If you are a school or organization and would like to discuss a partnership or collaboration, please contact us!
IMPLICIT BIAS
Unconscious biases—or “implicit biases”—are the preferences and prejudices that we hold without being aware of them. They can be feelings that drive us to buy certain kinds of food or vote for one candidate over another, but they can also affect how people treat each other. Everyone has these kinds of biases, and our lab is dedicated to developing new ways to assess them in very young ages, in different languages, in different settings, and now, online, so that we can better understand the conditions under which implicit biases develop and how they can help or hinder children’s learning.
STEM GENDER AND RACE STEREOTYPES
Gender and race gaps in STEM engagement are large and persistent. These gaps begin early—young girls, for example, report less interest and self-confidence in science and math compared to boys in elementary school. Children’s views about themselves and who is good at STEM mirror pervasive cultural stereotypes pertaining to gender (“math is for boys”) and race (“math is for Asians”). This is important because stereotypes are often relational, and stereotypes highlighting one group as being “good at math” may indirectly imply that another group is not. The sources of these stereotypes and their influences early in the STEM pipeline are not sufficiently studied. One line of our research zeroes in on the mechanisms of the transfer of information within the family and school environment, and the ways in which this is tied to students’ actual math achievement in the classroom and their future career interests in STEM.
SELF-ESTEEM
Early feelings of self-esteem are also connected to school readiness and children’s overall well-being. Another line of research in our lab shows that, as early as the K–2 years, children who feel good about themselves are better able to handle both teachers’ feedback and the extraneous messages (e.g., stereotypes and expectancies) about their group, and consequently do better in school than children who do not feel as good about themselves. In a related line of work, we are also finding that combining explicit and implicit measures of childhood self-esteem can be used to develop markers for the emergence of depressive and anxiety symptoms in middle childhood.
EQUITY, DIVERSITY, AND CROSS-CULTURAL WORK
In order to maximize the translational impact of our work, our lab partners with a variety of community-based organizations, museums, educators, community leaders, and families in Greater Seattle Area. This research-to-practice work serves the local communities in a way that is sensitive to the needs of the culturally and socio-economically diverse populations. We are also dedicated to expanding our research to other countries around the world so that the results are more informative and more generalizable. To date, we have worked with researchers in Singapore, Chile, Croatia, Spain, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland to collect data from children and adults on a wide range of topics (family math practices, gender–career stereotypes, scalable educational interventions, etc.).
