How does it feel to be on the cutting edge?

Pensacola-area moms have been, since the summer of 2018, part of a research project for the University of Chicago, thanks to the Studer Community Institute’s partnership with the TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health at the prestigious university.

Pensacola is the first community to implement on a large scale the Newborn Intervention of the Thirty Million Words Initiative at the University of Chicago. 

The Newborn Intervention is a video delivered during the universal newborn hearing screening every child undergoes before leaving the hospital. 

The video uses footage of real families with their newborns and young children along with voice-over teaching about the fundamentals of how parent talk and interaction fuels healthy early brain development. It uses a pre- and post-survey to gauge what parents know about this important topic — and what they learned from watching the video.

That growth, research suggests, is the “secret sauce” of what helps a growing child’s brain wire itself for learning. Children who have more positive, loving interaction with their parents and families — in a word-rich environment full of play, reading, singing and more — are more likely to develop the early language skills they will need to learn to be good readers once they get to school.

TMW Newborn aims to measure what a mom knows about her child’s early brain development, and then increase her knowledge of the power that language has to build an infant’s brain.

The video was  pilot tested with nearly 600 families in two Chicago-area hospitals. In 2018, Pensacola became the first outside pilot of the project. 

Our mothers will be contributing to fine-tuning the messaging for research that is proving to be effective at increasing what parents know about brain development — and the role it plays in school readiness. 

This summer, Baptist, Sacred Heart and West Florida hospitals began their participation. 

In the study, moms are offered the option to complete a survey and watch a video on an iPad. The video includes important teaching points for parents and uses the survey tool to track parent knowledge before and after the video is played. 

The participation rate for the pilot study in Chicago was at 25 percent. As of Sept. 30, 2018, 443 Pensacola parents have completed the video project. Our participation rates are:

— West Florida: 60 percent.

— Baptist: 79 percent.

— Sacred Heart: 55 percent.

Not only will local moms benefit from this video lesson, but also the feedback they give about the project will be used to refine it further.

That means that every parent touched by the video in the future will benefit from the feedback of Pensacola area mothers to help the research team maximize learning in as short a video-length as possible.