Study of Children's Quantitative Reasoning Led to Current Research on Promoting Healthy Development for Children
Assistant Professor
Irvine, Calif., August 1, 2008
Stephanie M. Reich is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Trained as a community psychologist, her research focuses on ecological perspectives of child development with special interest in promoting healthy social and emotional development for young children.
Stephanie Reich earned her B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles with a minor in Women’s Studies. After graduation she stayed to continue her research in the Gelman Cognitive Development Lab. While studying children’s quantitative reasoning, she visited preschools throughout Los Angeles County. During her visits, what struck her most was not these children’s understanding of number and mass, but the drastic differences in the quality of the preschool environments and children’s behaviors in these schools. For example, in many of the low-income schools, there were highly aggressive and extremely shy children while these extremes were rare in the high-income preschools. Such observations peaked her interest in the environmental aspects of child development, especially economic impacts.
This new focus directed her towards Community Psychology, a field that studies the relationship between individuals and their environments with the goal of improving the person-environment fit through changing policy and practice, rather than individuals. Thus, Ms. Reich relocated to the South to complete a doctorate in Community Psychology in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. Since she was interested in the effectiveness of programs for children, she also completed a concentration in Program Evaluation.
While in graduate school, Dr. Reich’s studies were funded by a training grant from the National Institute for Mental Health for research in children’s mental health services. This provided numerous opportunities to research children’s intersection with their communities, families, schools, and medical care. Through this research and influential readings by such theorists as Urie Bronfenbrenner and John Dewey, Dr. Reich’s research perspective began to appreciate the transactional nature of children’s relationships with their environment. This is the idea that one cannot study the influence of one thing on another without considering the role of the rest of the environment. For example, rather than study the role of parenting on children’s development, a transactional view would also explore how such things as financial strain, stress, social support, education, and neighborhood conditions affect parenting and children as well as how children’s behaviors influence how parents rear them. From this view, Dr. Reich’s research of child development is based on the premise that children’s lives are in constant transactions with such entities as their family members, peers, communities, and economic conditions.
Given her transactional view of child development, moving to the Department of Education at UC Irvine was ideal as applied research, policy, and practice are the hallmark of faculty research here.
Since coming to UCI in fall 2007, Dr. Reich has continued her research on the influences of family, school, economic, and community factors on child development and how low-cost interventions may promote healthy development. For instance, Dr. Reich along with collaborators from Vanderbilt University have a grant from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development to explore the effectiveness of embedding educational information, aimed at low income, first-time mothers, into the text and images of baby books. Since baby books are written at a first grade reading level and tend to be read over and over again, they provide a promising medium for increasing maternal knowledge of typical child development and effective parenting strategies. They also encourage more interactions between mothers and their babies through reading. If effective, these books will result in increased knowledge and improved interactions, which should contribute to better child physical health (e.g., immunization adherence, typical growth, reduced accidents/ emergency room visits, increased cognitive/linguistic development), improved maternal outcomes (e.g., reduced stress, increased self-efficacy and enjoyment), and increased level of stimulation and appropriateness of the environment for the infant. In addition to assessing the effect of the intervention, the study is collecting information about many of the economic, social, and community factors that influence children and their families within the first 18 months of life.
In addition to her research with families, Prof. Reich has several studies exploring the role of peer interaction, in person and online, in typical development. One vein of research focuses on the connection between online and offline social networks and the psychological benefits of these peer interactions. Using survey and interview methods, she, along with colleagues at UCLA and CSULA, hope to gain better understanding into the role these technologically mediated friendships play in socio-emotional development. In addition to online interactions, Prof. Reich’s research also includes face-to-face social networks and how child behaviors contribute to network structure in elementary school classrooms.
Through these studies of children in relation to their families, schools, peers, and communities, Prof. Reich hopes to learn more about how to promote healthy development for children.
