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Current Initiatives and Research
Departamental & Faculty:
Department of Human Development (EDHD)
Dr. Patricia Alexander (Professor, Educational Psychology) was a visiting scholar at University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand and an invited presenter at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand during the 2007-2008 academic year. She has also served as the Chair, of an external evaluation panel for Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, University of Padua and an external dissertation committee member for Dr. Sofie Loyens, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Dr. Natasha J. Cabrera (Associate Professor, Developmental Science) has engaged in collaborative and international research projects focusing on parent-child interactions among low-income minority families and the role that culture play in family functioning and child well-being. Her research focuses on predictors of adaptive and maladaptive parenting and its influence on children’s social emotional development. She has collaborated with colleagues in Toronto, Canada, Cambridge, England and Paris, France.
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Dr. Nathan A. Fox (Distinguished University Professor, Developmental Science) is involved in two international collaborations. The first is a project over the past eight years with two U.S. researchers and a group of psychologists and pediatricians in Bucharest, Romania studying the effects of early social deprivation on cognitive and social development in young children. This research has been extended to other countries where children are institutionalized early in life. The second project is in collaboration with colleagues at Tel Aviv University in the Department of Psychology studying a unique novel therapy for children with anxiety disorders. The therapy involves training children to attend to happy faces and away from threat; Dr. Fox and his colleagues have been working on the neural and behavioral consequences of this training and have a grant in to the NIH.
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Dr John Guthrie (Professor Emeritus, Educational Psychology) is in the "Reading Expert Group" (REG) that is the executive committee for an OECD-sponsored survey of reading in 15-year olds in 80 nations.
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Dr. Melanie Killen (Professor, Developmental Science) has engaged in collaborative and international projects focusing on children's and adolescents' evaluations of inclusion, exclusion, intergroup relationships, morality, prejudice, stereotyping, media intervention, and conflict resolution in Colombia (A. Ardila-Rey & C. Delgado); Israel (C. Cole, N. Fox, L. Leavitt, et al), Korea (K. J. Park, J. Lee-Kim, Y. Park, Y. Shin), Japan (D. Crystal & H. Watanabe) Spain (I. Enesco, S. Guerrero, & A. Navarro), Germany (A. Feddes), the United Kingdom (D. Abrams, & A. Rutland), and Australia (D. Nesdale). Dr. Killen has ongoing collaborations with faculty and their graduate students in Madrid, Spain, Canterbury, U.K., Matsuyama, Japan, K.J. Park (Seoul, Korea), and Australia. She is an Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and also received a grant from the Australian Research Council with Professor Drew Nesdale at Griffiths University.
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Dr. Kenneth H. Rubin (Director, Center for Children, Relationships, & Culture and Professor, Developmental Science) is the director of the International Consortium for the Study of Social & Emotional Development, funded by: SSHRC- Canada; Australian Research Council; Korean Research Foundation; & National University Council-Italy. The goal of this project is to examine the independent and interactive contributions of child temperament, parenting behavior, the quality of the parent-child relationship, and the life circumstances of the family unit to the prediction of passive withdrawal and aggression in early childhood. This collaborative, international research project has a longitudinal thrust, with the associations being examined from ages two-to-four in some countries and two-to-seven in others. Extensive observational and questionnaire data are available on parental behavior, the quality of parent-child relationship, and the child's production of adaptive and maladaptive social behaviors amongst peers. Importantly, the data collected in Canada and the United States are also being gathered in Australia, Brazil, China, India, Italy, and Korea. As such, cross-cultural comparisons are being made on parenting styles, parental beliefs, and their relations to children's social and emotional adaptation. Indeed, from the cross-cultural data bases, adaptation and maladaptation will be culturally defined.
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Dr. Judith Torney-Purta (Professor, Educational Psychology and Developmental Science) is a member of the U.S. National Committee which is part of the International Union of Psychological Science (USNC/IUPsyS) at the National Academy of Sciences. For this group she conducted a survey of twenty-six psychologists who were leaders of cross national projects to identify factors associated with successful international collaborations. The National Academy of Sciences recently issued a report, International Collaborations in the Behavioral and Social Sciences, based on a workshop held by the USNC with support from NSF. The survey is included as an appendix in the report. Professor Torney-Purta also received the Decade of Behavior Research Award (from a consortium of national behavioral and social science organizations) and the University of Maryland’s International Landmark Award in 2005. Both awards recognized her work as Steering Committee Chair for the IEA Civic Education Study, which surveyed 140,000 adolescents in 29 countries. Dr. Torney-Purta also did a report published by Organization of American States (OAS), Strengthening Democracy in the Americas, which was the basis of a presentation made in Tobago to the Education Ministers of the OAS. This has resulted in about half a dozen countries participating in enhanced civic education projects, including the new IEA Study (ICCS). She teaches EDHD 750 (Culture, Context, and Human Development) and EDHD 821 (Socialization) in which many students use this data set.
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Dr. Min Wang (Associate Professor, Educational Psychology and Developmental Science) has research interests are in the area of bilingual and biliteracy development. Her focus is on two bilingual populations: Chinese-English and Korean-English bilingual children who are living in the US. Her work examines how bilingual children acquire phonological, orthographic and morphological skills in their two languages and how the reading skills are interacted across the two languages.
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