Learning, Cognition, & Development Lab

On April 7th, one of our undergraduate students, Julia Xiong, traveled to Pittsburg to attend the National Conference on Undergraduate Research. There, she presented her senior thesis titled “Children’s Awareness in their Forgetting in Massed vs. Spaced Learning?”. Julia’s project focused on children’s perceptions on the efficacy of massed versus spaced learning and their understanding of their forgetting across these differing learning strategies. We are proud of Julia and the hard work she put into her senior thesis!

We are proud to share that one of our graduate students, Yi Tong, has been selected as a recipient of the Advanced Achievement in Teaching Award at UW-Madison! She is one of 31 exceptional graduate students who have been selected as recipients of the 2024-25 Campus-Wide Teaching Assistant Awards, recognizing their commitment to teaching.

This prestigious award recognizes teaching assistants (TAs) with four or more semesters of teaching experience who have demonstrates excellence in the classroom while continuing their graduate studies. Yi studies how children learn words and how word learning shapes their thinking and understanding of the world.

Yi served as a Teaching Assistant for Ed Psych 320: Human Development in Infancy and Childhood three times and has been the primary instructor since Spring 2024. She is deeply passionate about applying research on how people learn to real-world classrooms, continuously refining her teaching approach based on experience and student feedback. She enjoys sharing her passion for child development with students and hopes to help them see the relevance of these topics in their own lives.

Caitlyn Slawny, MS, CCC-SLP is a PhD candidate in the Communication Sciences & Disorders Department. She recently presented a talk entitled: "Blocked vs. Interleaved Exposure in Bilingual Children’s Word Learning” at the Boston University Conference on Language Development. This work investigates how bilingual preschool children learn novel words in English and Spanish sentences, within single- and dual-language conditions. Across two experiments, the dual-language condition varied in whether languages were blocked (i.e., Spanish first and English second) or interleaved (i.e., Spanish and English mixed). Bilingual children learned above chance regardless of condition, and preliminary data suggested that bilingual children learned better in an interleaved condition as compared to a blocked condition.

Last week one of our graduate students, Sam Macksey, presented her First-Year Project!

Sam’s first year project focuses on addressing common science misconceptions in preschoolers. She is investigating the use of refutation texts, as a type of intervention, to combat these incorrect beliefs. Her research could provide valuable insights into utilizing engaging educational tools, such as storybooks, to promote deeper conceptual understanding in early childhood. Introducing refutation texts into preschool classrooms could help children develop conceptual change, critical thinking skills, and a more accurate understanding of science topics.

This symposium set a great tone for her upcoming semester as a second year PhD student.

Meet Our Summer Education Research Program (SERP) Student: Marycarmen Hernandez-Mora!

Marycarmen Hernandez-Mora is studying Music Education (K-12) and ESL Instruction at Northeastern University in Chicago. This summer in the LCD Lab she developed an interactive storybook as a part of a project proposal, exploring whether 3–5-year-old children from lower socioeconomic status could learn to read sheet music through storybook exposures. After completing the Summer Education Research Experience (SERP) program, she is looking forward to continuing to study music cognition and memory as well gaining more experience presenting. After graduation, she would like to serve as a beginning band instructor in a Chicago Public School.

Happy Monday everyone, we have exciting news to kick off this week!

On April 9th, one of our graduate students, Melina, successfully defended her dissertation! Melina has been with the LCD lab for 7 years, and we want to congratulate her on this great accomplishment. Her project is focused on using dual language storybooks to examine whether there is an effect of code-switching on preschoolers' novel word learning. Melina will be working with Dr. Chen Yu at the University of Texas-Austin for post-doctoral research. Congratulations, again, Melina!