Families Count: A Home-Based Intervention to Promote Math Communication

In collaboration with Professor Geetha Ramani and her lab at the University of Maryland and with funding from the National Science Foundation, we are implementing a home-based intervention about math communication with American families with 3-5 year old children. Our goal is to determine whether our video interventions affect parent-child communication about math during play and children’s early math skills.

The Efficacy of Teaching Parenting at the Secondary Level

Parents who know more about parenting and child development and who have a stronger belief or mindset that they can make a difference in their child’s development, are more apt to interact with their children in ways that promote learning than parents with less parenting knowledge. Therefore, parenting knowledge is essential for promoting optimal development in children. Yet, parenting knowledge is not typically available in any formal way to US citizens. In this project we build on previous work to provide a national standards framework around parenting/child development education coupled with an evaluation framework and assessment tool to help schools/states determine whether students are meeting the learning standards. This project is funded by Strengthening Future Families.

Pre-K Audio Observations Feasibility & Proof of Concept

With funding from the Gates Foundation we are working with TeachFX to determine the feasibility of training AI to evaluate teacher and student speech in preschool classrooms from audio observations. The goal is to create more equitable measures of children’s language capabilities as well as a source of feedback for teachers on their classroom language practices.  

The Development, Implementation, and Evaluation of an Early Language Development Parenting Program for Social Assistance Community Centers in Brazil

This project represents the first steps to positively impact the home environments and early developmental trajectories of disadvantaged children in Ceara, Brazil. We will do this by implementing a parenting program in community centers and evaluating the effects on parent-child interactions. Dr. Rowe and Lizzie Baird are developing the intervention content. The research study is being led by Dr. Flavio Cunha and Dr. Guilherme Irffi. This collaborative project is funded by the Lemann Brazil Research Fund at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University. 

PLAY and Learning across a Year

We are a coding site for the PLAY project.
See here for more information about the larger collaborative study.