LRDC Newsletter
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KudosProfessor Diane Litman, Computer Science, and colleagues received a Cyber Accelerator Grant, details in the March 25 Pittwire accolade. Juan Del Toro (PI), postdoc mentee, and Ming-Te Wang, Professor, Psychology, Education, have received a racial equity special grant from the Spencer Foundation. Graduate student researcher, Alex Silver, Psychology, member of Melissa Libertus' KitLab was awarded the Dr. Ruth L. Myers Memorial Award for Excellence in Mentoring from the Department of Psychology. Graduate student researcher Lorraine Blatt, Developmental Psychology and student in Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal's lab received the 2021 Jeremy Johnson Landen Award, established to honor the memory of Jeremy Johnson Landon, son of Carl Johnson and Deborah Landon. Graduate student researchers Shirley Duong, Nabila Jamal-Orozco, and Isabella Kahhale are recipients of the Spring 2021 LRDC Graduate Student Council Award, designed to support the development of new, innovative, and interdisciplinary research by graduate students within LRDC. In the NewsMing-Te Wang, Professor, Psychology, Education was featured in the April 6 Pittwire accolade for the AERA Distinguished Research Award for Human Development and Learning and the 2021 SSWR Excellence in Research Award. Sara Jaramillo, graduate student in Ben Rottman's lab, received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) award. Read about the program and other GRFP Pitt recipients in April 7 Pittwire accolade. Demolition looming for O'Hara Garage and LRDC building. Details on building demolition in May 6 University Times. Jennifer Russell was quoted in May 9, 2021, Wall Street Journal, "Remote Kindergarten During COVID-19 'Could Impact This Generation of Kids for Their Lifetime." The Institute for Learning has been awarded a planning grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide "education agencies, schools, and the organizations that support them with reliable, practical evidence and measures." Read more in the May 12 Pittwire article here. "Why Do We Want to Love Aliens?" Read Marc Coutanche's answer in the May 26 Pittwire "What's Out There?" |
How to Promote Adolescent Social DistancingPublic health experts have identified social distancing as one of the best ways to curtail the spread of COVID-19, but try telling that to a teenager who needs time with friends. When the pandemic hit, University of Pittsburgh developmental psychologist Ming-Te Wang wanted to understand how to persuade teens to distance in a manner that both respected their dignity and met their need for independence. "Interacting with friends and risk-taking behaviors are two major components of adolescent development," said Wang, a professor of education and psychology and senior scientist at Pitt's Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC). "Social distancing challenges adolescents' developmental need for interacting with same-aged peers. These relationships are so important, we were concerned that adolescents may engage in risky behaviors like sneaking out of the house to see friends to get around social distancing mandates." The primary motivating factor behind teens' social distancing, they found, was the desire to protect others. Engaging in caring behavior toward others-especially during times of crisis or mass trauma-can be both rewarding and stress reducing. This altruism in times of trauma also has been associated with increased resilience and improved mental health. Based on a sample of more than 440 adolescents aged 13-18 years, Wang, School of Education doctoral candidates Christina Scanlon and Meng Hua, and LRDC postdoctoral fellow Juan Del Toro used focus groups and daily diaries to collect more than 6,200 assessments from participants in 38 states. "By emphasizing that social distancing is a good way to keep yourself and others safe during the pandemic, we activate developmental processes related to adolescents' need to pro-socially interact with peers," said Wang. "We also thought it critical to understand what can promote social distancing over time," Wang added. Though they could not have known we would still be socially distancing more than a year later, the team members also wanted to know what would encourage teens to continue practicing these pro-social behaviors. Teens who were more likely to keep up with social distancing fell into three categories: those who learned about preventive health behaviors for mitigating COVID-19, those who received peer support and those who remained virtually connected with friends. "It became clear," said coauthor Scanlon, "that adolescents who understood the purpose of social distancing and who found socially distanced ways to interact with peers were more likely to keep up their social distancing behaviors over time." According to Wang, "Teens who understand the importance of and rationale behind social distancing are empowered to make informed decisions about social distancing, which also allows them to exercise their independence in a manner that paints them as pro-social and competent." "Adolescents need the time and space to connect with their peers, and virtual spaces have allowed them to do so while remaining physically distanced," said Scanlon. "Teens' tenacity to connect with friends despite physical distancing is a testament to their resilience." Read the complete May 18, 2021, Pittwire article on "Social Distancing". |
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Recent PublicationsBadea, C., Binning, K.R., Sherman, D.K., Boza, M., & Kende, A. (2021). Conformity to group norms: How group-affirmation shapes collective action. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 95. Abstract here. Ren, X., & Coutanche, M.N. (2021). Sleep reduces the semantic coherence of memory recall: An application of latent semantic analysis to investigate memory reconstruction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.Abstract here. Del Toro, J. & Wang, M.T. (2021). Longitudinal inter-relations between school cultural socialization and school engagement: The mediating role of school climate. Learning and Instruction, 75. Abstract here. Norberg, K.A. & Fraundorf, S.H. (2021). Memory benefits from contrastive focus truly require focus: Evidence from clefts and connectives. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 36(3). Abstract here. Guzman-Alvarez, A. & Page, L.C. (2021). Disproportionate burden: Estimating the cost of FAFSA verification for public colleges and universities. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.Abstract here. Sequeira, S.L., Silk, J.S., Ladouceur, C.D., Hanson, J.L., Ryan, N.D., Dahl, R., Morgan, J., & Forbes, E.E. (2021). Function in neural reward circuitry is associated with psychological treatment response in youth with anxiety disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry. Abstract here. Leyva, D., Molina, D.C., Suárez, C., Tamis-LeMonda, C.S., & Yoshikawa, H. (2021). Mother-child reminiscing and first-graders’ emotion competence in a low-income and ethnically diverse sample. Journal of Cognition and Development, 22(1). Abstract here. Afrin, T., Kashefi, O., Olshefski, C., Litman, D., Hwa, R., & Godley, A. (2021). "Effective interfaces for student-driven revision sessions for argumentative writing." Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-13. Article here. Jha, R.R., Gupta, H., Pathak, S.K., Schneider, W., Kumar, B.V.R., Bhavsar, A., & Nigam, A. (2021). "Enhancing HARDI reconstruction from undersampled data via multi-context and feature inter-dependency GAN." EEE 18th International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), 1103-1106. Article here. Barnes, K., Rottman, B. M., & Colagiuri. (2021). The placebo effect: To explore or to exploit. Cognition. Link to full abstract here. Stein, M.K., Russell, J.L., Bill, V., Correnti, R., & Speranzo, L. (2021). Coach learning to help teachers learn to enact conceptually rich, student-focused mathematics lessons. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education. Abstract here. Blatt, L. & Votruba-Drzal, E. (2021). District-level school choice and racial/ethnic test score gaps. American Educational Research Journal.Article here. Wang, S. & Walker, E. (2021). "Providing adaptive feedback in concept mapping to improve reading comprehension." Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-11. Article here. |