Catherine E. Snow

Harvard University | Harvard · Harvard Graduate School of Education

Prior adolescent writing research typically used omnibus length-based measures, such as Mean Length of Clauses (MLC), to describe and evaluate students’ performance at constructing complex sentences. This study undertook to: (1) develop a novel approach, Diversity of Advanced Sentence Structures (DASS), with a more detailed inventory of students’ c...

The One-Village-One-Preschool (OVOP) initiative aims to guarantee early childhood education (ECE) to all children in high-poverty villages in China. A challenge to policymakers is to balance expanding the scale with lengthening service duration. Following 23,775 children from preschool (4-year-old) to fourth-grade (10-year-old) in a poverty-stricke...

We now know a huge amount about early reading development, about the various skills that learners have to master and integrate to be not only effective word readers but also good comprehenders. The body of work referred to with the term ‘science of reading’ has helped illuminate these processes, and offers important guidance for the learning opport...

With a sample of 7,752 fourth- to seventh-grade students in 25 schools which were randomized at the school level to condition, this article reports experimental impacts of an enhanced version of Word Generation on student outcomes at the end of Year 1 and of Year 2. Word Generation employs analysis, synthesis, critique, and problem-solving activiti...

One Village One Preschool (OVOP) project is a government-supported public intervention launched by the China Development Research Foundation, which provided disadvantaged rural and minority children in central and western rural China with access to early childhood education (ECE). OVOP has established about 2300 centers in ten provinces, enrolling...

This study aimed to investigate the characteristics of preschoolers’ home and classroom literacy environments and the relationships between receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness, and concepts about print (CAP) development. The participants were 168 parents and their children from five private preschools in a large suburban are...

The lessons I have learned over the last many years seem always to come in pairs – a lesson about the findings that brings with it a lesson about life as a researcher...Lesson 1. Even as a doctoral student, I believed that the sorts of social interactions young children had with adults supported language acquisition. In 1971, when I completed my di...

The task of writing arguments requires a linguistic and cognitive sophistication that eludes many adults, but students in the US are expected to produce texts that articulate and support a claim—simple written arguments—starting in the fourth grade. Students from language-minority homes likewise must learn to produce such writing, despite their rel...

We investigated general vocabulary and academic vocabulary growth trajectories of adolescent language minority students using an individual growth modeling approach. Our analytical sample included 3161 sixth- to eighth-grade students from an urban school district in California. The language minority students in our sample were classified as initial...

Available for pre-order from: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-International-Handbook-of-Early-Literacy-Education-A-Contemporary/Kucirkova-Snow-Grover-McBride/p/book/9781138787889

Much public attention has been drawn to the ‘30 million-word gap’ between children growing up in more vs. less privileged families. I argue in this paper that conceptualizing the gap in quantity of words, which is useful in emphasizing the size of the challenge, misconceptualizes the real differences, which are in knowledge of the world rather than...

The aim of the study was to explore teacher–child interaction in 24 whole-class read-aloud sessions in Chilean kindergarten classrooms serving children from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Fifteen sessions focused on story meaning, and nine focused on language coding/decoding. We coded teacher and child turns for their function (i.e., teacher initia...

This mixed-method study examined the implementation and the challenges to implementation for participants in randomized controlled trials of two school-based programs for early adolescents: the Tier One Word Generation (WG) program, and the Tier Two Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention (STARI). Levels of implementation for WG and STARI varied...

Science is a way of knowing about the world. At once a process, a product, and an institution, science enables people to both engage in the construction of new knowledge as well as use information to achieve desired ends. Access to science-whether using knowledge or creating it-necessitates some level of familiarity with the enterprise and practice...

In this article, the researchers examined general vocabulary, academic vocabulary, and reading comprehension growth trajectories of adolescent redesignated fluent English proficient (RFEP) students using individual growth modeling analysis. The sample included 1,226 sixth- to eighth-grade RFEP students from six middle schools in an urban school dis...

We investigate the impact of a relatively brief cross-curricular intervention, Word Generation, on middle school students' development of taught academic vocabulary. Students (n = 8382) in forty-four middle schools in three urban districts were randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions. Treatment teachers implemented the program with min...

This article reflects a metaview of the work of the three research projects funded through the Institute for Education Sciences under the Reading for Understanding competition that addressed middle-grade through high school readers (grades 4–12). All three projects shared the assumption that instruction is necessary for successful reading to learn...

This study evaluates the relationships between aspects of Chilean teachers' explicit vocabulary instruction and students' vocabulary development in kindergarten. Classroom videotapes of whole-class instruction gathered during a randomized experimental evaluation of a coaching-based professional development program were analyzed. The amount of conce...

We explored links between complexity of teacher–child verbal interaction and child language and literacy outcomes in fifteen whole-class read-aloud sessions in Chilean kindergarten classrooms serving children from low socioeconomic backgrounds. We coded teacher and child turns for function (initiation, response, and follow-up), type (e.g., open vs....

