Boosting school performance
“The bad news is, there’s a situation here that makes it harder for these kids to learn. The good news is that children are amazing learners, and so there is potential for us to go in and expose them to information that will mitigate the problem. So let’s do it.”
Mark Seidenberg
Professor of Psychology
Despite decades of interventions and billions of dollars spent, a large gap in school achievement stubbornly persists between children living in poverty and their more advantaged peers. A team of seed grant recipients will now bring its collective expertise to bear on one important, but overlooked, cause of this troubling problem.
Led by psychology professor Mark Seidenberg and communicative disorders professors Julie Washington and Jan Edwards, the study focuses on African American children from low-income families, a group that is particularly at risk for educational failure. At issue, says Seidenberg, is that in their early years, many of these children become fluent in one English dialect, called African American Vernacular English, only to encounter another, Standard American English, when they enter school.
“Usually the version of English you learn as your first language and that you speak in your home and your community, is the same as the language of instruction in school,” Seidenberg says. “Our study concerns kids who are speaking a different dialect of English at home than the one being used in their schools. And that makes learning more difficult, especially learning to read.”
Today, African American children are left on their own to sort through the differences between the dialects. The nine-member research team proposes instead to identify the dialect mismatches with the largest impacts on reading ability and to develop targeted interventions that will help very young children recognize these crucial differences and cope with them.
The Team
Co-Principal Investigators
- Jan Edwards, Communicative Disorders
- Mark Seidenberg, Psychology
- Julie Washington, Communicative Disorders
Investigators
- Martha Alibali, Psychology
- Maria Cancian, La Follette School of Public Affairs
- David Kaplan, Educational Psychology
- Maryellen MacDonald, Psychology
- Seth Pollak, Psychology
- Jenny Saffran, Psychology
A larger goal
Reducing the school achievement gap is a worthy aim all on its own, but the effort also represents the first step toward a much larger goal, Seidenberg says. "We usually think about issues like these as educational problems requiring educational solutions,” he says. “But they are also scientific issues about brain development, language, perception and memory. We need to begin using discoveries about the brain to inform educational issues.”
Key to the team’s success will be intervening with children at preschool age, when their brains are maximally responsive to learning, or “plastic,” when it comes to acquiring language.
“The bad news is, there’s a situation here that makes it harder for these kids to learn,” says Seidenberg. “The good news is that children are amazing learners, and so there is potential for us to go in and expose them to information that will mitigate the problem. So let’s do it.”
The other team members are psychology professors Martha Alibali, Maryellen MacDonald, Seth Pollak and Jenny Saffran; educational psychology professor David Kaplan; and La Follette School of Public Affairs professor Maria Cancian.