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What if problems in school performance could be solved if parents simply talked to their kids more? Sounds too easy, but Andrew Biemiller thinks the question is worth considering.
"We've come to discover that reading comprehension is directly related to vocabulary, and that vocabulary is largely taught at home, not at school," explains Biemiller. Moreover, he says, vocabulary levels vary widely depending upon the degree to which parents speak and read to their kids and make an effort to explain words to them.
So what happens when children start school with very different vocabulary levels? "Unfortunately, across the primary grades, the kids just get further and further apart," says Biemiller, pointing out that children with smaller vocabularies fare worse in reading comprehension throughout the school years.
"By the end of grade two, you've got the kids at the top end who know about 8,000 root words and the kids at the bottom end who know about 4,000 words. After grade two, once they become literate, they all move forward at the same speed. But, unfortunately, the kids at the low end never really catch up."
So Biemiller and his research team have devised a way to fill that gap.
"Since we can't control what goes on at home, we need to get better at teaching vocabulary at school, particularly in the early years." So using kindergarten, grade one and grade two classrooms, Biemiller has tested a new method for beefing up word knowledge.
It involves reading a book to the class, teaching eight to 10 words in the book, and then re-reading the book three or four days in a row and reviewing those words at the end of each day. After a week, another big review session challenges the kids to recognize the learned words in different context sentences. "It seems like such a simple method, but the key is the amount of review," says Biemiller.
So far, the results have been consistently good. "The more words you teach, the more words kids learn - we haven't found an upper limit yet."
The real difficulty, though, is identifying which words fall into the gap between the high-end kids and the low-end kids. Which words need to be taught in order to create a level playing field?
Biemiller says this is a very tricky question. "We have already established that certain words are always learned in pretty much the same order, but finding the exact words that separate the advantaged kids from the disadvantaged kids is a painstaking process." His current research is focusing in on that, testing thousands of kids over the next couple of years to get a clear picture of which words they understand.
"Right now we can identify about half the words that need to be taught at the primary level. But in the next year or two, we hope to create a much better picture."
 
Why do many of us fear difference? When we encounter people who are different in some way - whether physically, culturally or otherwise - why do we sometimes feel uneasy and look away?
There are no easy answers to this human riddle, but Richard Volpe hopes to contribute to a solution that begins in childhood: a groundbreaking initiative called the "reverse integration program."
A partnership between the Bloorview MacMillan Children's Centre and ICS, reverse integration is a kindergarten program that brings together children with and without physical challenges in a unique learning environment.
Located within Bloorview MacMillan, which has its own well-established school system from preschool to high school, the program aims to foster understanding and empathy. Working and playing side-by-side in a regular classroom setting, the kids are able to realize how similar to each other they really are.
Volpe, who helped establish the program in 1995 along with ICS Laboratory School Principal Elizabeth Morley, initially set out to examine what this kind of experience means to children and their families, while the kids are still in the program.
To do that, he enlisted a graduate student who literally went into residence in the Bloorview classroom and developed an ongoing rapport with the children. The research team also studied 37 behavioural indicators to assess how the kids see themselves and the world around them.
So far, the impact of the program seems clear. "We have a preliminary indication that it's significant. We certainly have found greater sensitivity, greater comfort. When the non-disabled kids see a kid in a wheelchair, they're not going to go the other way. They're not even going to think about it."
And once kids make the transition into regular school settings, he says, they seem to be more receptive to situations like a new student in the classroom. "There is often a 'host' relationship that other kids don't always have."
These early indications are promising, but Volpe wants to assess the long-term impact. He is currently proposing a research program that will track graduates and their parents more systematically to see how this unique classroom experience has affected their lives and their receptiveness to difference.
"There is a definite warehousing of differences in our society, and a lack of understanding. We talk about the importance of history and geography; well, there is a similar sort of liberal education needed around the area of disability. This program is part of that, and it's really quite exciting."
 
From addition and subtraction straight to algebra? Maybe not, but Joan Moss is setting out to prove what young children really know about math.
Moss is exploring the untapped math potential of kids in grade two. Her testing ground is one classroom at the Lab School and two classrooms at a similar school at Columbia University in New York.
In each setting, children work with increasingly complex series of repeating and growing patterns using shapes and blocks. But instead of simply sorting, classifying and extending these patterns, as practiced in most primary grade classrooms, students are taught to find the numerical rules and generalizations that underlie these patterns.
