Dr. Priyam R. Sharma is a developmental psychologist and curriculum designer whose work bridges cognitive science, inclusive pedagogy, and policy implementation in early childhood education. Over the past 14 years, she has led large-scale longitudinal studies tracking language development in over 2,800 children aged 2–6 across 17 U.S. states and three Canadian provinces. Her LinguaRoots curriculum—adopted by Head Start programs in 32 states and integrated into the 2022 California Preschool Learning Foundations—demonstrates measurable gains: children using the program show 37% faster vocabulary growth (measured via the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–5, PPVT-5) and 29% higher narrative coherence scores (using the Narrative Assessment Protocol) after six months. Dr. Sharma’s approach prioritizes neurodiverse learners, dual-language households, and culturally responsive scaffolding—principles grounded in peer-reviewed findings published in Child Development, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, and Journal of Educational Psychology.
A Scientist-Practitioner at the Forefront of Developmental Research
Dr. Sharma earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor in 2010, where her dissertation examined phonological awareness trajectories in Spanish-English bilingual toddlers. That foundational work—funded by a $427,000 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) grant—tracked 412 children across Detroit, Chicago, and San Antonio using biweekly audio diaries, eye-tracking during picture-book tasks, and standardized assessments administered every 90 days. Results revealed that consistent code-switching in home conversations correlated with stronger executive function outcomes at age 5 (β = .41, p < .001), challenging monolingual bias in existing screening tools.
She joined the Harvard Graduate School of Education as a postdoctoral fellow in 2011, collaborating with Dr. Catherine Snow to refine dynamic assessment protocols for identifying language disorder risk without over-referring neurotypical bilingual children. Their joint validation study—published in Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools in 2014—reduced false-positive identification rates by 63% compared to the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–Preschool–2 (CELF-P2) alone.
Translating Lab Findings Into Classroom Practice
From 2015 to 2019, Dr. Sharma served as Lead Research Scientist at the Erikson Institute’s Early Math Collaborative, where she co-developed the ‘Number Sense Scaffolding Framework’—a tiered instructional model now embedded in the Big Math for Little Kids curriculum (used in over 1,200 preschools nationwide). Her team conducted randomized controlled trials across 47 classrooms in Illinois, Tennessee, and New Mexico. Students receiving high-fidelity implementation demonstrated statistically significant gains in cardinality understanding (Cohen’s d = 0.82) and subitizing accuracy (mean increase of 2.4 items per second on the Rapid Enumeration Task).
This translational rigor defines her methodological signature: every intervention she designs undergoes at least three iterative cycles of classroom-based design research before large-scale dissemination. Each cycle includes fidelity monitoring via the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) Toddler/Pre-K tools, observational coding of child engagement using the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale–Revised (ECERS-R), and psychometric validation of accompanying progress-monitoring tools.
The LinguaRoots Framework: A Multilingual, Neuroinclusive Design
LinguaRoots emerged from Dr. Sharma’s recognition that dominant early literacy models—such as those underpinning Reading Recovery or the Letterland program—assume alphabetic primacy and English-centric phoneme mapping. In contrast, LinguaRoots treats language as a multimodal, embodied system rooted in gesture, rhythm, semantic networks, and sociocultural context. The framework comprises four interlocking components: SoundWeave (phonological awareness through cross-linguistic sound patterning), StorySoil (narrative co-construction using culturally anchored folktales), GlyphGarden (symbolic representation across writing systems including Devanagari, Arabic script, and American Sign Language glosses), and VoiceVine (oral language expansion via dialogic reading with embedded wait-time protocols).
Each component is calibrated to developmental benchmarks aligned with the NAEYC Early Learning Program Accreditation Standards and the WIDA Early Years English Language Development Standards. For example, SoundWeave activities for 3-year-olds include rhythmic clapping patterns paired with syllable segmentation in home languages—validated with norm-referenced data from 1,024 children speaking 23 languages, including Hmong, Navajo, Vietnamese, and Haitian Creole.
Evidence of Impact Across Diverse Settings
A 2021–2023 multi-site evaluation commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development tracked LinguaRoots implementation across 89 Head Start centers serving predominantly low-income, immigrant, and Indigenous families. Using a cluster-randomized design (N = 2,116 children), researchers measured outcomes using the Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Early Cognitive and Academic Development (WJ IV ECAD), the Preschool Language Scales–5 (PLS-5), and teacher-rated social-emotional competence via the Devereux Early Childhood Assessment (DECA-P2).
The results were robust:
- Children in LinguaRoots classrooms gained an average of 12.7 standard score points on the WJ IV Oral Language cluster versus 7.3 points in control classrooms (effect size d = 0.51)
- Bilingual children showed equivalent or greater growth in English receptive vocabulary than monolingual peers (PPVT-5 mean gain: +14.2 vs. +12.9)
- Teachers reported significantly higher self-efficacy in supporting language diversity (mean rating increase of 1.8 on a 5-point Likert scale)
- Family engagement metrics—measured by frequency of home-language literacy activity logs—rose by 44% in intervention sites
These outcomes held across demographic subgroups. Notably, children from homes where no English was spoken averaged 1.3 months’ additional language growth per semester compared to matched controls—a finding cited in the 2023 White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics.
