Sharon Murphy September 2015 Songs are memorable. We remember melodies and lyrics from long ago. Even though this power of harnessing the cadences of language as well as its pleasures underlies children’s nursery rhyme learning and the occasional literacy intervention, rarely has it been used in broad scale to make a difference in literacy learning. However, Brij Kothari in a recent Huffington Post article reports on an effort to do just that. In Maharashtra state (population

Sharon Murphy May, 2015 Closing the achievement gap between children with high and low incomes is an aspiration that few would quibble with. According to Richard Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen there is evidence to indicate that, during the school year, children from low-income families learn at about the same rate as those from high-income families. So, you might say, if that's the case, we shouldn't have an achievement gap. Well, it turns out that, over the summer months,

May 2015 Sharon Murphy Well known developmental psychologists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff recently wrote a piece for Philly.com recalling a 30-year-old study sometimes referred to as the "30 million word gap study." In this study, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley found that the number of words spoken to 3-year-olds whose families fell into the low-income bracket was found to be far fewer than the number spoken to children whose families were of

March 2015 Sharon Murphy A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience authored by Laurie S. Glezer, Judy Kim, Josh Rule, Xiong Jiang, and Maximilian Riesenhub reports that after learning new words, readers tend to remember them as a whole, an image, as it were, in a visual dictionary. The authors suggest that those who have difficulty learning words phonologically "might benefit from visual word learning strategies to circumvent the phonologic difficulties an

December 2014 Sharon Murphy Longitudinal studies require effort but they have dramatic pay-offs. A new study out of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the University of London's Institute of Education is one such study. The study's authors, Sullivan and Brown (see below), managed to answer the question, 'Does reading increase people's vocabularies between the ages of 16 and 42?" (p. 5). They used a sample that had been surveyed since birth and wondered about how childh