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An ambitious economic field experiment studies how financial incentives for students, teachers, and parents affect academic performance.

The fourth annual NBC News Education Nation Summit, held October 6-8 at The New York Public Library, explored “What It Takes” for us as a nation to ensure students are successfully prepared for college, career and beyond. Leading experts and stakeholders – from parents and teachers, to policymakers and employers – delved into critical factors that impact students’ chances of success.

Dr. Dana Suskind & the TMW Center are highlighted in a New York Times article about social scientists becoming more involved in policy.

Suskind, a half-dozen staff members, and a rotating cast of student research assistants are developing strategies to get parents to engage their children in rich, meaningful conversation from the moment they’re born.

They’ve completed the first trial of their Thirty Million Words Project, in which Suskind’s staff visited the homes of low-income mothers on the South Side and trained them in a parent-talk curriculum they developed.

The 30 Million Words Project teaches at-risk families about the importance of talking at home. By distributing an innovative “word pedometer,” which tracks language in the home, as well as video- and live-coaching for families, the project led to a 32 percent increase in levels of talking in at-risk homes. Run by a cochlear implant surgeon at the University of Chicago, Dana Suskind, the program recently floated the idea a “Let’s Talk” campaign, modeled on Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move.

Current research suggests that young kids who hear a lot of words do better in school—and the effects start very early.

Young children who hear fewer words do worse in school. Providence wants to close the gap.

In the early 1990s, a team of researchers decided to follow about 40 volunteer families — some poor, some middle class, some rich — during the first three years of their new children’s lives. Every month, the researchers recorded an hour of sound from the families’ homes. Later in the lab, the team listened back and painstakingly tallied up the total number of words spoken in each household. What they found came to be known as the “word gap.”

It’s no secret to speech/language and hearing professionals that children’s early language environments are critical to their speech, language, and academic outcomes. Yet millions of children fail to receive the input they need to be ready for school when they start, and they fall only farther behind as school continues.

The more parents talk to their children, the faster those children’s vocabularies grow and the better their intelligence develops.

When Professor of Surgery Dr. Dana Suskind started the Pediatric Cochlear Implant Program at the University of Chicago seven years ago, she soon realized that although the surgery brought sound to children’s brains, something else brought language into their lives: their “language environment.”

Dana Suskind leads an initiative to improve parental communication, a key factor in a child’s success.

A chasm exists in language learning. It involves the cumulative total of words that babies and toddlers hear — and even more importantly, the words they don’t hear. It’s called the “30 million word gap.”

Dr. Dana Suskind is quoted in this New York Times article aabout the research showing that brain development is buoyed by continuous interaction with parents and caregivers from birth.

PNC Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Pittsburgh-based PNC Bank, has committed $19 million to fund early education programming in Chicago that focuses on building vocabulary.

Getting parents at all income levels excited about reading to their young children has become a growing trend as more research has emerged about the importance of early language development to later success. Reading and talking to children under 5 years old on a daily basis is critical to their vocabulary development, their verbal communication skills and their ability to begin reading on time and at grade level in elementary school, said Dana Suskind, director a University of Chicago research laboratory focused on early language acquisition.

Many experts say that early learning gives children a head start when they go to school. But what kind of learning and how much? In this edition of Learning World, presented by Maha Barada, we take a close look at various different approaches.

Q&A featuring Dr. Suskind in the Boston Globe Ideas.

The surgeon’s Thirty Million Words project—and new book—is a how-to manual for parents to engage with their children from the earliest months.

Several years ago, though, Suskind realized some children who’d received the surgery continued to struggle anyway. She describes in her new book, “Thirty Million Words,” one little girl from a poor family who could still barely speak by the third grade. “When I looked at her lovely face,” Suskind writes, “it was hard to say whether I was seeing the tragedy of deafness or the tragedy of poverty.”

Prof. Dana Suskind’s research on how language affects children’s brain development is reaching the very population that can apply it in the real world: parents. Suskind’s book, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain, reached No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list for parenting and family reference, and the Thirty Million Words Initiative, which she founded, is sharing her evidence-based programming with broader audiences through several projects.

In our collective zeal to reform schools and close the achievement gap, we may have lost sight of where most learning really happens — at home.

Suskind’s book follows her path from surgeon to social scientist, as she launched the Thirty Million Words Initiative, aimed at harnessing parent talk to close the achievement gap for all children — those who are born hearing and those who are not.

In Suskind’s new book, Thirty Million Words: Building A Child’s Brain, she explains her personal journey toward the surprising answer: The kids who thrived generally lived in households where they heard lots of words. Millions and millions of words.

An article from Dr. Suskind adapted from her book Thirty Million Words: Building A Child’s Brain.

That’s the mantra of the Thirty Million Words initiative, an experimental effort to build young brains with words. The program gets its name from a study published in the 1990s that found children in low-income homes heard 30 million fewer words by age 3 than children in high income homes. They also heard a smaller variety of words and fewer words of encouragement. And those differences in language exposure had an apparent effect: Children from word-poor homes ended up with smaller vocabularies and worse school performance.

