Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children [Hardcover]

Todd R. Risley (Author), Betty Hart (Author), Louis Bloom (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1557661979 | ISBN-13: 978-1557661975 | Publication Date: June 30, 1995

This study of ordinary families and how they talk to their very young children is no ordinary study at all. Betty Hart and Todd Risley wanted to know why, despite best efforts in preschool programs to equalize opportunity, children from low-income homes remain well behind their more economically advantaged peers years later in school. Their painstaking study began by recording each month - for 2-1/2 years - one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families, categorized as professional, working class, or welfare families. Years of coding and analyzing every utterance in 1,318 transcripts followed. Rare is a database of this quality. "Remarkable," says Assistant Secretary of Education Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, of the findings: By age 3, the recorded spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families. Between professional and welfare parents, there was a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour. Extrapolating this verbal interaction to a year, a child in a professional family would hear 11 million words while a child in a welfare family would hear just 3 million. The implications for society are staggering: Hart and Risley's follow-up studies at age 9 show that the large differences in the amount of children's language experience were tightly linked to large differences in child outcomes. And yet the implications are encouraging, too. As the authors conclude their preface to the 2002 printing of Meaningful Differences, "the most important aspect to evaluate in child care settings for very young children is the amount of talk actually going on, moment by moment, between children and their caregivers." By giving children positive interactions and experiences with adults who take the time to teach vocabulary, oral language concepts, and emergent literacy concepts, children should have a better chance to succeed at school

Editorial Reviews

Review

...alerts us to how much each person's future intellectual ability hinges upon his or her experience in the first year of life. -- Senator Thomas Daschle

Hart and Risley have condensed a large amount offunctional, practical, and very persuasive data... -- Asha

This establishes a definite, studied link between early childhood experiences and later intellectual development, providing a strong study which focuses on American childhood experiences and which analyzes the strong differences to be found between children at the same age levels. An excellent, thought-provoking study. -- Midwest Book Review

[This book] sheds fresh light on the still ongoing argument over the relative influences of nature and nurture... --Child and Family Behavior Therapy

About the Author

Betty Hart, Ph.D., and Todd R. Risley, Ph.D., began their careers in the early 1960s at the Institute for Child Development at the University of Washington, where they participated in the original demonstrations of the power of learning principles in influencing young children. With Montrose Wolf they introduced the basic procedures of adult attention and time-out now routinely taught and usaed in teaching and parenting. They also introduced the procedures for shaping speech and language widely used in special education.

In 1965, Hart and Risley began 30 years of collaborative work at The Universityof Kansas, when they established preschool intervention programs in poverty neighborhoods in Inasas City. Their study of what children actually do and say in day care and preschool and their publications on incidental teaching form the empirical base for contemporary child-centered teaching practices in preschool and special education.

Dr. Hart is now Professor Emeritus of Human Development at The University of Kansas, and Dr. Risley is Professor of Psychology at the Universityof Alaska. Both are Senior Scientists at the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies at The University of Kansas.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 268 pages
• Publisher: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. (June 30, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557661979
• ISBN-13: 978-1557661975
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #61,258 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Of critical importance to parents, policy makerers, and edu, April 4, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Greenfield, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Hardcover)

Hart and Risley have created an easy to read volume that speaks readily to parents, policy makers and educators. This book is a must for anyone who truly wants to understand the relationship between the way we interact with children and the evolution of their intellectual development. If you are interested in poverty prevention, early literacy intervention or the impact of family based literacy on childrens' academic success, you will be inspired by the work of Hart Risley.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic, February 13, 2009

By 

Paul Chance "author, The Teacher's Craft" (Delaware, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Hardcover)

This book is a contemporary classic. Published in 1995, in my opinion it remains one of the most important books ever published in the areas of developmental psychology, intelligence, and language development, and it has powerful implications for education.

Perhaps more than any other book, it undermines the nativist views of people like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Nativists argue that cognitive development is largely an automatic process, the result of in-born brain mechanisms; experience makes little difference. What Hart & Risley found was that experience makes a profound difference. Children whose parents provide a rich linguistic environment are far more advanced linguistically and intellectually when they start school, and do far better in school, than children whose parents do not.

The study compares professional, working class and welfare families, so some may assume that the results merely reflect differences in genes: Poor kids don't do so well because the genes they inherit are just not as good. There's no denying that genes play a role in development, but what Hart & Risley found was that the quality and quantity of linguistic interactions, not income, was what predicted outcome. The children who did best were those who heard the most words, were given the most feedback, got the most positive feedback, and got the most complete answers to their questions.

One reviewer, a librarian, complains that the book's language is scholarly and jargony. It's true that this book does not read like a John Updike novel. It is, after all, the description and analysis of a scientific study. But as scholarly books go, this one is a breeze.

I believe most undergraduates majoring in psychology, early childhood development, and elementary education could read this book without difficulty and would find it interesting and useful. Many parents with a high school education would profit from the book. When this book first appeared I reviewed it in Psychology Today magazine and in Phi Delta Kappan. I should also have reviewed it on Amazon.com. I don't think I've reviewed any other book in three places, but this one deserves it. After all, it's a classic.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Serious implications for early child intervention efforts, March 27, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Hardcover)

This book is one of the by-products of one of the most dedicated efforts to understand variances in the development of language. One of the reviewers of the book states that the work "...is a detective story of the most serious academic kind." Yet the book is written in a manner that would allow it to be required reading for "Parenting 102" if not "Parenting 101". The implications for parenting and public policy are profound