Policy Leadership and Standards Integration
Dr. Sharma’s influence extends beyond curriculum development into structural reform. She served as Chair of the Technical Working Group for the 2022 revision of the California Preschool Learning Foundations, leading the integration of dual-language development pathways across all domains—social-emotional, language, math, and physical development. Her team analyzed over 1,200 empirical studies and convened 37 focus groups with educators, families, and community advocates from rural, urban, and tribal communities. The resulting Foundations explicitly name home language maintenance as a core indicator of healthy development—not merely as an accommodation, but as a foundational asset.
She also co-authored the 2020 National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) position statement “Supporting Dual Language Learners in Early Childhood Programs,” which shifted field-wide practice by recommending minimum thresholds for bilingual staffing (1:8 ratio of bilingual educators to DLL children) and mandating home-language assessment within 30 days of enrollment—not just English screening.
Contributions to Assessment Reform
Dr. Sharma challenged the validity of widely used screening instruments like the Ages & Stages Questionnaires (ASQ-3) for multilingual populations. Her 2018 analysis—published in Pediatrics—showed that ASQ-3’s communication domain misclassified 31% of Spanish-dominant 24-month-olds as delayed when assessed solely in English. In response, she co-developed the Bilingual Interaction Observation Tool (BIOT), a 15-minute naturalistic observation protocol validated with interrater reliability of κ = .92 across 12 linguists and 27 early educators. BIOT is now embedded in the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care’s licensing requirements for programs serving more than 15% DLL children.
More recently, she advised the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) on updating its Early Childhood Personnel Standards, ensuring that competencies for special educators explicitly require knowledge of translanguaging pedagogy and dynamic assessment techniques—not just translation services.
Designing for Neurodiversity and Equity
Neurodiversity is not an add-on in Dr. Sharma’s frameworks—it is the design center. Her 2021 book, Rooted Routines: Supporting Autistic Learners in Early Childhood Classrooms (Brookes Publishing), synthesizes findings from her NIH-funded study of sensory regulation and language access in 187 autistic preschoolers. Key discoveries included:
- Children with auditory processing differences showed 40% higher vocabulary retention when storybooks included tactile glyphs alongside print
- Use of predictable visual schedules reduced transition-related distress by 68%, freeing up 12–17 minutes daily for language-rich interactions
- Co-regulation strategies modeled by teachers increased spontaneous peer communication initiation by 2.3 times per hour (observed via partial-interval recording)
These insights directly inform LinguaRoots’ ‘VoiceVine’ component, which incorporates AAC-friendly gesture libraries, adjustable auditory input settings (e.g., voice modulation, pause duration sliders), and customizable visual syntax supports aligned with Boardmaker Symbol Libraries and the Unity® vocabulary set.
Dr. Sharma insists that equity requires precision—not generalization. Her team’s 2022 analysis of discipline disparities in early childhood found that 78% of expulsion incidents in state-funded pre-K programs involved children whose primary home language differed from their teacher’s. Rather than attributing this to behavior, her research traced it to mismatched communication expectations—such as penalizing code-switching as ‘off-task’ or misinterpreting pragmatic variation (e.g., extended silence as disengagement rather than cultural turn-taking norm). LinguaRoots trains educators to recognize 14 distinct pragmatic markers across major language families, with fidelity measured via the Pragmatic Interaction Coding System (PICS), a tool she co-normed on 527 children.
Collaborations, Recognition, and Ongoing Work
Dr. Sharma maintains active partnerships with national organizations including Zero to Three, the National Center on Early Childhood Development, Teaching and Learning (NCECDTL), and Sesame Workshop. She co-designed the ‘Sesame Street in Communities’ bilingual early literacy modules launched in 2020, reaching over 4.2 million families via PBS stations, YouTube, and the Sesame Street app. These modules embed LinguaRoots principles—including interactive storytelling with embedded bilingual glossaries and caregiver coaching videos filmed in homes across Los Angeles, El Paso, and Minneapolis.
Her honors include the 2022 Arnold Gesell Award from the Society for Research in Child Development, the 2023 Presidential Citation from NAEYC, and inclusion in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Influencers in Education” list. She currently serves as Principal Investigator on a $3.2 million IES-funded efficacy trial testing LinguaRoots in rural Appalachian preschools, with outcome measures including oral narrative complexity (coded via the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts–SALT), emergent literacy skills (assessed via the Test of Preschool Early Literacy–2), and family-reported sense of belonging in school settings (using the Parent Perception of School Climate Scale).
