Cool interviews from doctoral scholars in OSEP sister projects- especially this quote: “To truly make a difference, I needed to engage with all three realms. Research informs policy; policy shapes practice; practice, in turn, informs research. It’s a cycle of continuous learning and improvement, and I now see that my role is to participate in this cycle, not as a bystander but actively. This triad of research, policy, and practice is interrelated and interdependent — each one’s existence and efficacy are contingent on the others.” https://exceptionalchildren.org/blog/osers-features-work-its-doctoral-sch... “I wanted to understand the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ — to delve into the systemic disparities that set children on such divergent paths from the start. My aim was clear: to ensure that every child, no matter their economic background, had access to a beginning as shiny and promising as those kids in the higher-income neighborhoods.” On this second quote- I would encourage those of you interested in early intervention/early childhood to take a look at Hart and Risley’s Meaningful Differences- a seminal work in the area of early language development, poverty and SES- language differences vary by type, frequency, and complexity and correlate with speaking, listening, reading, and writing in childhood development (all those things we are interested in in Bilingual special education since communication plays such a big issue). Then- it in turn- correlates with vocabulary- and academic and cognitive ability (i.e., IQ). There is a reason everyone in early childhood education pushes parents to read daily to their children… https://products.brookespublishing.com/Meaningful-Differences-in-the-Ever... “Betty Hart and Todd Risley wanted to know why, despite best efforts in preschool programs to equalize opportunity, children from low-income homes remain well behind their more economically advantaged peers years later in school. Each month, they recorded one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families, categorized as professional, working class, or welfare families. Two and a half years of coding and analyzing every utterance in 1,318 transcripts followed. By age 3, the recorded spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families. Between professional and welfare parents, there was a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour. Extrapolating this verbal interaction to four years, a child in a professional family would accumulate experience with almost 45 million words, while an average child in a welfare family would hear just 13 million—coining the phrase the 30 million word gap.” MDB