The achievement gap is "the most pressing domestic issue facing the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century" (Espenshade and Radford, 2009).
Read more....
Latest developments
Espenshade is working with graduate students from Sociology and the Office of Population Research to develop a research proposal for a “video ethnography.” The aim is to persuade roughly a dozen families—stratified by race and by social class—in the Princeton-Trenton area to have “baby cams” installed in their homes. Observational video and audio data on family dynamics and, in particular, on parent-child interactions are likely to provide more reliable information on the early emergence of learning gaps than data gathered by more conventional survey methods. Interest will center on pre-school children’s diet and nutrition, the amount of talking and reading that parents do with their children, forms of structure and discipline, sleep patterns, TV watching, and the like. |
