July/August 1997

The Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development

By Leon Lynn

The Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development is a longitudinal study investigating the linkages between the early oral-language development of young children, at home and in preschool, and their literacy success when they reach elementary and middle school.

The project began in 1987 by identifying a group of 83 three-year-old children from lower-income families in the Boston area. All were English speakers from families eligible for Head Start services or other types of subsidized day care. The families received small stipends for participating in the study.

At the time researchers conducted their first home visits with the families, just under half were receiving welfare assistance. More than a third were single-parent families, and a third of the children were African American or Hispanic. Among the mothers, 28.4 percent hadn't completed high school, while 43.2 percent had, and 28.4 percent had completed some education beyond high school.

When the children were three, four, and five years old, researchers visited their homes to observe and tape-record interactions between mothers and children during a variety of activities. These included reading books--each family was asked to read Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar, as well as other books--playing with toys supplied by the researchers, and storytelling. The families also were asked to tape-record a meal shared by family members. Later, when the children were seven and nine years old, they were observed interacting with their mothers in homework-like activities.

During each of the home visits, researchers also conducted extensive interviews with the mothers, questioning them about their own lives and academic histories, their children's development and adjustment to school, and their hopes and dreams for their children, among other topics.

The study also included yearly visits to the children's preschools and elementary school classrooms. In preschool and kindergarten, the children wore backpacks equipped with tape recorders during snack time and free play, in order to capture their verbal interactions with teachers and peers. In 1st through 4th grade, classroom observations emphasized reading instruction and writing programs. Each year, the children's teachers were interviewed about how the children were doing in class and about their own educational philosophies. Further, starting in kindergarten, the children were given a yearly battery of language and literacy tests.

The principal investigators of the Home-School Study are Catherine Snow, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and David Dickinson, senior research scientist with the Education Development Center, in Newton, MA. Patton Tabors, a research associate at Harvard, is the study's research coordinator.

The study has been funded by the Ford Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, and the Head Start Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Continued funding from the W. T. Grant Foundation will make it possible to follow the same group of children through 7th grade.