Catherine E. Snow, Ph.D.

Co-Principal Investigator

David K. Dickinson, Ed.D.

David Dickinson is a Senior Research Scientist at Education Development Center (EDC) in Newton, MA. where he has combined long-term basic research with a range of applied projects designed to improve education in the early childhood period. After five years of teaching in elementary schools, he attended Harvard's Graduate School of Education.  Subsequently, he served as Director of Teacher Education at the Child Study Department at Tufts University and at the Education Department at Clark University, where he received tenure. Since moving to EDC he has directed the New England Research Center on Head Start Quality (NEQRC), one of the four Quality Research Centers funded by Head Start.  The NEQRC is examining the impact of Head Start on children's language and literacy development and its impact on families, with special attention being given to the development of children whose first language is Spanish. Starting in 1994 Dickinson began work applying emerging findings from the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development.  In collaboration with colleagues in the Center for Children & Families in EDC, he has developed LEEP (Language Environment Enrichment Project), an approach to helping preschool teachers adopt more effective practices to support language and literacy.  With funding from the Interagency Education Research Initiative he is developing a version of this program that can be delivered using distance learning technology.
 

Patton O. Tabors, Ed.D.

Patton O. Tabors, Ed.D., is a Research Associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and has been the research coordinator of the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development since its inception in 1987. Her research interests include the development of extended discourse and sophisticated vocabulary use in children from low-income families. She is co-editor, with David Dickinson, of Beginning Literacy with Language: Young Children Learning at Home and School. From 1992 until the present she has been a research team member of the Observational Studies of Mother-Child Interaction Project of the New Chance and JOBS Evaluations (subcontracted to the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation and Child Trends, Inc.). Dr. Tabors oversees analyses, participates in the development of written products from the analyses, and presents results in both research and policy-oriented forums. She is also the author of One Child, Two Languages: a Guide for Preschool Educators of Children Learning English as a Second Language, which provides information about young children learning a second language.
 

Stephanie J. Ross, M.A.

Project Director

Stephanie J. Ross,, M.A., is Project Director of the Home-School Study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has been in charge of data collection for the past 4 years, during which time she has developed relationships with the mothers, students, and school personnel who have participated in the project. Prior to this experience, she was a school psychologist in the Massachusetts public schools where she counseled and assessed preschoolers through high school age students. Ms. Ross is currently responsible for coordinating and carrying out the data collection activities in the participants' 9th and 10th grade classrooms, interviewing the mothers of the participants, processing and analyzing the data, as well as presenting results at national conferences. 
 

Michelle V. Porche, Ed.D.

Michelle V. Porche, Ed.D., is a Research Assistant at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  She began working on the Home-School Study as a Masters student and has stayed connected with the project ever since.  Her dissertation was on the effects of maternal involvement, both at school and at home, on children's academic achievement.  She has participated in all aspects of the project - from data collection to analysis and dissemination.  Her interests also include adolescent development and she spends most of her time as a Research Scientist at Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, where she works on several projects under the direction of Dr. Deborah L. Tolman.

Harriet Tenenbaum, Ph.D.

Harriet Tenenbaum is a postdoctoral fellow at Judge Baker Children's Center
and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on
predictors of science and technology learning and achievement, especially
amongst girls and underrepresented ethnic minorities. Past studies have
included examinations of parents' inequitable science talk with girls and boys
and the transmission of gender cognitions. She is interested in understanding
predictors of computer literacy in the Home-School Study.

Kevin A. Roach, Ed.M.

Kevin A. Roach, Ed.M., is a Research Assistant and an advanced doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  He has been a part of the Home-School Study research team since 1994.  His work for the project has focused on statistical analysis, using individual growth modeling and covariance structure analysis to capture the complexities of literacy development over time.  His recent conference presentation, "Relationships between Early Language and Literacy Experiences and Literacy Development Over Time among Low-Income Children" was presented at the Society for Research in Child Development in April, 1999.  In additional to longitudinal statistical techniques, his research interests include the development of extended discourse and genre awareness from preschool through middle school.

Jeanne M. De Temple, Ed.D.

Jeanne M. De Temple, Ed. D., is a Research Associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and has been a member of the research team since 1988. Her dissertation, Book Reading Styles of Low Income Mothers with Preschoolers and Children's Later Literacy Skills, was based on data from the Home-School Study. From 1992 until the present she has directed the Embedded Observational Studies of Mother-Child Interaction Project of the New Chance and JOBS Evaluations (subcontracted to the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation and Child Trends, Inc.).
 

Diane E. Beals, Ed.D.

Diane E. Beals, Ed.D., is an Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  She has been a member of the Home-School Study research team since 1989.  Her research on the project has focused largely on the use of narrative and explanation in family mealtime conversations, beginning with her dissertation, completed in 1991, titled ‘I know who makes ice cream’: Explanations in Mealtime Conversations of Low-Income Families of Preschoolers.  From 1991-1999, she was an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis.  In 1999 she moved to the University of Tulsa, where she has continued her research on the development of children’s ability to use different genres of discourse.  In collaboration with Patton Tabors, she has expanded this work to examine the informativeness of the use of rare vocabulary (words preschoolers would not be expected to know) within these discourse genres and situations.