"We have found that by helping students to integrate their knowledge of visual patterns with the numerical operations they learn for addition and multiplication, we are helping them understand sophisticated mathematical relations well beyond their grade level," says Moss.
As children work through the exercises, they interact with teachers and fellow classmates face-to-face and via a database about why they made various decisions or how they identified different patterns.
Moss' work - and the mainstream math curricula it may one day help shape - promises to push the envelope in early math learning. "We want to take the current curricula to a new level, to see how far we can develop kids' abstract thinking around patterns, and how they make sense of and reflect upon what they're doing. Both things are incredibly important."
Doing away with the traditionally rigid structure of math learning is crucial for helping students embrace math, Moss insists. "This is a substantial change from what most people remember about math class, where you did procedures and followed rules and didn't spend a lot of time discussing how things worked. Math was a very scary concept to a lot of people."
Moss, her team of researchers and her New York colleagues regularly discuss how the method, which was implemented in November 2003, is working in their classrooms and how they might refine and enhance the lessons.
This process of continuous collaboration and refinement stems from a long-held Japanese method of teaching improvement called the "lesson study approach."
"In the Japanese education culture, math lessons are continuously refined using a process whereby teachers sit in on each other's lessons, observe how the kids are responding, and then meet to discuss how things can be improved," explains Moss.
Using her current experiences as a starting point, Moss has launched a project in several schools around Toronto to familiarize participating teachers - many of whom graduated from ICS's master's program - with the benefits of the Japanese lesson study approach.
A passion for finding new and better ways of engaging kids in math is what drives Moss. Over the last five years, she has designed and tested a unique curriculum for teaching rational numbers to grade seven and eight students around the city. Her recent shift to earlier grades aims to test new theories about young children's capacity for algebraic reasoning.
"It's amazing the kind of reasoning kids are capable of when they're working in an environment that fosters an understanding of something that is pretty hard."
 Working parents of young, school-age children know the drill all too well: the morning rush to drop kids off, the evening rush to pick them up. That is, if they're lucky enough to secure one of the few school-based daycare spots to fill the gap between school hours and a full-time work day.
It's a time in the lives of families when services such as education, childcare and other family resources seem most disconnected. But an innovative new pilot project in five Toronto schools aims to change that.
The three-year initiative, called the Toronto First Duty Project, integrates kindergarten, childcare and family support services such as parent education groups, family literacy programs and parenting centres - all within the school setting - to provide a more seamless learning environment.
The project has lofty goals and an impressive team of U of T and Ryerson University researchers led by ICS director Carl Corter. The team aims to ensure that the project's impact is well-documented and then communicated to the people who can make it a permanent reality.
"Similar initiatives have been launched before, but they haven't resulted in any sustained benefit," notes Corter. "So we are doing a very thorough evaluation to demonstrate the kind of accountability and impact that will convince policy makers that this is a worthwhile project with long-term benefits for everyone."
The sites - Bruce Public School, Corvette Public School, J.R. Wilcox Community School, Queen Victoria Public School and Secord Public School - are scattered across the city and represent varying levels of experience with early childhood programs, infrastructure and community demographic profiles. "This is crucial, because how the programs work will vary according to all these factors," says Corter. "It's not a cookbook approach, so each site needs a tailored program."
Corter and his team have a broad research agenda to ensure that the program is evaluated on all possible levels. "We're charting how staff come together, how different service agencies come together, how the programs engage parents and kids, what the uptake is for different services, how the community responds to the integration and, of course, whether children have better outcomes."
Janette Pelletier, another ICS researcher working on the project, is responsible for measuring the impact on children. To do this, she takes baseline measures of children's vocabulary, early reading and number sense, and also asks them questions about their impressions of the learning environment.
A psychologist and former elementary school teacher herself, Pelletier is enthusiastic about the benefits a wider rollout would bring to families. "Wouldn't it be wonderful for parents to just go to their local school and access all the services they need?"
Corter agrees. "A lot of us live fragmented lives as we try to patch together services - and the system isn't designed very well. This is about redesigning the system."
And he is thrilled that ICS is taking a lead role in the project. "The institute has always been in the middle of the action throughout its 75-year history - it has helped produce childcare standards, basic research that has guided practice and professionals who have worked in childcare in schools and other settings. So this project, which also links to many of those things, is a very nice fit."
So, neither age nor class nor good
behaviour protect black people from much higher rates of police
contact, Wortley concludes. “If you’re black, the colour
of your skin is going to mean, in this city right now, that you’re
going to be considered one of the usual suspects.”
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