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Program Outline | Course of Study | Research | Faculty | Current Student Work | Recent Dissertations | Student Handbook

Areas of Inquiry | Applied Research


Faculty and student research has both a basic and applied focus. We are engaged in research regarding the social and cultural contexts of human development with particular emphasis on issues concerning linguistic and cognitive development in both children and adults. Particular social and cultural contexts concern, for example, the effects of medical trauma, urban poverty, literacy, work-place environments, gender, minority status, and urban schooling.

The range of developmental topics studied includes such classical areas as Cognition, Social Development, Infancy, Perceptual Development, and Language Development and such emerging areas as Sociocultural Theory, Cultural Psychology, Narrative Analysis, Semiotics, Activity Theory, Adult Development, Pediatric Psychology, and Environmental Psychology. While our basic research draws upon the resources of New York City and often has been cited as evidential bases for social policy, many of our faculty and students also engage in applied research directly addressing practical problems related to the quality of life.

Areas of Inquiry

Social-cognitive & moral development
Social interaction
Cognition and affect 
Representation
Media studies
Philosophy of science
Adult development in the workplace
Socio-cultural analysis and activity theory
Narrative analysis semiotic and activity theory
Language and cognitive development
Memory development
Language and thought
Conceptual development
Self development
Gender development
Parent-child relations
Literacy and knowledge
Peer culture
Atypical infant development
Discourse analysis
Communication practices
Urban education
Feminist psychology
Ecological studies of children's environments
Infant perceptual development
Evolution and development
Biology and ethics
Nature-nurture dichotomy
Social constructionism
Unconscious cognitive processes
Influences of gender, race, class, and sexuality on socialization
Family and peer interaction
Levels of organization
Infant sensory processes
Hemispheric differentiation
Child abuse
Developmental disabilities
Pediatric AIDS sociolinguistics
Dialects in context
Ethnolinguistic studies
Pediatric health psychology
Child forensic psychology
Theories of development

Applied Research

• Evaluating science and mathematics curricula for the New York City Public Schools

• Implementing and evaluating technology based transitions in the work place in the New York City Transit Authority

• Developing and implementing computer based environments that enable New York City hospitalized Chronically ill children to communicate with other hospitalized children throughout the country

• Training public service attorneys to interview New York City children who have been physically and sexually abused

• Reviewing New York State legislation and policies as they affect poor and working class families

• Evaluating families for New York City family courts on matters of child custody

• Studying the effects of peer based education in New York City Public Schools

• Studying the effects of peer interaction on promoting literacy in urban public schools

• Implementing and evaluating computer based curricula to promote learning and literacy in elementary schools in New York City

• Studying interventions regarding family stress and coping with life-threatening illnesses in children

• Research and development of community and television outreach programs on literacy for children through the New York City based Children's Television Workshop

• Studying the experience of volunteers at New York City's Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) as a community based response to the AIDS epidemic

• Studying how African-American women in New York City cope with and respond to the medical conditions of having lupus

• Studying the nature/nurture relationship as it applies to assumptions regarding education, medicine, and political policy

• Studying visual/perceptual development in infancy as it relates to adult forms of Dyslexia

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