Below is a roundup of some of the great work our grantees accomplished in November 2018.
I-LABS
A new study from the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) shows that short parent coaching sessions focused on helping parents know how and why to speak parentese can have a direct impact on children’s vocabulary.
Parent coaching sessions occurred at six and 10 months. The researchers found that babies of coached families babbled, on average, in 43 percent of the analyzed recordings, while control babies babbled in 30 percent of the recordings. In addition, at 14 months, intervention babies produced significantly more words than control babies.
Centering Healthcare & Nurse-Family Partnership
Centering Healthcare and Nurse-Family Partnership were featured in an article in Vox about initiatives working to decrease the infant mortality rate in South Carolina.
South Carolina is home to two statewide, randomized-controlled trials to improve infant health outcomes, both focused on grantees supported by the Early Impact portfolio. One looks at whether the statewide implementation of CenteringPregnancy is indeed reducing infant deaths.
The other is run by Nurse-Family Partnership, measuring the impact of a similarly low-tech intervention: having nurses travel to low-income mothers’ homes for regular visits during their pregnancy, and then for the first two years of their new child’s life.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy founder Sal Khan was named Educator of the Year by Common Sense, the leading nonprofit organization dedicated to helping kids thrive in a world of media and technology.
Common Sense rates Khan Academy as a Top Pick for Learning, with five stars for quality and an A+ for educational value, calling it “an inspiring resource for teachers, parents, and students of all ages.”
Students2Science
Students 2 Science, an authentic science lab class in New Jersey, was featured in a TV segment on PIX11. The segment follows students as they test how sunscreen works, and decipher the ingredients in pain relievers.
FIRST
The annual FIRST benefit gala was featured in Bloomberg, alongside interviews with Jeff Bezos and John Overdeck.
Reading Partners
A new five-year study on Reading Partners, a program that trains community volunteers to provide one-on-one literacy support to young children, affirms previous findings of the program’s significant impact on reading achievement for low-income students.
In just one school year, students served by Reading Partners showed significantly higher growth on academic assessments than their comparison peers who did not receive the support. Specifically, students who received the twice-weekly, 45-minute tutoring sessions moved from the 15th to the 21st percentile and had significantly higher spring reading scores than the control sample of students.
BranchEd
BranchEd, an organization that supports minority-serving institutions with teacher preparation programs, was featured on the74.
BranchED focuses on a subset of about 250 of the minority-serving schools that have teacher prep programs at the undergraduate or graduate levels. BranchED’s goal is to reach half of these schools in the next five years.
More than half of K-12 public school students in the United States are low-income, and more than 50 percent are members of a racial minority group. But 40 percent of American public schools have no teachers of color.