Hey friends,
I can't remember if I've mentioned this already, but one of the several professional roles I currently inhabit is the role of professor. For the last few years, I have taught a course once a year that I got to write from scratch. It's such an incredible opportunity that is a ton of work, but is also very rewarding.
One of the reasons it's so rewarding is I get to include whatever I want (within reason, of course--"reason" being "content that is technically relevant to the major themes of the course"). This year, one of the tweaks I've made to the course contents is to increase my emphasis on ways in which students planning to pursue careers in psychology need to develop their research evaluation skills, including evaluating who is missing and what is being missed in the research base.
With that in mind, I'd love to share one example of a study that really got it wrong, the consequences thereof, and the research that subsequently got it right.
In 1992, a study by researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas was published that claimed that young children from low socioeconomic status families were exposed to 30 million fewer words by age 3 than their counterparts in wealthier, higher SES families.
This study had a massive impact on research and academic institutions. It was cited over 8,000 times in other articles, and was a clarion call to concerned educators, administrators, and families nationwide. The researchers claimed their findings that lower SES children were exposed to less language could be directly linked to poorer academic outcomes later in childhood, including overall readiness to learn in school and specific skills like recognizing letters and numbers.
The trouble is, there were a multitude of flaws in the original study. It had a tiny sample (under 50 families). The study's small sample clearly conflated socioeconomic status with race and ethnicity: All of the “welfare families” (the researchers' term) were Black, 7 of the 10 of working class families were Black, and 9 of the 10 professional families were white. Despite the possibly complicating factor of race and ethnicity, the researchers failed to examine the role of race in the outcomes of their study.
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| Credit: https://www.alsc.ala.org/blog/2015/11/is-the-30-million-word-gap-a-stat-we-should-be-using/ |
And yet, that factor was very likely impactful, given the study's methods: Researchers physically went to families' homes with a tape recorder, stopwatch, and clipboard, spending 1 hour per month for 2 years observing young children interacting with their families. These researchers, most of whom were white, clearly did not take into consideration how being observed in person would actively transact with race and class, including how privileged families might take being observed as a cue to perform, while underprivileged families might become more inhibited under the watchful gaze of a stranger.
Upon replication years later with more rigorous research protocols, it has been estimated that the actual "word gap" is 4 million words, meaning that children from lower SES families are exposed to 4 million fewer words by age 4 years compared to children from higher SES family--quite the shortfall compared to the original estimate.
So what are the lingering questions and consequences of this research?
The biggest question to me is: Prompted by the original research, who were we holding accountable for closing the "word gap", and why? It would be so easy to hold lower SES families accountable for the perceived shortfall in language to which their children are exposed. But what this facile conclusion overlooks is the opportunity to examine what public schooling is really meant to accomplish, and who it is really meant to serve.
The pedagogical practices of public schooling, as implemented in the United States, are rooted in the dominant culture. Perhaps the reason the higher SES kids in the original study seemed to perform better in their later academic lives is that they were already at a profound advantage: many of them were being raised in the dominant culture that their future educations were fine-tuned to resonate with. By comparison, students not raised in the dominant culture are at a disadvantage--in a sometimes literal sense, they are learning more than one language as they enter the public school system. The racial and socioeconomic achievement gap in American schools is very real, but the responsibility for that arguably lies more with academic institutions themselves than with students and their families. Schools should ensure their curricula are equally accessible to all of the students they serve rather than demanding that underprivileged students struggle with the inequitably distributed burden of acculturating themselves to their schools.
At its worst, the original research could have been, and likely was, used to perpetuate already-existing societal messages that poor families and Black families are inherently inferior to wealthy, white families and that their inferiority is their problem to solve, rather than recognizing that the education system and academic research institutions are active creators of and contributors to discrepancies in achievement. Because of the immense power those institutions wield, they bear much of the responsibility for neutralizing those discrepancies.
To learn more about this--as I originally did!--check out Code Switch's excellent episode on this topic!