This study evaluates the effects of a coaching-based teacher professional development program on Chilean kindergarten teachers' explicit vocabulary instruction. Classroom videotapes gathered during the cluster-randomized evaluation of the Un Buen Comienzo (UBC) program were analyzed to identify the intervention impacts of training. The offer of tra...

American Educational Research Association presidents’ presidential addresses have only intermittently considered relevance as a criterion of quality for education research. A few, though, argued that education research could only distinguish itself from research in the disciplines through attention to improving educational outcomes. David Krathwohl...

Despite consensus that school absenteeism has negative consequences for children's life outcomes, until recently, little was known about the prevalence of absenteeism or its potential to moderate the impacts of school-based interventions. This study provides evidence from a randomized experiment of a preschool intervention involving 1876 children i...

Communicative self-efficacy serves as an important link between discussing controversial issues and civic engagement because confidence in one’s discourse skills is important to managing conflicting perspectives and developing solutions to community-based problems. Freely available to schools, Word Generation is a cross-content literacy program tha...

Deep reading comprehension refers to the process required to succeed at tasks defined by the Common Core State Literacy Standards, as well as to achieve proficiency on the more challenging reading tasks in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) framework. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that three skill domains...

In this article, Leslie Duhaylongsod, Catherine E. Snow, Robert L. Selman, and M. Suzanne Donovan describe the principles behind the design of curricular units that offer disciplinary literacy support in the subject of history for middle school students who represent a wide range of reading levels, and for their teachers, whose own subject matter e...

Transcending the low status of educational research will require demonstrating its relevance to improvements in practice. Educational progress is most likely to emerge from approaches to research that create an equal footing for practitioners and researchers, recognizing that though these groups accumulate and curate knowledge in different ways, th...

Background Decades of research shows that early childhood interventions can positively impact children's short- and long-term health, academic and economic outcomes, but that interventions' effectiveness depend on their quality. Interest in continuous quality improvement (CQI) methods is rising among early childhood clinicians, educators and policy...

Modern teens have pervasively integrated new technologies into their lives, and technology has become an important component of teen popular culture. Educators have pointed out the promise of exploiting technology to enhance students’ language and literacy skills and general academic success. However, there is no consensus on the effect of technolo...

Although American schools are required to meet civic education goals of preparing students to become active and informed citizens, high-quality civic opportunities (e.g. service learning and volunteering) are consistently less available to youth of color who are typically enrolled in schools located in high-poverty communities. The purpose of this...

Although American schools are required to meet civic education goals of preparing students to become active and informed citizens, high-quality civic opportunities (e.g. service learning and volunteering) are consistently less available to youth of color who are typically enrolled in schools located in high-poverty communities. The purpose of this...

In the present study, 81 Norwegian students were taught the meaning of words by the Word Generation (WG) method and 51 Norwegian students were taught by an approach inspired by the Thinking Schools (TS) concept. Two sets of words were used: a set of words to be trained and a set of nontrained control words. The two teaching methods yielded no signi...

Classroom discussion, despite its association with good academic outcomes, is exceedingly rare in U.S. schools. The Word Generation intervention involves the provision of texts and activities to be implemented across content area class, organized around engaging and discussable dilemmas. The pro- gram was evaluated with 1,554 middle grade students...

We assessed impacts on classroom quality and on 5 child language and behavioral outcomes of a 2-year teacher professional-development program for publicly funded prekindergarten and kindergarten in Chile. This cluster-randomized trial included 64 schools (child N = 1,876). The program incorporated workshops and in-classroom coaching. We found moder...

Quality of teacher–child interactions is central to prekindergarten children's learning. In the United States, the quality of teacher–child interactions is commonly assessed using the teaching through interactions conceptual framework and an associ/ated observational tool, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). This study examined: (a) wh...

Un Buen Comienzo [A Good Start] was a professional development program implemented with prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers in Chilean public schools serving low-income families. In a randomized trial, the program showed moderate to large impacts on classroom quality but no impacts on targeted child outcomes. To unpack these findings, we exam...

Technology including social media and other technology applications enabled by different technology devices offer many possibilities for second language learners to improve their learning, if they are interested in doing so. We investigated purposes for using technology among urban adolescents, including both English language learners (ELLs) and na...

Adolescents today have vastly different opportunities to learn and process information via pervasive digital technologies and social media. However, there is scant literature on the impact of these technologies on urban adolescents with lower socioeconomic status. This study of 531 urban students in grades 6-8 used a self-reported survey to collect...

We tested whether urban middle-school students from mostly low-income homes had improved academic vocabulary when they participated in a freely available vocabulary program, Word Generation (WG). To understand how this program may support students at risk for long-term reading difficulty, we examined treatment interactions with baseline achievement...

ABSTRACT In the early years of the Journal of Child Language, there was considerable disagreement about the role of language input or adult-child interaction in children's language acquisition. The view that quantity and quality of input to language-learning children is relevant to their language development has now become widely accepted as a prin...

Although schools are required to meet civic education goals of preparing students to become “competent and responsible citizens” (Carnegie Corporation & CIRCLE, 2003), high quality civic opportunities (e.g. service learning and volunteering) are consistently less available to youth of color who are typically enrolled in schools located in high pove...

