As a student in Warner’s human development
program, Meredith Rowe M.S. ’95 worked with Professor Lucia French on a study of the effect of reading aloud to low-income preschoolers. Each day for several weeks she read to a classroom of 3-year-olds at a Catholic school in Rochester. Afterward, she compared the children’s listening comprehension to another class.

“The difference was amazing,” says Rowe. “They were so much better at comprehension! That was so promising to me.”

The fact that she had been able to help the children made a strong impression on Rowe. After graduation Rowe spent a year teaching at a preschool in Cambridge, Mass., attended largely by children of Harvard professors. She was struck by the stark contrast between the Cambridge children and those in her Rochester study. “The classroom was so different,” she remembers. “The kids were so much more advantaged.”

Not only were the children very different, but the way they were taught and what was expected of them was different, Rowe says. Seeing disparities manifested so early on made her realize she was more interested in research than teaching and set her on the path toward an Ed.D. in human development and psychology from Harvard.

At Harvard, Rowe took part in a long-term study of children enrolled in Early Head Start. She looked at how parents’ interactions with their preschoolers affected the children’s language development, an important factor in later school performance. Although all of the children in the study were from low-income families, there were wide variations among them. Rowe found three significant variables: the diversity of vocabulary the mothers used in speaking to their children, the mothers’ overall language and literacy skills, and whether or not the mothers were depressed.“

Basically I’m trying to argue that social class isn’t the whole story,” says Rowe. “There are other factors that need to be identified that influence children’s development.”

Rowe is continuing her study of interactions between parents and preschoolers as a post-doc at the University of Chicago, where she is working with Professor Susan Goldin-Meadow. While the study is not yet finished, Rowe says one of her most interesting findings is that there appears to be a correlation between the parents’ knowledge of child development and their children’s language skills.

Rowe, who laments the gap between research and practical applications, hopes her study and other work like it will be useful in designing intervention programs for low-income families. If the connection between knowledge of child development and language skills holds up, it will be exciting, she says. “That’s something you can do something about.”

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