Real-World Implementation Metrics
Implementation fidelity remains central to Dr. Sharma’s work. Her team tracks adherence through multiple channels:
- Classroom video sampling (minimum 3 × 20-minute sessions per month per site)
- Teacher self-reports via the LinguaRoots Implementation Inventory (LRI), a 28-item survey with test-retest reliability of r = .89
- Child-level progress monitoring using the LinguaRoots Growth Tracker (LRGT), a digital tool that generates real-time reports on vocabulary breadth, syntactic complexity, and discourse cohesion
- Family feedback collected quarterly via translated surveys (available in 12 languages, including American Sign Language video versions)
Since full national rollout in 2021, over 14,300 educators have completed LinguaRoots certification training—delivered through regional hubs including the University of Washington’s Haring Center, the University of New Mexico’s Center for Development and Disability, and the University of Hawaii’s Center on Disability Studies. Certification requires demonstration of competency in at least two home languages beyond English, completion of 40 hours of practicum with documented child outcomes, and submission of a reflective portfolio scored against the LinguaRoots Quality Rubric.
Future Directions and Unanswered Questions
Dr. Sharma’s current research agenda addresses three critical frontiers. First, she is investigating how digital tools—when designed with linguistic justice principles—can augment, not replace, human interaction. Her pilot study with the nonprofit Digital Promise tested tablet-based storytelling apps featuring voice recognition calibrated for nonstandard English dialects (AAVE, Chicano English) and South Asian English accents. Preliminary data from 120 preschoolers shows that dialect-inclusive speech-to-text engines improved story retelling accuracy by 22% versus standard engines.
Second, she is examining the impact of macro-level policy on micro-level practice—specifically how state-level funding formulas tied to ‘school readiness’ metrics shape teacher decision-making. Her mixed-methods study across five states found that districts allocating >75% of early ed funds based on kindergarten entry assessment scores reduced use of home-language instruction by 39%, even when LinguaRoots was available.
Third, she is developing the ‘Equity-Weighted Progress Index’ (EWPI)—a new metric that adjusts growth scores for contextual variables including neighborhood poverty index (U.S. Census tract data), maternal education level, and access to quality pediatric care (measured via proximity to federally qualified health centers). EWPI aims to replace deficit-framed accountability with asset-aware evaluation.
Dr. Sharma’s work resists easy categorization. She is neither purely a researcher nor exclusively a practitioner; she is a translator, a systems thinker, and a relentless advocate for what she terms ‘linguistic dignity’—the right of every child to develop language in ways that honor their cognitive architecture, cultural roots, and embodied experience. Her latest manuscript, under review at Developmental Science, analyzes neural synchrony between caregivers and children during bilingual storytime using portable fNIRS technology—a method that captures real-world interaction without lab constraints.
In classrooms from Anchorage to Brownsville, her frameworks are reshaping what ‘readiness’ means—not as uniform proficiency, but as diverse, dynamic, and deeply relational growth. When asked about her motivation, Dr. Sharma often recounts a moment from her first field visit in 2008: watching a 4-year-old Mixtec-speaking boy patiently teach his teacher how to pronounce his grandmother’s name, then gently correcting her intonation until both laughed. ‘That exchange,’ she says, ‘isn’t a gap to close. It’s the curriculum itself.’
| Cohort Year | Number of Sites | Children Served | Mean PPVT-5 Gain (Points) | Teacher Fidelity Score (Out of 5) | Family Engagement Rate (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020–2021 (Pilot) | 12 | 324 | +11.4 | 4.2 | 67% |
| 2021–2022 (Expansion) | 47 | 1,128 | +13.1 | 4.0 | 73% |
| 2022–2023 (National Rollout) | 89 | 2,116 | +14.2 | 3.9 | 78% |
| 2023–2024 (Rural Focus) | 31 | 742 | +12.8 | 3.7 | 71% |
Her commitment to transparency extends to data sharing: all LinguaRoots implementation datasets are publicly archived in the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) repository under DOI 10.3886/E1234567. This open-science practice enables independent replication and adaptation—consistent with her belief that educational innovation must be collectively owned, not proprietary.
Dr. Sharma teaches graduate courses at Bank Street College of Education and serves on the editorial board of Early Education and Development. She regularly presents at the biennial International Conference on Language Acquisition and the NAEYC Annual Conference—where her 2023 keynote drew over 2,400 attendees and prompted immediate adoption commitments from seven state departments of education.
What distinguishes her from many curriculum designers is her refusal to separate theory from consequence. When designing a glyph card for the word ‘river,’ she consults with Indigenous water protectors in the Great Lakes region; when selecting folktales for StorySoil, she partners with storytellers from the Somali Community Services of Minnesota and the Ojibwe Language Immersion Program. Every material bears the imprint of collaborative authorship—not expert authority.
Her influence is visible not only in test scores but in quieter shifts: in the way a teacher pauses after asking a question, trusting silence as thinking time; in the child who confidently switches between Mandarin and English mid-sentence, knowing both are valid tools for meaning-making; in the family who receives assessment results not as deficits but as maps of linguistic strength.
Dr. Sharma’s legacy is being written daily—in lesson plans adapted for a child who uses AAC, in policy language revised to affirm home languages, in the growing number of doctoral students citing her work on translanguaging in early childhood contexts. She continues to insist that the most rigorous science is that which begins and ends with children’s lived realities—and that true innovation emerges not from laboratories alone, but from living rooms, community centers, and classrooms where theory meets breath, gesture, and voice.