First language learners acquire vocabulary in the context of participation in discourse, and the quantity and richness of that discourse is the best predictor of their progress. Similarly, we argue, engagement in discourse, in particular debate and discussion, is an effective component of classroom instruction for second and foreign language learne...

Background: The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies (2010) stress the importance of engaging students in collaborative classroom discussion as a strategy to help students develop interpersonal skills that have wide applicability outside the classroom or workplace. Not much is known, however, ab...

Two ways of measuring change are presented and compared: A conventional “change score”, defined as the difference between scores before and after an interim period, and a process-oriented approach focusing on detailed analysis of conceptually defined response patterns. The validity of the two approaches was investigated. Vocabulary knowledge was as...

This study compares interactions during joint book reading of 14 Taiwanese and 15 American mother–child pairs from low-income families. All mother–child pairs read the same book, ‘The very hungry caterpillar’, at home and their interactions were recorded. Taiwanese and American mothers demonstrated both similarities and differences during joint boo...

Background. The prevalence of Children with Special Healthcare Needs (CSHCN) globally is mostly not known. Few studies validate the CSHCN Screener with concurrent child-level developmental measures to ascertain whether CSHCN outside the US experience early developmental risks predictive of lower educational attainment and adult productivity. Obje...

Advanced literacy is a prerequisite to adult success in the twenty-first century. By advanced literacy we do not mean simply the ability to decode words or read a text, as necessary as these elementary skills are. Instead we mean the ability to use reading to gain access to the world of knowledge, to synthesize information from different sources, t...

This longitudinal quasi-experimental study examines the effects of Word Generation, a middle-school vocabulary intervention, on the learning, maintenance, and consolidation of academic vocabulary for students from English-speaking homes, proficient English speakers from language-minority homes, and limited English-proficiency students. Using indivi...

The Collaborative Language and Literacy Instruction Project (CLLIP) is a model of professional development designed to help teachers incorporate research-based practices of literacy instruction, support mastery, and sustained use of these practices through coaching, and serve as a foundation for whole-school reform efforts. We describe the model, i...

Educational policies that impact second language (L2) learners—a rapidly-growing group—are often enacted without consulting relevant research. This review synthesized research regarding optimal conditions for L2 acquisition, facilitative L2 learner and teacher characteristics, and speed of L2 acquisition, from four bodies of work—foreign language e...

Science education currently focuses on developing science-based content knowledge, emphasizing the teaching of science vocabulary words (e.g., photosynthesis). Nevertheless, current curriculum lacks a focus on general academic language vocabulary (e.g., process, analyze). Such vocabulary is critical for understanding texts both in and outside of th...

Certain tasks are more likely to be solved by groups than by individuals, even when the individuals are highly skilled at aspects of the task. These are tasks such as filling out income tax forms or performing surgical operations, for which inputs from several individuals who have complementary domains of knowledge and skill are needed. I refer to...

Imitation has been dealt with in so many different ways by different subfields of psychology that it, in fact, may constitute a number of quite different conceptual phenomena, related only in that they all have the same name and somewhat similar external forms. Researchers on infant development, starting with Piaget himself, considered imitation an...

This research examines the processes which native Spanish-speaking learners of English and English-only students engage in when inferring meaning for unknown English words that have Spanish cognates. Conducted within the context of a large-scale vocabulary intervention that taught word inferencing strategies, including a cognate strategy, this qual...

The development of reading skills in language minority (LM) learners, particularly during the middle school years, remains unclear despite the increasing need for educators to serve this rapidly growing population. In this study, the English reading comprehension growth of middle school LM learners was investigated using a longitudinal design and t...

This study examined the relative contribution of reading comprehension strategies and interactive vocabulary in Improving Comprehension Online (ICON), a universally designed web-based scaffolded text environment designed to improve fifth-grade monolingual English and bilingual students’ reading achievement. Seventy-five monolingual English and 31 b...

Evaluation designs for social programs are developed assuming minimal or no disruption from external shocks, such as natural disasters. This is because extremely rare shocks may not make it worthwhile to account for them in the design. Among extreme shocks is the 2010 Chile earthquake. Un Buen Comienzo (UBC), an ongoing early childhood program in C...

Quantity and quality of home language use as well as home literacy resources are positively related to vocabulary knowledge among children growing up monolingually (De Temple & Snow, 2003; Juel, 1988; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Stanovich, 1986). While the presence of interactive features associated with good vocabulary outcomes have been reporte...

The purpose of the current study is to elaborate on the statistical nature of the linguistic interdependence hypothesis (Cummins, 19796. Cummins , J. 1979. Linguistic interdependence and the educational development of bilingual children. Review of Educational Research, 49: 222–251. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [CSA]View all references). It is a...

A major challenge to students learning science is the academic language in which science is written. Academic language is designed to be concise, precise, and authoritative. To achieve these goals, it uses sophisticated words and complex grammatical constructions that can disrupt reading comprehension and block learning. Students need help in learn...