Prof. David Menendez
Prof. David Menendez
(He/Him/Él)

Assistant Professor

About Me

I am an assistant professor of Psychology at the University of California-Santa Cruz, and I direct the CRECE lab.

I will be accepting graduate students to start in Fall 2026 in UC-Santa Cruz. If you are interested in how children learn scientific and social concepts, how we can improve science education, or how culture influences children’s understanding of death, please email me! You can also check out my lab’s website: https://crecelab.sites.ucsc.edu/

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Interests
  • Conceptual development
  • Visual representations
  • STEM education
Education
  • PhD in Psychology

    University of Wisconsin-Madison

  • MS in Psychology

    University of Wisconsin-Madison

  • BA in Psychology

    University of Wisconsin-Madison

  • AA in Psychology

    Miami Dade College

📚 My Research
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 examined 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.
Featured Publications
Recent Publications
(2025). “What happens when you get corona?”: Children’s questions and parental responses about the COVID-19 pandemic. PLOS ONE.
(2025). Cognition in Action: The relation between physical and mental paper folding in young children. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
URL
(2025). Discovering the world of viruses: Testing the influence of anthropomorphic representations on children’s learning about COVID-19. Developmental Psychology.
DOI
(2025). U.S. adults' beliefs and explanations about health disparities. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
URL
(2024). A bird’s-eye view of research practices in mathematical cognition, learning, and instruction: Reimagining the status quo. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.