I am an assistant professor of Psychology at the University of California-Santa Cruz. I am an interdisciplinary scholar interested in the intersection of cognition, education, and child development. Some of my research projects have explored how children learn science concepts through conversations with parents, when and why people change the strategies they use to solve mathematics problems, and how visual representations influence learning and generalization. I am also interested in the role of culture and socialization practices on the development of cognition. I have examine how participating in cultural rituals like dia de los muertos shapes children’s understanding of death, how teachers in the United States and Turkiye talked about the pandemic with their children, and how different communities within the United States think about illness.
I might or might not be accepting graduate students to start in Fall 2024 in UC-Santa Cruz. But if you are interested in how children think about death, evolution, global warming or genetics I would love to chat!
PhD in Psychology, 2022
University of Wisconsin-Madison
MS in Psychology, 2017
University of Wisconsin-Madison
BA in Psychology, 2016
University of Wisconsin-Madison
AA in Psychology, 2014
Miami Dade College
We investigated children’s reasoning about genetic inheritance. We found that 4- to 12-year-old children have a fairly good understanding of how genetic inheritance works, but they reliably have two misunderstandings. The first one is that if the two parents have the same eye color (let’s say dark brown) they think that it is more likely for the offspring to have a similar color (dark orange) than a different color (green). The second one is that they think that if the parents have different eye colors, they think that female offspring are more likely to resemble the mother and male offspring are more likely to resemble the father.
I investigated how children and adults use visual and linguistic cues to determine how broadly to generalize facts.
We investigated adults’ reasoning about genetic inheritance. We found that adults have a fairly good understanding of how genetic inheritance works, but they reliably have two misunderstandings. The first one is that if the two parents have the same eye color (let’s say dark brown) they think that it is more likely for the offspring to have a similar color (dark orange) than a different color (green). The second one is that they think that if the parents have different eye colors, they think that female offspring are more likely to resemble the mother and male offspring are more likely to resemble the father.
We examined whether the perceptual richness of a diagram influences children’s learning and transfer of knowledge about metamorphosis. First and second graders who saw the rich diagram during the lesson learned more than those who saw the bland diagram during the lesson. Fourth and fifth graders who saw the bland diagram during the lesson incorrectly transferred more than those who saw the rich diagram during the lesson.
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