Monday, February 23, 2015

March 9: Candice Odgers

Income Inequality and the Developing Child

Low-income children growing up in economically mixed neighborhoods are expected to benefit from higher quality schools, more prosocial peer groups and greater access to amenities and opportunities. Contrary to this belief, new research from the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study finds that low-income children fare worse when they grow up in the ‘shadow of wealth’ as compared to their low-income peers living in concentrated poverty. The importance of examining both local area poverty and inequality on children’s behavior is highlighted, alongside a description of new methods for capturing neighborhood and momentary effects in studies of child development.

Brief Bio: Candice Odgers is an Associate Professor of Public Policy, Psychology and Neuroscience and Associate Director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia and completed her postdoctoral training at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre in London, England. Her research focuses on how social inequalities and early adversity influence children’s future health and well-being, with an emphasis on how new technologies, including mobile phones and web-based tools, can be used to understand and improve the lives of young people. Odgers was a William T. Grant Scholar and the recipient of early career awards from the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development and the Royal Society of Canada. Most recently, she received the Janet Taylor Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science for transformative early career contributions to psychological science. More information about her current work can be found on the following website: adaptlab.org

This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman Hall, 12:00-1:30pm. 

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Feb. 23: Mark Seidenberg

The Science of Reading and Its Educational Implications
Research in cognitive science, developmental science, and neuroscience has made enormous progress toward understanding skilled reading, the acquisition of reading skill, the brain bases of reading, the causes of developmental reading impairments and how such impairments can be treated. My question is: if the science is so good, why do so many people read so poorly? I will mainly focus on the United States, where the reading levels of about 25-30% of the population are low by standard metrics, with an eye on comparisons to other countries. I will consider three possible contributing factors: the fact that English has a deep alphabetic orthography; how reading is taught; and the impact of linguistic variability as manifested in the US by the Black-White “achievement gap”. I conclude that there are opportunities to increase literacy levels by making better use of what we have learned about reading and language, but also institutional obstacles and understudied issues for which more evidence is badly needed.

BIO:
Mark S. Seidenberg is Hilldale and Donald O. Hebb Professor in the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has conducted research on many topics related to reading and language since the disco era. His reading research addresses the nature of skilled reading, how children learn to read, dyslexia, and the brain bases of reading, using the tools of modern cognitive neuroscience: behavioral experiments, computational models, and neuroimaging. His current research focuses on the causes of chronically low reading performance among poor and minority children, particularly the effects of language background on learning to read. He is among the most highly cited researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. His book Reading Matters will be published by Basic Books (late 2015).

This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Feb. 9: Tamar Kushnir


Meeting in the middle: acting and learning in social environments

In the course of a typical day, an individual child will encounter a range of social situations, all of which afford the opportunity to learn.   Patient, caring adults may be engaged with them in conversation or direct instruction. Playful groups of peers may attract their attention to interesting new objects or games.  Even when they are on their own, they may be exploring classrooms prepared intentionally by adults to facilitate their learning.
How do children learn in and from this changing social world? One idea is that children meet their social environments “in the middle”:  The more the social environment is one of direct pedagogy, the more a child has to rely upon her emerging theory of mind to learn. Conversely, the more the environment consists of social resources not directed at the child but nonetheless available to her, the more active she will be in gathering social information. This implies a need for a broader definition of social cognition, one that includes mental state inferences, active social engagement, and everything in between.
          This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman Hall,  12:00-1:30pm.