How This City is Improving Childhood Literacy Rates
Smart City practices are on track to transform childhood literacy rates in Birmingham, AL
As children get ready to leave home and start kindergarten, parents often seek ways to ensure their children are prepared and ready to learn. Study after study has shown that one of the best ways to prepare children for school is simply talking with and around them as much as possible.
Typically, children’s brains reach 80–85% of their adult size by age 3, making a child’s first 3 years a critical time of learning and growing. Studies have shown that frequently talking to children can yield an extra 300 words in the child’s vocabulary by age 2. Researchers have also discovered that academic outcomes at ages 9 and 10 correlate to the number of words they hear before the age of 3.
Sadly, this same study, “The Early Catastrophe,” revealed that the amount of words a child hears is largely affected by household income. Children in low-income homes are exposed to 30 million fewer words than children in more affluent homes. In their study, Hart and Risley wrote:
“We learned from the longitudinal data that the problem of skill differences among children at the time of school entry is bigger, more intractable, and more important than we had thought. So much is happening to children during their first three years at home, at a time when they are especially malleable and uniquely dependent on the family for virtually all their experience, that by age 3, an intervention must address not just a lack of knowledge or skill, but an entire general approach to experience.”
The silver lining found in this disparity is that talking more to your children is free and accessible to anyone. With no extra cost or equipment, parents can do their kids an incalculable favor by talking more.
Birmingham Talks is helping the city of Birmingham, Alabama tackle this issue with friendly reminders. In the same way pedometers and wearable fitness trackers are used as reminders to walk and move during the day, Birmingham Talks is providing children with “talk pedometers.” These counters, worn as a vest, track the number of words an adult speaks in the presence of a child so that the adult is motivated to speak more. Artificial intelligence is used to sus out what is background and ambient noise, words from television, and actual, human voices speaking around the child.
Early results show that 56% of children enrolled in the program were exposed to more words, and children with the largest uptick in words heard were those in low-income households. Their number of words heard, on average, increased by over 3,000 words per day. This jump is massive, and according to strong research will yield higher educational outcomes for those children.
The program seeks to expand in the future, given such promising early returns. Birmingham Talks is a reminder to the smart city community that the technologies we employ might be applied to areas we may regard as untraditional, but still do worthy and noble work in making cities stronger, healthier, and “smarter.”
Sources
- https://bhmtalks.org/#how-it-works
- https://ferstreaders.org/resources/fifty-top-literacy-statistics
- https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/the_importance_of_talking_to_your_children
- https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/TheEarlyCatastrophe.pdf
- https://improvingliteracy.org/brief/supporting-your-childs-literacy-development-home
The Center for Urban Informatics and Progress is a smart city research center at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. CUIP is committed to applied smart city research that betters the lives of citizens every day. For more on the work we’re doing and our mission, visit www.utc.edu/cuip.
