Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek

This training program prepared four postdoctoral fellows to apply cognitive science principles to crucial issues in education, with a special focus on mathematics, language development, and early learning.

The research team will develop and pilot test an intervention designed to foster vocabulary development among preschool children from low-income homes. Low-income children typically have smaller vocabularies than their middle-income peers, and these vocabulary disparities directly contribute to the achievement gap. This project will extend the research team's previous Development and Innovation project (Increasing Vocabulary in Preschoolers: Using Cognitive Science to Guide Pedagogy), where ...

The purpose of this project is to create and test a novel approach to building preschool teachers' abilities to foster vocabulary and therefore, broader language skills among preschool children from low-income homes. In years 1 and 2, researchers will identify instructional methods that can be used to teach vocabulary and foster language learning through book reading followed by guided play (i.e., play in which an adult subtly offers input to children's play activities). Researchers will the...