Coordinator: Dr. Rebekah Levine Coley, Campion Hall 239A, 617.552.6018, email
The doctoral (Ph.D.) degree in “Applied Developmental and Educational Psychology” is housed in the Department of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology.
All members of the staff situate their teaching, research and service within the mission of the Lynch School, which is to improve human well-being through teaching, research, and service.
We prepare undergraduate and graduate students to serve diverse populations in a variety of professional roles as teachers and researchers in colleges and universities and as researchers and leaders in applied settings, including schools, government agencies, and health and human services organizations.
Through our research, we seek to advance developmental psychological knowledge to inform policy and improve practice. We share the school’s mission, that is, an “underlying aspiration to enhance the human condition, to expand the human imagination and to make the world more just.” These aspirations and goals are embodied in our teaching, research, and service.
The focus of the Applied Developmental and Educational Psychology Program is development and learning in sociocultural context. Areas of program expertise within the study of child development and child functioning include cognitive development and social development from the preschool years through adolescence. We also have expertise on adult functioning in community settings. Development is examined, in both research and curriculum, across multiple, interactive contexts or levels. These levels include:
Individual Functioning
• Basic Processes
• Individual Differences
• Developmental Disabilities
• Biological Bases of Behavior
Interpersonal Processes
• Family Relationships
• Peer Relationships
• Parenting
Community, Cultural, and Public Policy
• Schools and Learning Environments
• Poverty
• Race and Ethnicity
• Gender
Program requirements in detail
Our Applied Developmental Focus
Faculty research has an applied developmental focus. This is evident in two major directions of the research we conduct.
Research Informing Practice and Policy
Relations among Families, Schools, and Communities in Low- and Middle-Income Populations
Rebekah Coley’s research on low-income families addresses issues of how family, school, community, and policy environments either support or inhibit family functioning and child development. Dr. Coley’s research has both broad and specific application to programs and policies. Her recent focus on child care experiences of low-income children directly informs educational and social policies regarding child care and early education services. Similarly, her work on the impact of poverty and welfare reform policies on children and families seeks to inform national debates on the direction of future welfare, work, and educational initiatives.
Penny Hauser-Cram’s research interests focus on how children’s development relates to the multiple systems in which they are nurtured and learn. In particular, Dr. Hauser-Cram is investigating the lives of children with developmental disabilities and their families to understand the way in which children’s development is fostered by the family system. In addition, she studies the lives of children who live in very low-income families to understand the extent to which the family, school, and community serve as important mechanisms of development. Finally, Dr. Hauser-Cram explores the long-terms effects of early education with a view toward assessing the benefits of universal preschool. The practice and policy implications of all three lines of work are an essential component of her work.
Joan Lucariello’s research focuses on the sociocultural context, both family and community, of low-income children and its relation to their cognitive development and learning. The aspects of family and community context she examines include the language experiences and the self-concept to which children are socialized. Dr. Lucariello explores how the particular nature of this context leads to certain strengths in children’s learning. Moreover, her work has significant implications for how school curriculum might be modified to capitalize on these strengths. This would be one way to reduce the home/community-school discontinuity commonly faced by low-income children.
Jacqueline Lerner’s research on "Early adolescent risk and school transitions" informs teachers and practitioners about the factors that contribute to risk behaviors during early adolescence. Her research on temperament informs teachers and practitioners about the role of temperamental individuality in children's learning, social interaction, peer relations, and self-regulation. Dr. Lerner’s research on maternal employment and child outcomes informs school administrators and policymakers about the conditions that would lead to poor outcomes for children who are left unsupervised after school and about the needs for after-school programs and activities for children and adolescents.
Program Development
Collaborating with Families, Schools, and Communities
Beth Casey, in collaboration with other faculty at Boston College, has developed a model for the use of narrative (story-telling) as a mechanism for teaching math and spatial skills to prek-grade 2. The rationale is based in part on her research on gender differences in spatial skills. In this story-telling project, Dr. Casey, the doctoral students, and staff work closely with inner city and suburban teachers in the Boston area to develop and implement the books created out of this model. Future research will document the power of story-telling for teaching mathematics. A particular focus will be to investigate the strength of this model for teaching mathematics from a spatial perspective to minority students and to girls, right at the student’s entry point into schooling.
John Dacey has recently produced two articles published in Research in the Middle Schools. In the past four years, he has published books on teenage creativity, on how teachers and psychotherapists should help anxious children, and on how families can develop ways to achieve greater cohesion, all of which have "applications for practitioners."
M. Brinton Lykes has worked with local communities and schools in Guatemala, the North of Ireland, South Africa and Boston, MA, in the development of community-based programs for survivors of state-sponsored violence, war, economic repression and HIV/AIDS. Her colleagues, local community-leaders, have developed skills to respond to the psychosocial effects of state violence and war through group-based creative workshops. They have replicated their work through training colleagues in these techniques and, with Lykes, documented and published articles and books that re-present some of the effects of these forces in their lives as well as their responses to them.
Curriculum
Our core curriculum provides students with:
• Theoretical background through core courses in cognitive, social, and affective development and in the primary contexts that influence that development
• added research experience, prior to the dissertation, through an Independent Study Program, leading to a Second Year Research Project
• Teaching preparation through teaching seminars closely supervised by our faculty
• Field/practicum experience in applied settings that also relates to theory
• Professional experience through our Proseminar course, which exposes to students to the research presentations of leaders in the field, gives students the opportunity to present and discuss their own research, and prepares students in grant and journal writing.
