LRDC Newsletter
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Alumni KudosRoberta Golinkoff (PostDoc, 1974) has been elected to the National Academy of Education. Dr. Golinkoff is the Rodney Sharp Chair in the School of Education at the University of Delaware and a member of the Departments of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Read Dr. Golinhkoff’s 2018 interview in Delaware Today about her research. LRDC KudosNikki Lobczowski, post-doc working with Erin Walker, Diane Litman, and Timothy Nokes-Malach, received the prestigious Paul R. Pintrich Outstanding Dissertation Award from Division 15 (Educational Psychology) for “Building from the Inside Out: The Formation and Regulation of Emotions in Collaborative Learning.” Ming-Te Wang, Professor, Psychology, Education, was included in an Educational Psychology Review article that investigated productivity in early career scholars. Brian Galla, Timothy Nokes-Malach, LRDC, and Melanie Good, Department of Physics and Astronomy, received an NSF grant for "Collaborative Research: Investigating the Impact of Mindfulness Training to Mitigate Psychological Threat and Enhance Engagement and Learning in Undergraduate Introductory Physics." Kudos to Walter Schneider and Sudhir Pathak, members of the team that received the Best Demo Award at the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management for "HealthDist: A Context, Location and Preference-Aware System for Safe Navigation." Schneider was also part of a team that won Best Industry and Application Paper Award for "A Context, Location and Preference-Aware System for Safe Pedestrian Mobility." In the NewsMarc Coutanche's paper, "Expertise Moderates Incidentally Learned Associations Between Words and Images," was the focus of a recent episode of the Pitt Communication Science and Disorders Podcast. Alberto Guzman-Alvarez and Lindsay Page were featured in the blog post, "FAFSA Verification: An Undue Burden for Students and Public Colleges," a blog post of the Brookings Institute. LRDC Graduate Student Brett Bankson, Psychology, was a “Top Chef Amateurs” Winner Brett Bankson, and featured in The Pitt News for winning ‘Top Chef Amateurs. LRDC New LocationLRDC is now on floors 4-7 of the Murdoch Building (shown below), 3420 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. The LRDC building is featured in the July 16 University Times. |
Culturally Responsive Family Intervention Improves Latino Kindergarteners' Vocabulary and Approaches to LearningAll families engage in food routines, such as grocery shopping, cooking, and eating together, but in Latino families, food routines play special roles Main takeaways from this research article are:
One in every four children in the United States today is of Latino heritage. Latino children represent 23% of school-age children, and the population of Latino preschool children is growing faster than any other racial/ethnic group. It is critical to help Latino kindergarteners start school with the best possible chance of achieving and succeeding. A 2021 study, led by a national research team including authors from the University of Pittsburgh, University of Michigan, and University of Virginia investigated the impact of an intervention that emphasizes students strengths and builds on practices that already exist around food routines in the context of the Latino family. Called Food For Thought (FFT), the four-week program leverages family food routines to help Latino parents foster their kindergarten children's academic skills at home. Diana Leyva, Research Scientist at Pitt's Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) and Associate Professor, Psychology, developed FFT based on evidence of studies examining parent-child interactions in food-related activities and discussions. According to Leyva, most family programs focus on the knowledge and skills that families of color lack rather than their strengths. "As a result, many of these programs have failed to engage families of color and improve their children's learning. This study developed a new family program for Latinos that is innovative because it draws on their cultural strengths," Leyva said. After implementing FFT in a select group of Latino kindergarteners, the results indicated that there were moderate-to-large impacts on child vocabulary (especially food-related) at end-of-treatment and the five-month follow-up, and suggestive evidence of moderate impacts on approaches to learning (including approaches to learning math) and executive function at the five-month follow-up. There were no statistically significant impacts on children's math or literacy skills. Overall, the research indicated that a culturally responsive family intervention that emphasizes student's positive strengths and qualities and is integrated into Latino family life can improve critical skills needed to succeed in school. |
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Recent PublicationsAnthony, A.M. & Page, L.C. (2021). How big is the ballpark? Assessing variation in grant aid awards within net calculator student profiles. Education Finance and Policy, 1-19. Binning, K.R., Cook, J.E., Greenaway, V.P., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Sherman, D.K., & Cohen, G.L. (2021). Securing self-integrity over time: Self-affirmation disrupts a negative cycle between psychological threat and academic performance. Journal of Social Issues. Duong, S., Bachman, H. J., Votruba-Drzal, E., & Libertus, M. (2021). What’s in a question? Parents’ question use in dyadic interactions and the relation to preschool-aged children’s math abilities interactions and the relation to preschool-aged children’s math abilities. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Guediche, S., & Fiez, J.A. (2021). Comprehension of morse code predicted by item recall from short-term memory. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Maheux, A.J., Nesi, J., Galla, B.M., Roberts, S.R. & Choukas-Bradley, S. (2021). #Grateful: Longitudinal associations between adolescents’ social media use and gratitude during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 31, 734-747. Verhoeven, L. & Perfetti, C. (2021). Universals in learning to read across languages and writing systems. Scientific Studies of Reading. Möhring, W., Ribner, A.D., Segerer, R., Libertus, M., Kahl, T., Troesch, L.M., & Grob, A. (2021). Developmental trajectories of children's spatial skills: Influencing variables and associations with later mathematical thinking. Learning and Instruction, 75. Caddick, Z.A. & Rottman, B.M. (2021). Motivated reasoning in an explore-exploit task. Cognitive Science. Huang S.Y., Witzel, T., Keil, B., Schneider, W., et. al., (2021). Connectome 2.0: Developing the next-generation ultra-high gradient strength human MRI scanner for bridging studies of the micro-, meso- and macro-connectome. Neuroimage. Zong, Z., Schunn, C.D., & Wang, Y. (2021). What aspects of online peer feedback robustly predict growth in students' task performance? Computers in Human Behavior, 124. Silver, A. M., Elliott, L., & Libertus, M. E. (2021). Parental math input is not uniformly beneficial for young children: The moderating role of inhibitory control. Journal of Educational Psychology. Wang, M.T., Del Toro, J., Scanlon, C.L., Schall, J., Zhang, A.L., Voltin, S.E., Belmont, A.M., & Plevniak, K.E. (2021). The roles of stress, coping, and parental support in adolescent phycological well-being in the context of COVID-19: A daily-diary study. Journal of Affective Disorders. Milburn, E., Dickey, M.W., Warren, T., & Hayes, R. (2021). Increased reliance on world knowledge during language comprehension in healthy aging: Evidence from verb-argument prediction. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition. |