Dana Suskind discusses how she came to move from pediatric cochlear implant surgery to launching a translational research program to promote healthy brain development and explains the science behind the TMW Initiative.

Dr. Dana Suskind from the University of Chicago, who has studied ways to help parents enrich infant language development but who wasn’t involved in this research, told Reuters Health by email, “From my standpoint, this work continues to reaffirm the critical importance of early and intentional parent language and interaction from day one and that learning doesn’t start on the first day of school but the first day of life!”

The LLP is launching Talk It Up, a community read of the book “Thirty Million Words: Growing a Child’s Brain” by Dana Suskind. This initiative is designed to engage the community in open dialogue on what it takes to ensure all children in Broome County achieve optimum brain development beginning at birth.

Last year, Pensacola’s three major birthing hospitals introduced a campaign centered around a gift to new parents: the Brain Bag. It’s literally a bag full of resources on brain development, based on a University of Chicago research program called Thirty Million Words.

Last year, Pensacola’s three major birthing hospitals introduced a campaign centered around a gift to new parents: the Brain Bag. It’s literally a bag full of resources on brain development, based on a University of Chicago research program called Thirty Million Words.

Suskind observed that many of her patients struggled to develop language because their parents didn’t talk to them as much. It was a revelation that began inspired her to found the Thirty Million Words Initiative, which aims to improve educational differences. The program has since led to a best-selling book and most recently, a community partnership that will test these innovative ideas on a national scale.

“Remediation, starting later when something has already happened, can be less successful,” says Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery at the University of Chicago and founder of the TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health. “We need a fundamental change in our approach to become much more preventative.”

Ballmer Group, the philanthropic organization founded by Connie and Steve Ballmer, is giving $4.2 million to University of Chicago’s TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health to fund its work that develops a model for a community-wide approach to promote cognitive and language development in young children.

Partnerships between policy makers and researchers could improve the lives of millions—but they’re harder than you think.

Every parent knows that talking to their kids is important, but University of Chicago professors Dana Suskind and John List have been pioneering a research agenda that encourages parents and community members to increase both the quantity and quality of parent-child interactions for all kids, beginning at birth.

In the recent Democratic presidential debate, Joe Biden was asked about our nation’s history of slavery and pervasive inequality in its schools. He gave a meandering response that received a lot of attention—and criticism.

A literacy crisis plagues Chicago’s underprivileged communities and handicaps our educational system.

A literacy crisis plagues Chicago’s underprivileged communities and handicaps our educational system.

In recent years, citizens and lawmakers have become increasingly enthusiastic about the adoption of evidence-based policies and programs. Social scientists—aided in part by an increased use of field experiments—have delivered evidence of countless interventions that positively impact peoples’ lives. And yet these programs, when expanded, have not always delivered the dramatic societal impacts promised.

Dana Suskind is a surgeon at the University of Chicago whose specialty is providing kids who have little or no hearing with high-tech cochlear implants that allow them to hear much better. But she noticed about a decade ago that some of her young patients had much better outcomes than others after receiving the implants.

Preliminary results from a five-year study, supported through a $3 million grant by the PNC Foundation and conducted by the TMW Center, reveal that parents improved their toddler’s language environments by increasing conversational turns almost four times more than parents in the control group. These findings are particularly meaningful because they mirror new and emerging research that points to the importance of conversational turn-taking in building a child’s language and cognitive skills.

Whether it’s the ongoing debate over free college, the unique politics surrounding charter schools, or the power of teacher strikes, education promises to play a vital role in determining the outcome of the Democratic primaries and the 2020 general election. To help readers understand these often-complex topics, we’ve collected relevant Chalkboard posts from the past year that discuss the big ideas in education that are likely to be prominent next year.

Why do so many promising solutions — in education, medicine, criminal justice, etc. — fail to scale up into great policy? And can a new breed of “implementation scientists” crack the code?

New generation of parenting apps aim to support caregivers, build capacity

Historically, times of crisis have brought out the best in U.S. policymaking. The Great Depression ushered in the New Deal. The Cuyahoga River burning due to industrial pollution in 1969 gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. What might the coronavirus-fueled public health and economic emergencies lead to? If we follow another example from history, the answer just might be universal child care.

The video footage is a gold mine for developmental psychologists

You’ve likely heard of the summer slide in childhood learning. Will changes to education and toxic stress due to COVID-19 result in similar losses, especially for already disadvantaged children? John List and Dana Suskind share what evidence shows about the new risks facing families; then, Ariel Kalil discusses her research on interventions to support parents’ role in learning at home.

Writing for the Brookings Institution, Dana Suskind discusses the incredibly important role fathers play in building their children’s brains. She summarizes the science that reveals what fathers can and should do to increase brain activation and ultimately contribute to children’s stronger skill formation.