Program admission requirements and Financial Aid
Students with either bachelor’s or master’s degrees in psychology or in related areas may apply to our Ph.D. program. Incoming and advanced students receive financial support through mechanisms such as research and teaching assistantships.
Program Faculty
Eric Dearing, Assistant Professor, Ph.D. University of New Hampshire
Research areas include parent-child relationships, family-school connections, child care and after-school care, and children’s self-regulatory efforts in the context of family, school, and community impoverishment. In each of these areas, Dr. Dearing is interested in determining the extent to which poverty influences children’s cognitive, language and literacy, and social-emotional development as well as the mechanisms by which poverty exerts its influence. In addition, he studies processes that maximize children’s chances of developmental success in the context of poverty, including adaptive parenting strategies, family involvement in their children’s education, and high-quality child care. To address these issues, Dr. Dearing takes advantage of interdisciplinary perspectives on poverty and children’s development by collaborating with clinical and developmental psychologists, economists, and education researchers.
Rebekah Levine Coley, Assistant Professor, Ph.D. University of Michigan
Research areas center on the intersection of family, community, and policy contexts and their impact on child development in the social and cognitive realms. In particular, Dr. Coley’s research includes a focus on children and families in poverty, father involvement, welfare reform, and child care. Current research explores the influence of federal welfare changes on the development of children and adolescents in the longitudinal project “Welfare, Children and Families: A Three City Study.” Dr. Coley is also a Research Associate of the Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research, a Technical Review Panel Member for the National Household Education Survey, and a member of the National Conference of State Legislatures’ Child Care Research and Policy Advisory Committee.
Penny Hauser-Cram, Professor, Ed.D. Harvard University
Research areas include children with developmental disabilities and children growing up in poverty. Dr. Hauser-Cram conducts longitudinal studies in which change in children and families is documented over the early through middle childhood years. Particular attention is paid to children’s experiences as family members and as students in schools with an eye to understanding how they can develop and learn in optimal ways. Dr. Hauser-Cram is a grant review panel member for the Maternal and Child Health Bureau and has served as a reviewer of research reports for the National Research Council. She is a consulting editor for the journals Child Development and the Early Education Research Quarterly.
Jacqueline V. Lerner, Professor, Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University
Research areas include the social and emotional development of children and adolescents, the role of temperament in child adjustment, goodness-of-fit between child and context; the influences of maternal employment on children and adolescents, parent-child relationships, and the transition to adolescence. Dr. Lerner was Associate Editor of the journal Child Development and is currently Associate Editor of the journal Developmental Psychology, and Advisory Editor, Institute for Children, Youth, and Families, Michigan State University.
Joan Lucariello, Associate Professor, Ph.D. City University of New York Graduate Center
General research areas include cognitive development, cultural psychology, and language development. The relation between learning environments (informal and formal), and children’s learning and cognitive development is of particular interest. Also of specific interest is the relation between sociocultural variables (e.g., self-concept; language socialization) and children’s learning and cognitive development. Current research includes study of children’s learning of sociocultural events and the metacognitive (theory of mind) development needed for such learning. Such sociocultural learning and metacognition are also being studied in minority, low-income children in relation to sociocultural variables. Dr. Lucariello is a consulting editor for the journal Child Development, a member of the Human Cognition and Perception Advisory/Review Panel of the National Science Foundation, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, and Executive Committee Member-Division 7, American Psychological Association.
M. Brinton Lykes, Professor, Ph.D. Boston College
Research areas include exploration of the interstices of indigenous cultural beliefs and practices and those of Western psychology, towards creating community-based responses to the effects of war and state-sponsored violence. Dr. Lykes is an activist scholar and teacher and has lived and worked among women and child survivors of state-sponsored violence and war and their wake in rural Guatemala, the North of Ireland, and South Africa. Dr. Lykes is on the editorial board of Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology and the American Journal of Community Psychology. Currently, Dr. Lykes is involved in the following activities and organizations: Cadre of Experts, Initiative on Ethnopolitical Warfare: Origins, Intervention, and Prevention, American and Canadian Psychological Association; Consultant to Comisión para el esclarecimiento Histórico [Commission for Historical Clarification] UNOPS, United Nations –Collaboration in preparation of sections of final report on Psychosocial Effects of War and Recommendations for Reparation Process; Advisory Team, Life Skills and HIV/AIDS Education and Training for the Early Childhood Development Program, Johannesburg, South Africa; Consultant and Member, Peace Watch Ireland, Boston, Mass.; Advisory Committee Women's Rights International; Co-Developer/Founder and Coordinator, Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund for Mental Health and Human Rights, Funding Exchange, N.Y.
Marina Vasilyeva, Ph.D. University of Chicago
Research areas include language acquisition and the development of spatial skills. In the domain of language acquisition, the main focus is on the nature and sources of individual differences among children. Recently, Dr. Vasilyeva started a set of studies investigating the language development of children growing in multi-lingual environments. Other projects explore the mastery of complex sentence structures in monolingual speakers of English and the possibility to improve children’s understanding of these structures through educational intervention. In the domain of spatial development, the main research focus is on children’s understanding of symbolic spatial representations and on the role of cultural tools (e.g., measurement instruments, maps and graphs) in the growth of spatial skills. A common theme cutting across the studies of language and spatial development is the relationship between the level of skill children achieve and the type of input they receive from their caregivers.