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Catherine Snow is an expert on language and literacy development in children, focusing on how oral language skills are acquired and how they relate to literacy outcomes. Her current research activities include a study of how Boston Public School early childhood classrooms are supporting children's development, and participation in a long-standing research-practice partnership (the Strategic Education Research Partnership, SERP) that is developing curricular tools to support teachers in introducing innovative classroom practices. Word Generation, a discussion-based academic language and literacy program developed by SERP, has been shown to improve middle-school literacy outcomes, in particular for students from language-minority homes.
This project will undertake an innovative effort to align the preservice educational preparation of future early childhood educators to the curriculum they will be implementing as full-time lead teachers. This effort is possible because a well-developed curriculum, the CEREC curriculum, which is conceptualized and developed by Si Chen and Catherine Snow, is now being successfully implemented in preschools in rural Chinese villages. The CEREC curriculum is based on a well-articulated theory of classroom quality. This study will test whether preparing preservice teachers to use the CEREC curriculum generates better instructional quality and learning outcomes than the current, business-as-usual approach of providing primarily theory in preservice training. The students (n = 3000) who will receive this innovatively aligned preservice curriculum are attending Yunnan Technology and Business University (YTBU), funded by the China New Higher Education Ltd, one of a small chain of low-cost private institutions of higher education serving primarily low-income and minority students who do not achieve entrance to public universities. We plan to recruit 3,000 early childhood education (ECE) major students of YTBU to participate in this randomized control trial study. We will randomly assign half of the students (~1500) to the treatment group receiving professional development training about the CEREC curriculum, child-teacher interaction strategies, and pedagogical content knowledge. We will use labdesigned coding schemes to compare the teaching performance between treatment and businessas-usual control group. We plan to collect longitudinal data to compare the job performance and turnover ratio between the treatment and control groups.
The longtime professor and pioneer in the research of language and literacy will address HGSE graduates on May 28
After 45 years on Appian Way, Catherine Snow is ready to start a new chapter