简介

My graduate training in experimental psychology and early childhood education focused on typical cognitive development, whereas during my postdoctoral training in developmental neuropsychology I focused on the constraints learning disabilities impose on traditional learning. My research interests focus primarily on individual differences in cognition and how these differences affect the development and function of problem solving behaviors. I am particularly interested in the development of numeracy skills, how those and other cognitive skills interact to affect and predict long-term mathematics achievement outcomes, and how pathways to mathematical learning differ across students progressing at very different achievement levels. These interests extend to determining how these cognitive abilities or skills can be assessed in a meaningful way, and how numeracy skills can be optimized in formal and informal environments. Currently, I am examining individual differences in early number concepts and how the nature of these concepts may reflect or shape numerical abilities or mathematical learning; whether individual differences in numeracy skills are specific or related to non-numerical problem solving; variation in children’s response to computational errors; and different manifestations of automaticity in number processing throughout development. I am also analyzing data from a recently completed longitudinal study of students who I followed from kindergarten to high school, to evaluate consequences of early mathematical learning difficulties. I am also interested in the development of metacognition in childhood, particularly as it relates to dealing with lexical ambiguity, numeracy, and other problem solving behaviors. Effective 2015, I was appointed to the Editorial Board of the Journal of Educational Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association.