Research

My current research interests concern the social environment that supports children and students in educational contexts. For example, whose encouragement do students find motivating? How do students decide what to communicate about their abilities? Do students expect their teachers to have gender stereotypes?

1. Whose encouragement do students find motivating?

Parents and teachers often provide feedback to motivate students, but it is not always effective. To understand why, my collaborators and I applied for and received $40,000 from the Character Lab Research Network to conduct independent research with adolescents. We designed and administered surveys to over 1,500 students across the United States. The research found that middle and high school students, who are in the midst of making important academic decisions, are most likely to seek out and be motivated by encouragement from people who both know their abilities and the task at hand well. Simply put, students do not trust encouragement from just anyone—they evaluate it based on who provides it to them and what they know.

Our findings suggest that for encouragement to be most effective, it is critical that students have people in their lives who know them and their activities well. By fostering connections between students and these highly knowledgeable mentors, schools and programs can significantly boost academic motivation and persistence. This can ensure that adolescents feel supported and understood in their educational journeys.

This work was presented at the Annual Conference for the Cognitive Science Society and published in Developmental Psychology. Link to paper

2. How do students decide what to communicate about their abilities?

Questions about the self are central in our lives: Who am I? Can I do this? Just as common, yet arguably more preoccupying, are questions about the self in the eyes of others: Who do you think I am? Do you think I can do this? While these thoughts might come naturally to adults, what underlies them is a remarkable cognitive feat: the ability to reason about what others think of the self.

Through four carefully designed experiments, I examined how 3- and 4-year-olds make decisions about what to communicate and to whom, based on others’ observations of their performance. The study finds that children strategically present information to revise others’ outdated or negative impressions, highlighting an early sophistication in self-presentation and reputation management. This research was conducted at local preschools in the Bay Area.

These findings bridge developmental research on theory of mind, communication, and reputation, showing that even preschool-aged children can engage in nuanced reasoning about others’ mental states. The results have broad implications for understanding how early social interactions contribute to the development of children’s understanding of themselves.

This work was presented at the Annual Conference for the Cognitive Science Society, the Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development, and the *Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting and published in PNAS. Link to paper

3. Do students expect their teachers to have gender stereotypes?

Stereotypes about gender emerge early and can negatively influence children’s lives, but how do children think about adults’ stereotypes? To investigate this, I designed and lead two online experiments with 5- to 7-year-olds. This research was conducted on Children Helping Science, an asynchronous developmental data collection platform. Children were presented with scenarios where teachers made decisions about which students will get to play certain activities, like engineering or storytelling games.

We found that children expect adults to hold and act on gender stereotypes. For example, when a teacher was unaware of a student’s true interests, children predicted the teacher would assign activities based on stereotypical assumptions—engineering games for boys and storytelling games for girls—even when children themselves knew these stereotypes were inaccurate. These expectations were especially pronounced among 6- and 7-year-olds.

Our findings highlight the pervasive nature of stereotypes in shaping children’s views of others, including adults. By understanding how children form these expectations, we can design interventions to challenge and dismantle harmful stereotypes in early educational environments, fostering more equitable learning opportunities.

This research was presented at the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society and is currently in prep for journal submission. Link to paper.