Ten Scholars Recognized for the 15th Annual Student and Early Career Council Dissertation Research Funding Awards

“Equity in Early Intervention: A Mixed-Methods Pilot Study of a Professional Development Program on Culturally Responsive Practices”

Diana Lucía Abarca is a Latina doctoral candidate in Communication Science and Disorders at Florida State University under the mentorship of Dr. Mollie Romano. Her professional goals are driven by her core belief that all families deserve equitable services to support their children's development that reinforce their existing skills, knowledge, and culture. Her research aims to support the development of training programs on cultural responsiveness and sustainment for EI providers who work with families of color, especially as the number of families of marginalized racial and linguistic backgrounds in our nation rapidly grows. Diana’s dissertation is a pilot study of a professional development program on culturally responsive practices (CRP) aimed towards early intervention providers. The study aims (1) to develop a professional development program for EI providers on CRP in collaboration with community stakeholders; (2) to evaluate the effects of a PD program on EI providers’ knowledge and understanding of CRP; and (3) to evaluate the social validity of a PD program for EI providers across the perspectives of various community stakeholders. This mixed methods study is the first step in Diana’s line of inquiry focused on enhancing services and outcomes for Black and Brown families and children with disabilities.

“Children's Judgments about the Capacities and Limitations of Google Search”

Lauren Girouard-Hallam is a Ph.D. candidate in Experimental Psychology at the University of Louisville, where she works with Dr. Judith Danovitch in the Knowledge in Development (KID) Lab. Lauren’s research focuses on when and why children turn to emerging technologies in order to think and learn about the world around them. For her dissertation, she is exploring children’s beliefs about Google search to (1) establish whether children exhibit a preference for Google search over other novel technological informants or human informants, (2) examine whether these preferences vary based on the kind of information being sought, and (3) describe the relationship between children’s attitudes towards the internet and their intuitions about search engines. Her goal is to expand our theoretical understanding of the impact of characteristics like familiarity, omniscience, and expertise on children’s trust and learning related judgments to include non-human informants like search engines. When not engaging with research, Lauren enjoys teaching graduate level statistics and working on science communication initiatives that bring research like hers to the parents and educators who need it most.

“Heritage language development and maintenance from children’s perspective: Understanding child agency in early childhood”

Yiyang Guan is a doctoral candidate in the Early Childhood Education and Care program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, under the mentorship of Dr. Mona M. Abo-Zena. Yiyang’s research examines heritage language development and maintenance (HLDM) in early childhood from a multidisciplinary approach. For her dissertation, Yiyang will focus on (1) identifying young children’s agentic behaviors in the process of their heritage language socialization and during the construction of family language policy with their parents and other family members, and (2) investigating children’s language ideologies and attitude toward HLDM through their own justification of the agentic behaviors and their understanding of the consequences resulted from those behaviors. In addition to being a research focus, child agency will be an important aspect in different study phases (e.g., informed consent, data collection, data analysis, etc.) so that children are valued as co-constructors of learning and are trusted to be capable of interpreting their world. In the short term, Yiyang plans to further investigate the influence of intergenerational power dynamics on HLDM based on the findings from this research. In the long run, she envisions herself as an advocator for child agency in multilingual, multicultural, and inclusive education for all children.

“Exploring the influence of people-pleasing socialization and problem-solving context on gender differences in children’s adaptations to ineffective teaching”

Mia Radovanovic is a doctoral candidate in Developmental Psychology working with Dr. Jessica Sommerville at the University of Toronto. Her work broadly interrogates how conflicting messages and power dynamics influence children’s persistence and exploration. Misinformation is generally ambiguous and divesting from teaching can come with social consequences for children, particularly for girls as obedience and people-pleasing are highly socially valued in girls. Mia’s previous work has demonstrated that in ambiguous contexts, girls are more likely to persist in ineffective teaching while boys are more likely to explore their own ideas, resulting in learning differences. Her dissertation will incorporate building greater nuance by avoiding deficit narratives and characterizing these differences as differential problem-solving adaptations, (1) examining whether disadvantages are reversed when ineffective teaching can be refined through persistence rather than requiring complete divestment, (2) examining the robustness of these effects across tasks varying in gender typicality, and (3) assessing individual differences in people-pleasing to empirically validate the hypothesized socialization mechanisms. The results of this work will inform future interventions to identify ways adults can structure learning environments to support children in flexibly negotiating between their own ideas and teaching.

“An Evaluation of “Preventing Expulsion in Preschool”: A Cognitive-Behavioral, Strengths- Based Teacher Training to Reduce Early Childhood Exclusionary Discipline”

Elyse Shenberger is a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she works with Dr. Katherine Zinsser in the Social Emotional Teaching and Learning Lab. Her work centers around early childhood emotional functioning and reducing preschool expulsion risk through multiple ecological perspectives. She is also currently a pre-doctoral pediatric psychology intern at Children’s Hospital of Michigan. Her dissertation combines her clinical experience and research interests by adapting an evidence-based parenting intervention designed to help adults modify their own emotional responses to children’s challenging behaviors. More specifically, Elyse has developed, and will be evaluating, a training program aimed at helping early childhood educators gain knowledge and skills around managing their own emotional well-being when working with children who display challenging behaviors and may be at risk of being expelled. Findings from this work have the potential to provide accessible, scalable professional development for Illinois teachers working to support and include our youngest learners.