Spring 2011 Brown Bag Schedule

Please note that the Brown Bag meetings will be held on Thursdays, 12-2p.m. in Room 1111 Tolman Hall unless otherwise noted.


January 27: Richard Nisbett, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan
Will be held in 5101 Tolman Hall

February 10: Frank C. Worrell, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley

February 24: Geoff Saxe, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley


March 10: Susan Rivera, Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis

March 17: Rudy Mendoza-Denton, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley

April 7: Steve Hinshaw, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley

April 21: Unni Wikan, Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

Dec. 1: Andrew Fuligni, UCLA

Family Obligation and Assistance during Adolescence

Despite being normative for most families around the world, the role that adolescents play in providing instrumental support to their families has been rarely studied. In this talk, Dr. Fuligni presents a program of research that has focused on nature and the developmental implications of family obligation and assistance among adolescents from Latin American, Asian, and European backgrounds. Using data from longitudinal studies involving questionnaires, qualitative interviews, daily diary checklists, biomarkers of health, and neuroimaging, Dr. Fuligni highlights how family obligation and assistance (a)are strong among adolescents from Latin American and Asian backgrounds and remain strong across several generations, (b)create both developmental oportunities and challenges for adolescents, and (c)provide adolescents with a sense of meaning and purpose as they confront the challenges of becoming adults in American society.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010
12:00-1:30p.m.
Room 1111 Tolman Hall

Nov. 10: Melanie Killen, University of Maryland

Morality and Intergroup Attitudes: Developmental Origins of Prejudice

Professor Melanie Killen is the Associate Director of the Center for Children, Relationships, and Culture at the University of Maryland. Her research has focused on the development of social and moral reasoning, with an emphasis on judgements about social exclusion, intergroup bias, and prejudice in childhood.

Oct. 20: Fei Xu, Department of Psychology

Learning from sparse data: Statistical inference in infants and children

Much of developmental research on infants and young children has focused on either how much innate knowledge infants have or how infants learn by keeping track of input statistics from their environment. Recent research aims to break this impasse between innate knowledge and learning by focusing on how children make principled generalizations based on limited amounts of data. Prof. Xu will describe a number of recent studies on probabilistic reasoning, social cognition, and language to illustrate that infants and young children have several powerful inductive learning mechanisms that allow for rapid acquisition of knowledge in various domains.

Fall 2010 Brown Bag Schedule

October 6:
Ron Dahl, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley

October 20:
Fei Xu, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley

November 10:
Melanie Killen: Department of Human Development, University of Maryland


December 1: Andrew Fuligni, School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles

Brown Bag Meetings are held on Wednesdays, 12-1:30p.m. in Room 1111 Tolman Hall

Oct. 6, 2010: Ron Dahl, School of Public Health

Professor Dahl has recently joined the UC Berkeley faculty in the School of Public Health and is now a member of the IHD. Please join us to hear about his research on Adolescent Brain Development: A Window into Unique Vulnerabilities and Opportunities.

The IHD Brown Bag meetings are held in Room 1111 Tolman Hall.

Please note the change in day and time: Wednesdays from 12:00 Noon to 1:30p.m.

April 29: Laura Sterponi, Graduate School of Education

Rethinking Echolalia: Repetition as Interactional Resource in the Communication of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Echolalia, that is the repetition of the speech of others, often constitutes the bulk of the early speech of those children with autism who develop language. Autism echolalia has traditionally been conceived of as an automatic, pre-reflexive behavior that bears no or minimal communicative function and compromises intersubjectivity. In line with recent naturalistic studies, Prof. Sterponi explores the functional role of echolalic behavior in the communication of and with affected children. Through an integrated methodology, which combines linguistic, discourse and acoustic analyses, Prof. Sterponi demonstrates that (1)immediate echoes are not automatic responses devoid of meaning but rather they accomplish a range of interactional goals; (2)delayed echoes are employed systematically and productively to mark different epistemic and affective stances; and
(3)adult-child verbal interaction unfolds according to discernible formats, which are distinctly conducive to functional uses of echoes.

Thursday, April 29, 2010
12:30-2:00p.m.
1111 Tolman Hall

April 15: Margaret Bridges, Institute of Human Development

Watching Scooby Doo and Making Tortillas: The Daily Activities of Mexican-American Preschool Children

In response to Social and Ecocultural theories about why some young children of color lag behind their peers in school, Dr. Bridges will present her research on the everyday activities of 25 young Mexican-American children. Specifically, she will report on the six most frequently observed activities in terms of their reproduction of heritage culture, language, symbols, and knowledge; their cognitive demands; and how they varied across families. She will use these findings to explain, in part, why some Latino children may differentially engage in the activity structures present in U.S. classrooms.

