1-167 - Taking it to the Street: Can We Move the Needle on the Word Gap Through Population-Based Interventions?

Session Type: Conversation Roundtable

Integrative Statement

Too many children from low-income families enter school with a serious learning disadvantage that emerges in their earliest years: substantially smaller vocabularies than their more advantaged peers (Dickinson & Tabors, 2001). This disparity in child vocabulary size is often traced to the quality and quantity of exposure to talk and interactions in children’s home environments (often referred to as the “Word Gap” (Hart & Risley, 1995; Walker, Greenwood, Hart, & Carta, 1994). While research has pointed to evidence-based interventions to improve children’s language learning environments and thereby reduce this word gap, to this point, only limited evidence has been published showing that language-promoting interventions has had population-level impacts (Nelson, Welsh, Trup, & Greenberg, 2011). This Conversational Roundtable will focus on 4 population-based interventions that have been mounted recently to address this disparity through broad community-wide efforts. Panelists will respond to questions about the challenges in achieving wide-scale outreach with language-promoting interventions while demonstrating that their efforts has resulting in meaningful and sustainable parent and child behavioral changes. Discussion among panelists will focus on questions such as: how does one begin to organize a community-wide effort across multiple agencies with leaders across diverse sectors that results in change? What formative assessment metrics can be used to provide meaningful feedback that allows communities to see that their efforts are making a difference? What strategies have proven successful for researchers to collaborate with practitioners in translating evidence-based strategies to authentic community settings?

Sub Unit

• Prevention and Interventions

Moderator

• Judith Carta, University of Kansas

Panelists

• Dale Walker, University of Kansas

• Ashley Darcy-Mahoney, George Washington University School of Nursing

• Jennifer Stapel-Wax, Department of Pediatrics; Emory University

• Anne Seery, New York University School of Medicine