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
Reading and inequity
Here, I present two abstracts of research related to reading and inequity. Clemons, Mason & O’Donnell (2023) published “Language and self-regulation: Interrelated sources of disparities in reading achievement and opportunities for reducing inequity” in School Psychology. Here’s the edited impact statement and abstract:
Overcoming genetic propensity to poor reading
I am going to do two successive posts related to children’s reading. In this first one, Leve et al. (2022) published “The Potential of Children's Rearing Environment to Overcome Genetic Propensity for Low Reading Achievement” in Mind, Brain, and Education. Here’s the edited article:
More on executive function
As promised, I am following up the last article summary with a series of abstracts related to executive function. First, Moffett et al. (2022) published “Enrollment in Pre-K and Children's Social-Emotional and Executive Functioning Skills: To what extent are associations sustained across time?”
Reading to learn math
Hübner, Merrell, Cramman, Little, Bolden, & Nagengast (2022) published “Reading to Learn? The co-development of mathematics and reading during primary school” in Child Development. I like studies with huge samples and sophisticated statistical techniques. Here’s the abstract: