Department and Faculty Highlights
Department of Human Development (EDHD)
Dr. Kenneth H. Rubin (Director, Center for Children, Relationships, & Culture and Professor, EDHD) is the director of the International Consortium for the Study of Social & Emotional Development, funded by: SSHRC- Canada; Australian Research Council; Korean Research Foundation; & National University Council-Italy. The goal of this project is to examine the independent and interactive contributions of child temperament, parenting behavior, the quality of the parent-child relationship, and the life circumstances of the family unit to the prediction of passive withdrawal and aggression in early childhood. This collaborative, international research project has a longitudinal thrust, with the associations being examined from ages two-to-four in some countries and two-to-seven in others. Extensive observational and questionnaire data are available on parental behavior, the quality of parent-child relationship, and the child's production of adaptive and maladaptive social behaviors amongst peers. Importantly, the data collected in Canada and the United States are also being gathered in Australia, Brazil, China, India, Italy, and Korea. As such, cross-cultural comparisons are being made on parenting styles, parental beliefs, and their relations to children's social and emotional adaptation. Indeed, from the cross-cultural data bases, adaptation and maladaptation will be culturally defined.
Dr. Judith Torney-Purta (Professor, EDHD) is a member of the U.S. National Committee which is part of the International Union of Psychological Science (USNC/IUPsyS) at the National Academy of Sciences. For this group she conducted a survey of twenty-six psychologists who were leaders of cross national projects to identify factors associated with successful international collaborations. The National Academy of Sciences recently issued a report, International Collaborations in the Behavioral and Social Sciences, based on a workshop held by the USNC with support from NSF. The survey is included as an appendix in the report. Professor Torney-Purta also received the Decade of Behavior Research Award (from a consortium of national behavioral and social science organizations) and the University of Maryland’s International Landmark Award in 2005. Both awards recognized her work as Steering Committee Chair for the IEA Civic Education Study, which surveyed 140,000 adolescents in 29 countries www.wam.umd.edu/~iea . She teaches EDHD 750 (Culture, Context, and Human Development) and EDHD 821 (Socialization) in which many students use this data set.
Dr. Min Wang (Assistant Professor, EDHD) has research interests are in the area of bilingual and biliteracy development. Her focus is on two bilingual populations: Chinese-English and Korean-English bilingual children who are living in the US. Her work examines how bilingual children acquire phonological, orthographic and morphological skills in their two languages and how the reading skills are interacted across the two languages.
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