studies & articles
The Blog
One of the many pleasures of being a professor was feeling the need to stay on top of the research in psychology. When I first learned about the half-life of knowledge, the literature typically said it was 3-5 years in technical fields. As a retired professor, I am still a member of the American Psychological Association and subscribe to a service that delivers abstracts and open-source articles from a large number of journals. As an alumna of Harvard, I also get information from them and I have the time to peruse multiple sources. This is a pleasure most professionals don’t have, especially if they value
work-life balance.
I still love research and, when I was asked to write the blog, I enthusiastically agreed. I try to select articles based on their relevance to practitioners, but also to capture both emerging themes and important corrections. I am hopeful that, moving forward, we will have ways to enable readers to easily engage in conversations with me and each other.
-Dr. Karen Nelson
Making Schools a Welcoming Place for Immigrant Students
Ross (2023) published “Making Schools a Welcoming Place for Immigrant Students: How educators can help newcomers in the classroom” in Harvard Graduate School of Education’s (HGSE) Usable Knowledge. I am presenting the article with minimal editing because it is very important and offers helpful links to other resources:
Solidarity with those who are different
Here, I summarize four articles related to understanding those different from the self. The first article, which is available in full text, has the longest summary: Scott, Ash, Immel, Liebeck, Devine & Shutts (2022) published “Engaging White Parents to Address Their White Children's Racial Biases in the Black-White Context” in Child Development. Here’s the edited article:
Are victims of bullying primarily social outcasts?
Kaufman, Laninga-Wijnen & Lodder (2022) published “Are Victims of Bullying Primarily Social Outcasts? Person-group dissimilarities in relational, socio-behavioral, and physical characteristics as predictors of victimization” in Child Development. I like this study because it reminds us of the value of an “it all depends” approach to understanding bullying.