Sept. 22: Alison Miller Singley, "Relational Reasoning: Potential Implications for Mathematics Pedagogy"

Relational Reasoning: Potential Implications for Mathematics Pedagogy


The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics encourage reasoning about the relationships between math concepts. Relational reasoning is a skill that children develop and use spontaneously in non-mathematical contexts, but rarely do in math class. In particular, fractions and algebra are two major stumbling blocks for students, and both are highly relational in nature. Would engaging students' relational reasoning abilities help them to learn fractions and algebra? In this talk I'll discuss several ways in which I've approached this question and sketch out my plans for dissertation research.


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

Sept. 29: Kathryn Paige Harden, "Sensation Seeking and the Development of Externalizing Behaviors during Adolescence"

Sensation Seeking and the Development of Externalizing Behaviors during Adolescence

K. Paige Harden

University of Texas at Austin

Department of Psychology

Population Research Center

www.labs.la.utexas.edu/harden/

Externalizing behaviors, including substance use and delinquency, escalate during adolescence and are leading contributors to mortality and morbidity in this age group. This presentation will describe research on sensation seeking and its role in driving adolescent increases in externalizing. First, I will describe a series of studies on age-related changes in sensation seeking and impulse control. Results from nationally-representative samples show that (a) average levels of sensation seeking increase markedly from childhood to mid-adolescence, (b) sensation seeking peaks earlier and declines more rapidly for females than males, (c) changes in sensation seeking are largely independent from changes in impulse control, and (d) individual differences in sensation seeking change are under strong genetic control, and (e) adolescents who show more rapid increases in sensation seeking also show the most rapid escalation in delinquent behavior. Part 2 will describe results from a behavioral genetic study of twins from the Texas Twin Project (Harden, Tucker-Drob, & Tackett, 2013). Factor analytic results indicate that self-reports of sensation seeking map to some – but not all – laboratory tasks designed to assess risk-taking or reward seeking, but there is substantial task-specific variance in individual tests. Studies of sensation seeking should use a multivariate measurement battery that can isolate theoretically distinct constructs (i.e., sensation seeking from impulsivity from cognitive ability). Finally, Part 3 will present hypotheses and preliminary data regarding the influence of testosterone and other pubertal hormones on the development of sensation seeking, including evidence for possible testosterone × cortisol interactions.

Institute of Human Development & Change, Plasticity and Development Seminar, Fall 2014

All talks will be held in 3105 Tolman Hall, 12:15-1:30pm.

Sept. 22- Alison Miller Singley, Graduate Student
       UCB Department of Psychology

Sept. 29- Kathryn Paige Harden, Assistant Professor of Psychology
                University of Texas, Austin

Oct. 13- Kristen Hawkes, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology
               University of Utah

Oct. 20- Nicholas Allen, Professor of Clinical Psychology
               University of Oregon

Oct. 27- Zi Lin Sim, Graduate Student
       UCB Department of Psychology

Nov. 3- Christoph Konieczny, Graduate Student of Psychology
             Heidelberg University

Nov. 10-Tamar Kushnir, Assistant Professor of Child Development
               Department of Human Development, Cornell University

Nov. 17- Larry Nucci, Professor UCB Graduate School of Education

Dec. 1-Fumiko Hoeft, Associate Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry & Director of Laboratory for Educational Neuroscience (LENS)
UCSF Department of Psychiatry

April 28: Jane Hu, "Learning from others using social and statistical cues"

Learning from others using social and statistical cues

How do children come to possess the knowledge necessary to progress into adulthood? With relatively few life experiences, children must look to other people for information about the world. In this talk, I'll discuss several studies that demonstrate children's rich ability to learn from and about others by observing their actions and paying attention to contextual cues surrounding new information. Specifically, I'll show that children can infer others' preferences from watching their choices, and consider consensus opinions and informants’ knowledge when learning new information from others.

