Speaker: Dr. Si Chen, postdoctoral fellow, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Time: 15:30 - 17:00, June 3rd, 2019

Venue: #1113 Wangkezhen Building, Peking Universtiy

Abstract: Previous research suggests that emergent literacy activities at home are essential to children’s language development. The iRead Project is an on-going large-scale home literacy intervention being implemented in a metropolitan area in China. It provides free picture books and parent training packages in early literacy education for at least 50,000 families per year. To explore the effectiveness of the iRead Project, we sampled more than 2,000 Mandarin-speaking families with children aged 1-6 from an urban metropolis in China. We used a random encouragement design as an instrumental variable (IV) to estimate the effectiveness of the iRead Project on children and parents’ outcomes, the local average treatment effect (LATE) for compilers. We found moderate effects (approximately 17% to 23%) of iRead intervention on children’s Chinese receptive and expressive vocabulary development. The intervention shows significant improvement on children’s vocabulary development, home literacy environments, as well as parental early literacy education beliefs.

Bio: Si Chen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research is primarily concerned with the ways in which and how language/literacy learning curriculums and environments for young children — in and out of school, monolingual and bilingual— can be designed to support children’s development. Many of Chen’s researches mainly focus on detecting the effectiveness of randomized literacy interventions in China.

Host: Prof. Li Yi

2019-05-22