child of the professional arrives at kindergarten thinking he/she is a world-beater and the at risk child arrives with a mindset of “can’t-do” because people at home have been telling him so for years.

the message is unambiguous: it’s not the toys in the house that make the difference in children’s lives, it’s the words in their heads. the cheapest thing we can give a child, outside of a hug, turns out to be the most valuable: WORDS. you don’t need a job, a checking account, or even a high school diploma to talk with a child.

sadly, I’ve not heard even one of the nation’s so-called “education candidates” address the issues in the “meaningful differences” report.

the immediate affect of this vocabulary gap presents itself when the child starts school. two significant studies of student vocabularies in first through third grade showed that children from high income families had 30 to 50 percent larger vocabularies than their peers in low income families, a difference that allowed them to read more, and thus, widen the gap further.

in order for the poorer child to make up the lost ground before fifth grade, he/she would need to learn an extra 170 vocabulary words each week, over the 116 they’re supposedly learning – a daunting task, to say the least.

if conversation is so important, why not have a conversation instead of reading?
most conversation is plain and simple whether it’s between two adults or with children. it consists of 5,000 words we use all the time, called the Basic Lexicon.

83 percent of words in normal conversation with a child come from the most commonly used 1,000 words, and this doesn’t change much as the child ages.

then there are another 5,000 words we use in conversation less often.

beyond that 10,000 mark are the “rare words” which play a critical role in reading. the eventual strength of our vocabulary is determined not by the common 10,000 words but by how many “rare words” we understand.

if we don’t use rare words that often, where do we find them? the chart shows that printed text contains the most rare words.

wheras adults speaking with a three-year-old use only 9 rare words per thousand, you’ll find three times as many in children’s books, and more than seven times as many in a newspaper.
 
how can a parent with a poor vocabulary help?
there is a public agency that comes to the rescue in such instances. in fact, it’s been doing this job for more than a century. what this agency does is take all the nouns, verbs and adjectives a person would ever need, and bundles them into little packages for people to borrow – FREE. I’m referring to the american free public library – the “people’s university.”

if you think it’s simplistic that libraries can fix people’s language and knowledge problems, then you must be unaware of the success stories involving libraries and immigrants throughout the twentieth century – from the jews at the beginning to the asians at the end.

how can an illiterate parent help?
that would have been a harder question forty years ago, but today’s libraries have thousands of children’s and adult books on audio tape. you can follow along with the tape. for younger children there are wordless picture books. [these are fine if the parent understands it is the repetition of words that helps the child.]

encouragement – pay now or pay MORE later.
the most encouraging of all the long term studies on low-income children is the carolina “abecedarian project”. begun in the early 1970s, the study followed 111 children in chapel hill, north carolina. 57 were assigned to a high-quality, year-round day care program, and 54 to a control group that didn’t receive the treatment. the children received nutritional food supplements in the early years, and social services until age eight.

a central focus of the day care was a language enrichment program. to encourage that, the staff-to-child ratio
•    for infants was 1 to 3,
•    and 1 to 7 for preschoolers.

children stayed in the program for five years, costing a total of 11,000 dollars by today’s standards, and were evaluated through age 21.

at age 21, when compared to their control-group peers, the abecedarian students:
•    had higher IQs.
•    were retained in grade FAR LESS..
•    had higher reading achievement.
•    had slightly higher math scores.
•    were twice as likely to be in post-secondary schools by age 21.
•    delayed having a child by two full years.

cost comparison
there are those who will balk at spending that kind of money in order to to break the cycle of school failure in a family. society can spend
•    11,000 dollars total per child,
•    or 27,000 dollars PER YEAR, for a person who might be incarcerated.

a RAND study showed that for each person who is moved from the status of high school drop-out to graduate, the following ANNUAL savings occur by age 30:
•    social programs savings (jail, medicaid, food stamps, AFDC) – 4,121 dollars.
•    increase in graduate’s tax payments – 1,617.
•    increase in graduates disposable income – 2,449.

by these calculations, the 11,000 cost of enriched child care could be repaid in less than two years. after that the savings are all profit for the community and the country. if a person went past high school the saving are even greater. << eds. – we didn’t need fancy pants RAND to make these simple calculations, but it adds weight to the idea. >>

(the original paper has been slightly modified, and had nine footnotes. it was received as a hand out at a, appropriately enough, “read to your bunny” seminar at a large library.)