Picture this: You’re in the supermarket with your hungry preschooler in tow. As you reach into the dairy case, you spot a sign with a friendly cartoon cow. It reads: “Ask your child: Where does milk come from? What else comes from a cow?”
In a small study published last year, signs like these, placed in Philadelphia-area supermarkets, sparked a one-third increase in conversations between parents and children under 8.
The extra family chatter happened only in low-income neighborhoods. Research shows that’s exactly the place where it’s needed most: Studies have documented a “word gap” that can lead, ultimately, to poor kids starting school months behind in language development.
The total cost of the intervention? About $20 per grocery store.
The supermarket study is one seed of a much bigger idea about creating opportunities for children to learn in the wider world; to leverage caregivers as teachers and, in the process, try to level out stubborn inequities.
Here at NPR Ed, for example, most of our stories are set in classrooms. But children spend only 20 percent of their waking time, if they’re lucky, in formal classroom settings.
That gap — not in our coverage, but in the education community in general — bothers Brenna Hassinger-Das, a postdoctoral fellow at the Temple University Infant & Child Laboratory, which conducted the supermarket study (Katherine Ridge was the lead author).
“We devote so much of our time and energy to reforming school, when you realize how small a percentage of time students spend there. How can we have a faster impact by getting resources right to where people are?”
Versions of the supermarket project are being tried in Tulsa, Okla., and Johannesburg. And at home in Philly, Hassinger-Das is working with supermarket study coauthors Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnik Golinkoff, the authors of Becoming Brilliant, on a bigger answer to that question: a pilot project called Urban Thinkscape. To read more from ANYA KAMENETZ, click here.