Catherine Snow

About

Catherine Snow is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her expertise focuses on language and literacy development in children, particularly how oral language skills are acquired and their relationship to literacy outcomes. Her current research includes studying how Boston Public School early childhood classrooms support children's development and participating in a long-standing research-practice partnership with the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP), which develops curricular tools to support teachers in implementing innovative classroom practices. Snow has contributed to the development of Word Generation, a discussion-based academic language and literacy program that has been shown to improve middle-school literacy outcomes, especially for students from language-minority homes. She has received numerous awards, including the Morningstar Teaching Award at Harvard and an Honorary Degree from the University of Nijmegen, and has held leadership roles such as Chair of the RAND Reading Study Group and President of the American Educational Research Association. Her work also includes cofounding the Child Language Data Exchange System and leading projects aimed at improving preservice teacher training and early childhood education, including efforts in China to align curriculum with classroom quality and instructional outcomes.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Mathematics education
• Developmental psychology
• Computer science

Selected publications

• Null relations between CLASS scores and gains in children’s language, math, and executive function skills: A replication and extension study

  Early Childhood Research Quarterly · 2020-08-15 · 90 citations

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  PublisherDOI

• Are screen devices soothing children or soothing parents?Investigating the relationships among children's exposure to different types of screen media, parental efficacy and home literacy practices

  Computers in Human Behavior · 2020-06-26 · 70 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Use of screen devices has become a standard practice in modern parenting. Research has shown that screen devices can be strategically used as tools, either for babysitting or for educational support. We surveyed 4,907 parents of preschool children from China to investigate how different devices (including TV, tablet, computer and paper-based books) may channel parental efficacy (or the lack of it) to home literacy practices. We found that parents with low parental efficacy were more likely to gi…

  PublisherDOI

• Instructional alignment is associated with PreK persistence: Evidence from the Boston Public Schools

  Early Childhood Research Quarterly · 2023-12-09 · 12 citations

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  PublisherDOI

• One Score to Rule Them All? Comparing the Predictive and Concurrent Validity of 30 Hearts and Flowers Scoring Approaches

  Assessment · 2024-02-15 · 8 citations

  article

  The Hearts and Flowers (H&F) task is a computerized executive functioning (EF) assessment that has been used to measure EF from early childhood to adulthood. It provides data on accuracy and reaction time (RT) across three different task blocks (hearts, flowers, and mixed). However, there is a lack of consensus in the field on how to score the task that makes it difficult to interpret findings across studies. The current study, which includes a demographically diverse population of kindergar…

  PublisherDOI

• Are There Sustained Effects of a Preschool Shared-Reading Intervention Addressing Dual Language Learners?

  Scientific Studies of Reading · 2024-04-03 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Purpose Previous research has demonstrated that immediate effects of language interventions tend to fade, but has also suggested that differentiating language skill types may be essential for understanding fade-out processes. This paper examines the longer-term effects of participating in a shared-reading intervention.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Christina Weiland

  35 shared

• John Locke

  32 shared

• Brian MacWhinney

  Carnegie Mellon University

  32 shared

• Anat Ninio

  29 shared

• Hollis S. Scarborough

  Haskins Laboratories

  28 shared

• Anne Van Kleeck

  The University of Texas at Austin

  28 shared

• Marilyn Jager Adams

  27 shared

• John D. Bonvillian

  Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist

  27 shared

Labs

• Catherine Snow LabPI

Education

• PhD, Department of Psychology

  McGill University

  1971

• M.A., Department of Psychology

  McGill University

  1967

• B.A.

  Oberlin College

  1966

Awards & honors

• Morningstar Teaching Award, Harvard Graduate School of Educa…
• Honorary Degree, University of Nijmegen (2003)
• Carnegie Corporation of New York, Institute for Statewide Li…
• Charles A. Ferguson Fellow, Center for Applied Linguistics (…
• Spencer Senior Scholar Award (1999)

Similar researchers at Harvard University

• Susan E. Careyh-96
• William R. Beardsleeh-91
• Robert A. LeVineh-79