Saul Zaentz Professor of Early Learning and Development
Faculty Co-Chair, Human Development and Education (HDE)
Degree: Ed.D., Harvard University, (2003)
Email: [javascript protected email address]
Phone: 617.496.8068
Personal Site: Link to Site
Vitae/CV: Meredith L. Rowe.pdf
Office: Larsen 506
Office Hours Contact: Email the Faculty Member and cc the Faculty Coordinator
Faculty Coordinator: Colleen Laude
Profile
Meredith Rowe is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). She leads a research program on understanding the role of parent and family factors in children's early language and literacy development. She is particularly interested in uncovering how variations in children's early communicative environments contribute to language development and in applying this knowledge to the development of intervention strategies for low-income families. Rowe received her doctoral degree in Human Development and Psychology from the HGSE in 2003 and then pursued postdoctoral fellowships in the Psychology and Sociology departments at the University of Chicago for several years. In 2009, she was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014 before joining the faculty at Harvard. Rowe's dissertation was supported by a grant from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). For the past 10 years, her work has been funded by grants from the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Specifically, Rowe was the recipient of a Postdoctoral National Research Service Award (NRSA), a Pathway to Independence (K99/R00) early career Research Transition Award, and a recent Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant (R21) to fund her current intervention study. Her work is published widely in top journals in education and psychology, including Science, Child Development, Developmental Science, and Developmental Psychology.
Click here to see a full list of Meredith Rowe's courses.
Areas of Expertise
Child DevelopmentCognitive DevelopmentCultural StudiesDiversityEarly Childhood DevelopmentLanguage DevelopmentLiteracyParenting IssuesPoverty and ChildrenPsychology
Research
"Meredith Rowe is an expert on language and cognitive development during early childhood, with a focus on the role that parents, socioeconomic status, culture, and experience play in development"
Sponsored Projects
The Efficacy of Teaching Parenting at the Secondary Level (2017-2018)
United Way of Northern New Jersey
The ultimate goal of this project is to improve children’s kindergarten readiness skills and reduce achievement gaps by being proactive and providing parenting/child development instruction to high school students. We see this as a cost-effective way to proactively affect kindergarten readiness, and believe that the first step in this line of inquiry is to survey advanced high school students, from varied backgrounds here in the US, as to what they know about parenting. By “parenting” we include information that covers basics about child development, about the role of parents in children’s development, about knowledge of basic parenting practices that may be more or less helpful for children’s development, and about the challenges and benefits of parenting. We will develop our specific questionnaire by thoroughly reviewing previous literature and efforts related to teaching parenting and measuring parenting knowledge. We aim to survey students from diverse backgrounds and geographic locations in the United States. The survey results will then be analyzed and disseminated to presumably argue for the need to teach parenting at the secondary level. We will use the students’ responses to the questionnaire to inform our development of the curricula that we will test out in our pilot study.
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