In this Q&A, John List, a pioneer in the use of field experiments in behavioral economics and a professor at the University of Chicago, discusses the pandemic’s effect on children and the achievement gap.

Parental incarceration exposes children to ‘toxic stress’ and causes them to miss out on nurturing relationships, potentially disrupting brain development and contributing to poor educational outcomes

Op-ed in the Chicago Tribune by TMW Center’s Katie Dealy.

Unpredictable schedules and pay and limited access to benefits like health care and parental leave can threaten the ability of workers’ children to learn

Dads typically don’t talk in depth about parenting like moms do, said Meghan Storms, senior program manager at Southwest Human Development, which runs the program locally. Dads play a critical role in their children’s lives.

A panel from the University of Chicago and Brookings Institution explored what goes wrong — and what can go right — when researchers and policymakers undertake the science of scaling

Early childhood interventions have a strong evidence base proving profoundly positive and lifelong benefits. But moving from a successful pilot to a state-level program requires careful design in order to achieve the same positive results at scale. In this Q&A, Dana Suskind and John List discuss the science of scaling.

A pilot program promoting early childhood education is test driving its techniques in Kentucky. Families and children from five Kentucky counties are getting an early start on education with a 10-week program called 3-T’s Let’s Talk. The program was developed by the TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health at the University of Chicago, and funded by a grant from PNC Grow Up Great.

Among O.E.C.D. nations, the U.S. has one of the highest rates of child poverty. How can that be? To find out, Stephen Dubner speaks with a Republican senator, a Democratic mayor, and a large cast of econo-nerds. Along the way, we hear some surprisingly good news: Washington is finally ready to attack the problem head-on.

A rich body of scientific literature demonstrates that the first three years of a child’s life builds the foundation for lifelong learning and achievement — and that a warm, nurturing relationship with caretakers is the most important building block in that foundation. But little research has been done to quantify parents’ awareness or understanding of that science.

Among the many harsh realities revealed by COVID-19 is the overwhelming share of parents in the United States who lack access to the support they need, particularly during the critically important early years of their children’s lives. Indeed, many have to shoulder the enormous responsibility of early childhood care, development, and education on their own, without knowledgeable support or guidance.

Parents who learn about current science nurture children well.

If you see adults across the Triangle talking casually to babies as if they might somehow answer, there is no need for concern. These adults are probably just aware of current research about the importance of communicating with young children.

The key to improving young children’s vocabulary and math skills may lie in changing their parents’ beliefs. We describe these findings in an article published in October 2021 in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Communications.

This column reports the results of two TMW Center field experiments that reveal how shifting parents’ beliefs about the role of parental inputs in child development can impact parents’ behavior and be a pathway to reducing gaps in children’s skills.

Writing in The Hill, Dana Suskind argues that parents have the potential to be the largest special interest group in the country, writing: “The time is ripe for parents to galvanize — to advocate for systemic supports that would finally, truly, make parental choice a reality.”

In a review of Dana Suskind’s new book, Publisher’s Weekly notes that its “stories of parents driven to the brink by a broken system make policy issues feel powerfully personal.” And calls the book “an incisive and persuasive call to action.”

Emily Oster interviews Dana Suskind on her latest book, Parent Nation.

This Planet Money feature on Dana Suskind’s new book, Parent Nation, explains that “millions of kids in America are getting left behind during their first three years of life — years that a heap of scientific evidence says are crucial to their brain development.” And “To fix that, (Suskind) argues, America needs much stronger policies to support parents and caregivers at this early stage.”

Writing for Scientific American, Dana Suskind and Lydia Denworth explore how family-friendly policies such as paid parental leave and high-quality child care improve children’s brain development and prospects for a better future.

Dana Suskind is quoted in this USA Today article examining the challenges facing kids born in the COVID-19 era. Suskind argues their parents need more support.

The Atlantic quotes Dana Suskind in this article examining our nation’s education system. Suskind argues parents need more support to foster their children’s academic success.

In a guest essay in The Atlantic, Dana Suskind argues that raising kids in America is expensive and isolating; and that a caregivers’ lobby could help.

A profile of Louisiana’s second annual Early Ed Month highlights Dana Suskind’s keynote address.

Early Learning Nation magazine asked some of their favorite people, “What’s one thing our readers can do to make the world better for mothers?” See what Dana Suskind and others had to say!

In a Wall Street Journal Saturday Essay, Dana Suskind examines the potential impacts of artificial superintelligence on children’s developing brains.

Governing magazine highlights the city of Chattanooga’s efforts to promote family-friendly workplace policies, and quotes Dana Suskind at length.

Andrew Leigh, member of Australian Parliament, interviews Dana Suskind on his podcast “The Good Life.”

“Parent Nation” and Dana Suskind are cited in an article about the likelihood of child care legislation passing in Congress.