April 1: Susan Stone, School of Social Welfare

School-level psycho-social supports and achievement: Evidence from the San Francisco Unified School District

The aims of Prof. Stone's talk are threefold. First she will discuss scholarly concerns, emerging from both social work and psychology literatures, raised about the nature and quality of psycho-social service provision in schools. She will argue that these concerns dovetail with findings generated from educational research on essential school reform processes and "improved" school finance (see Grubb, 2008). Second, Prof. Stone will characterize the mismatch between the accumulating body of school based "empirically supported treatments" and actual practices. Finally, she will present on data generated from San Francisco Unified School District's "Learning Support Professional" program, which was initially implemented in the 2001-2002 school year. This program was unique in that it encouraged "school reform minded" psycho-social service provision. Given that the program was rolled into schools over several years and that data on services were collected over time, these data provide an opportunity to explore the association between the school-based psycho-social service provision and overall performance trends. Findings suggest that the presence of this program is positively (albeit modestly) associated with school achievement, controlling for plausible confounds. There is also evidence that particular combinations of service strategies show additional, positive relationships with school achievement.

March 11: Susan Holloway

Women and Family in Contemporary Japan: Ideology, experience and agency

Japanese women have often been singled out for their strong commitment to the role of housewife and mother. But they are now postponing marriage and bearing fewer children, and Japan has become one of the least fertile and fastest aging countries in the world. To explore this phenomenon, I will report on a mixed method, longitudinal study excamining Japanese mothers' perspectives and experiences of marriage, parenting, and family life. My analysis will focus on how these women interpret and respond to the barriers and opportunities afforded within the structural and ideological contexts of contemporary Japan.

February 25, 2010: Emily Ozer

Studying the Effects of Youth-Led Participatory Research on Students and Schools: Preliminary Results and Mixed Methods Approaches

Youth-led participatory research is a form of "action research" (Lewin, 1947) that is increasingly being implemented in the youth development, education, public health and community psychology fields. In this approach, students are trained to identify major concerns in their schools and communities, conduct research to understand the nature of the problems, and take leadership in influencing policies and decisions to enhance the conditions in which they and their peers live. While promising, it has been subjected to relatively little systematic study and evaluation regarding its potential impact on young people's development and on their schools as settings that support positive youth development. In this talk, I will present preliminary process and outcome findings from a longitudinal experimental evaluation of a youth-led participatory research program conducted in several SF public high schools for the past 4 years. This project entails the integration of extensive observational and interview data on the quality of implementation of the school-based intervention with self-report and district data regarding youth outcomes. My presentation will highlight the strategies used and challenges encountered in this multi-method study, and invite feedback from participants regarding the analytic decisions involved in the quantitative and qualitative components of this research.

Feburary 11, 2010: Anne Fernald

Early experience with language really matters: Links between maternal talk, processing efficiency, and vocabulary growth among diverse children.


Research on the early development of cognition and language has focused primarily on infants from middle-class families, excluding less advantaged children. But we know that SES differences are strongly associated with the quantity and quality of early cognitive stimulation available to infants. Longitudinal research on the development of fluency in language reveals relations between processing speed in infancy and longterm outcomes for both high-SES English-learning children and low-SES Spanish-learning children. But by 18 months, we find that low-SES children are already substantially slower in processing speed as well as vocabulary growth. It turns out that differences in early experience with language contribute to variability observed in children's efficiency in real-time processing. Within low-SES families, those children whose mothers talked with them more learned vocabulary more quickly; they also made more rapid gains in processing speed. By examining variability both within and between groups of children who differ in early experience with language, we gain insight into common developmental trajectories of lexical growth in relation to greater processing efficiency, and discover environmental factors that enable some children to progress more rapidly than others.

January 28, 2010: Anne Cunningham

Teacher Study Groups: Professional Development in Early Literacy for Preschool Teachers


Given the significance of establishing strong foundations in early
literacy in preschool children, there is a need for effective sustainable
professional development to assist preschool teachers in providing early
literacy support in their classrooms. The goal of our project, a three
year Institute of Education Sciences funded study, Teacher Quality: The
Role of Teacher Study Groups as a Model of Professional Development in
Early Literacy for Preschool Teachers, is to investigate the factors that
will contribute to effective professional development for preschool
teachers in language and literacy. In this presentation, we will describe
our model of PD employing Teacher Study Groups (TSG) .
The TSG professional development model is guided by an emphasis on content focus, coherence, duration/intensity and collective participation. The TSG will provide opportunities for teachers to have interactive, reflective, and context-sensitive conversations to foster their knowledge, beliefs, and practices in ways aligned with research-based early literacy development and instruction. This presentation will frame the study in historical and current research in the field of early literacy as well as provide an in-depth look into the inner workings of the TSG.

Spring 2010 Brown Bag Series

The speaker series for the Brown Bag Meetings this Spring are as follows:

Jan. 28 Anne Cunningham
February 11 Anne Fernald
February 25 Emily Ozer
March 11 Susan Holloway
April 1 Susan Stone
April 15 Margaret Bridges
April 29 Laura Sterponi

The meetings are held at 12:30-2:00p.m. in Room 1111 Tolman Hall.

Please check back for possible changes to the schedule and more information about each of the talks.