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

April 14: Audun Dahl, "Early Moral Development in Social Interactions"

Early Moral Development in Social Interactions

Morality is about how we treat other people, and it develops, to a large extent, through social interactions. In its fully developed form, morality involves a concern for the well-being of others and an ability to coordinate moral and non-moral concerns. Although infants appear sensitive to some moral norms by their first birthday, they do not reliably act out of concern for the well-being of others. For instance, they harm others without provocation and they help others at substantially lower rates than older children, if at all. Over the course of the second year of life, this changes dramatically. In this talk, Audun will discuss evidence for how distinct forms of social interactions in the second year contribute to two fundamental aspects of moral development: the aversion to interpersonal harm and the tendency to help others. His research combines naturalistic and experimental methods to show that (1) caregivers are generally more insistent and more angry when intervening on infants' moral (harmful) transgressions than on other transgressions, (2) caregivers facilitate infants' helping behavior at ages earlier than often assumed, and (3) infants make use of these social signals in deciding what to do (help) and not to do (harm).

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

April 7: Douglas Jutte, "Exploring the Intersection of Community Development and Healthy (Child) Development"

Exploring the Intersection of Community Development and Healthy (Child) Development

There is growing interest in the social determinants of healthy child development, and more specifically, in understanding the ways that low-income social environments can have a negative impact on child development. This presentation by Douglas Jutte will describe an exciting research initiative to examine efforts to improve low-income neighborhoods and their effects on the health and well being of children and families. Douglas Jutte is a developmental pediatrician who has recently received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to add health and development measures to a large community development project. He will describe the history and function of the national non-profit community development sector and discuss how the $150 Billion (yes, Billion) invested annually into low-income neighborhoods has the potential to have a positive impact on understanding--and improving--important social determinants of child and family health and well-being. Achieving these goals will require partnering between the national non-profit community and researchers with expertise in child development and public health to more effectively understand how improvements in low-income neighborhoods can have a positive effect on the social determinants of healthy development.

Douglas Jutte, MD, MPH is a professor and population health researcher at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. He teaches in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program and serves as associate director of the master’s degree in Health & Medical Sciences. He has been a leader in the Federal Reserve & Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Healthy Communities Initiative that aims to increase the positive impact of community development and public health by better integrating the work of these two sectors, and he will soon be Executive Director of the newly formed National Partnership for Community Development & Health. His research focuses on the impact of social determinants of health on children’s wellbeing over the life course as well as the policy levers and financial tools that can intervene to protect children and families. He has published in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Epidemiology, Academic Pediatrics, the American Journal of Public Health and Health Affairs. Dr. Jutte graduated from Cornell University and received his MD from Harvard Medical School and a master’s degree in public health from UC Berkeley. His post-doctoral research training in population health was through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health & Society Scholars program based at UCSF. He completed his pediatric training at Stanford University and continues to care for at-risk newborns as a neonatal hospitalist.

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

March 31: Nathan Fox, "Are There Sensitive Periods for the Effects of Early Experience on Cognitive and Social Competence? Lessons from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project"

Are There Sensitive Periods for the Effects of Early Experience on Cognitive and Social Competence? Lessons from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project

Dr. Nathan Fox, University of Maryland
Director of the Child Development Lab in the Dept. of Human Development

Distinguished University Professor

Interim Chair, Dept. of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology

Abstract

Developmental psychologists and educators assume that early experiences shape the brain and neural circuitry for emerging cognitive and social behaviors over the first years of life. Most of the evidence for these assumptions is based on rodent and non human primate animal research. Far less has been published on the effects of early experience that is not correlational in nature. The Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) is the first randomized trial of a family intervention for children who experienced significant psychosocial neglect early in their lives. A group of infants living in institutions in Romania were recruited and randomized to be taken out of the institution and placed into family/foster care homes or to remain in the institution. Follow up of these children occurred at 42 and 54 months of age and at 8 years of age. Multiple domains, including cognitive, socio-emotional, psychiatric, and brain imaging were assessed at each age. Three questions are posed in this study and this talk: first, are there lasting effects of early psychosocial deprivation as children develop over the school years. Second, is intervention successful in ameliorating deficits as a result of institutionalization. And third, are there sensitive periods in delivering the intervention that explain both success and failure to improve cognitive and socio-emotional behavior.

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