Students at Harrison Preschool are using new and exciting technologies to improve student growth and development. Research has shown that daily conversations between adults and children have an incredibly significant effect on each child’s development. Adult/child conversations impact children’s later-in-life language skills, trust development, cognitive thinking abilities, and ultimately their overall academic achievement.
LENA, a company that seeks to “build brains through early talk”, provides “talk pedometers” for student use. A talk pedometer is a small, child-safe recorder vest that children wear for a day at a time while at school. The vest records each daily conversational turn the child experiences. A conversational turn occurs when one person speaks and then the other person responds. For example, if a child says something and an adult responds (or vice versa), that's one conversational turn. These conversational interactions are vitally important factors in child development.
After a full school day is captured by the LENA vest, the files are processed and the recordings deleted. The software does this without recognizing any words or even the languages being spoken. It simply recognizes conversational turns, generating feedback reports for teachers or caregivers on the quantity and quality of talk in their child’s environment. These feedback reports provide specific actions and changes to improve daily interactions between students and teachers.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) state that back-and-forth conversations between an adult and child, whether teacher or parent, is powerfully significant. Their findings suggest that parents and teachers can have considerable influence over their children’s language and brain development by simply engaging them in regular conversation.