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    A Usable Knowledge Conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

 

Author/Practitioner Biographies

  Catherine Ayoub
Catherine C. Ayoub Catherine Ayoub is a developmental and licensed counseling psychologist with research and practice interests in the impact of childhood trauma across the life span, and the development and implementation of prevention and intervention systems to combat risk and promote resilience with emphasis on young children. Her present research centers on the developmental consequences and emotional adjustment of children who have experienced child maltreatment (including child sexual abuse and Munchausen by Proxy), chronic illness, difficult parental divorce, and witnessed domestic violence. Ayoub leads ongoing research in prevention and intervention systems for young at-risk children, including leadership in a current evaluation of children and families in Early Head Start and families with depression. She also directs several research projects, including a developmental study of maltreated children and their parents, a study of Munchausen by Proxy families, and a project that explores the impact of conflicted divorce and family violence on children. Along with Michael Nakkula, Ayoub directs HGSE's master's program in Risk and Prevention. Ayoub also holds an appointment at Harvard Medical School and is senior staff at the Law and Psychiatry Service at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she serves as a forensic mental health expert for children and adults involved with the legal system.

 

Online biography & bibliography: http://hugse9.harvard.edu/gsedata/Resource_pkg.profile?vperson_id=230

Freely available online articles:
Ayoub, C., Pan, B. A., Guinee, K., & Russell, C. L. (2001, April). Relationships between family characteristics and young children’s language and socio-emotional development in families eligible for Early Head Start. Biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, MN.

Project Web sites:
Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project

Mind, Brain, and Education conference paper: Developmental Pathways

 

   
  John T. Bruer
  Online biography: http://www.jsmf.org/about/jbio.htm

Online bibliography: http://www.jsmf.org/about/jpubs.htm

Freely available online articles:
Bruer, J. T. (2002). Avoiding the pediatrician's error: How neuroscientists can help educators (and themselves). Nature Neuroscience, 5(Suppl), 1031-1033.

Bruer, J. T. (1999). In search of...brain-based education. Phi Delta Kappan, 80, 648.

Project Web sites:
James S. McDonnell Foundation

Mind, Brain, and Education conference paper: Cognitive Models Matter: The Methodological Priority of Psychology in Cognitive Neuroscience

   

   
  Jennifer Chidsey
Jennifer Chidsey started her work at Ross School as the Dean of Science and was promoted to Director of Curriculum and Assessment in 2003. The fields of science and education have been intertwined throughout her career, which includes positions teaching grades 4 through graduate school at public and private institutions. After earning a B.S. in biology and a science teaching certification from Northwestern University, she completed graduate studies in critical and creative thinking at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and in geoscience at the University of Iowa. She is currently finishing her Ph.D. in science education, also at the University of Iowa. Her dissertation research gave her the opportunity to work closely with elementary-school teachers who were involved in science reform in their schools. In addition to being a science teacher Chidsey has also held positions such as Curator in Science Education at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, Graduate Program Instructor for Informal Science Education and Science Methods, Dean of Students for the Exploration Summer Programs, and Director of Education at the Iowa City Science.

Mind, Brain, and Education conference paper: The Ross School - Convergence of the Ross Spiral Curriculum and Mind/Brain Research( Jennifer L. Chidsey, Bruce Stewart, & Tom Liao)
 

   
  Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio is the Van Allen Distinguished Professor and head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center and is an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. The recipient of numerous awards (including the Ipsen Prize and, most recently, the Nonino Prize from Italy), Damasio is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Damasio’s first two books, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, and The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness are translated and taught in universities worldwide. His book Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain was published by Harcourt (New York) in 2003 and to date it has been translated in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and Swedish. Damasio has elucidated critical problems in the fundamental neuroscience of mind and behavior, at the level of large-scale systems in humans, although his investigations have also encompassed parkinsonism and Alzheimer's disease. His contributions have had a major influence on our understanding of the neural basis of decision-making, emotion, language, and memory. The laboratories that he and Hanna Damasio created at the University of Iowa are a leading center for the investigation of cognition using both the lesion method and functional imaging. Damasio was born in Portugal. He received both his MD and his doctorate from the University of Lisbon, and began his research in cognitive neuroscience with the late Norman Geschwind. (Damasio photo credit: Christian Steiner)
   

   
  Kurt Fischer
Kurt Fischer Kurt Fischer is a student of human development from birth through adulthood. His work focuses on the organization of behavior and the ways it changes, especially cognitive development, social behavior, emotions, and brain bases. His approach, called dynamic skill theory, provides a framework for combining the many organismic and environmental factors that create the rich variety of development and learning across and within people, including both cultural and individual variation. His research analyzes change and variation in diverse domains, including problem-solving and co-construction in school settings, concepts of self in relationships, cultural contributions to social-cognitive development, early reading skills, emotions, child abuse, and brain development. Before coming to Harvard, Fischer was a professor of psychology at the University of Denver. He has also been a visiting professor or scholar at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Groningen (Netherlands), Nanjing Normal University (China), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford). Primary research directions include dynamic growth modeling, analysis of microdevelopmental change in real-life learning situations, emotional pathways to psychopathology, brain bases of cognitive change, and pedagogical implications of knowledge about development of cognition, emotion, and brain. Cultural research focuses on development of emotions and self in diverse nations, including China, Korea, and the United States. Fischer is the author of 10 books or monographs and more than 200 scientific articles.

 

Online biography & bibliography:

http://hugse9.harvard.edu/gsedata/Resource_pkg.profile?vperson_id=335

http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~ddl/publication.htm

Freely available online articles:
Fischer, K. W. & Rose, L. T. (2001). Webs of skill: How students learn. Educational Leadership, 59(3), 6-12.

Fischer, K. W., & Immordino-Yang, M. H. (2002). Cognitive development and education: From dynamic general structure to specific learning and teaching.

Project Web sites:
Dynamic Development Laboratory

Video:
Skill Theory and Cognitive Development

Mind, Brain, and Education conference paper:
Cognitive Development and Learning: Analyzing the Building of Skills in Classrooms and Neural Systems
(If you get a message that says "Error reading linearized hint data" click here)

   

   
  John D.E. Gabrieli
 

Online biography: http://gablab.stanford.edu/people/gabrieli/cv.htm

Online bibliography: http://gablab.stanford.edu/publications.htm

Freely available online articles:
Canli, T. D., John E. Zuo Zhao Gabrieli, John D.E. (2002). Sex differences in the neural basis of emotional memories. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99(16), 10789-10794. 

Canli, T., Zhao, Z., Brewer, J., Gabrieli, J. D. E., & Cahill, L. (2000). Event-related activation in the human amygdala associates with later memory for individual emotional experience. Journal of Neuroscience, 20(19), RC99.

Project Web sites:
Gabrieli Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory

Mind, Brain, and Education conference paper: Development of Emotions and Learning: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective

   

   
  Howard Gardner
Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds positions as Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Adjunct Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. In 1990, he was the first American to receive the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award in Education and in 2000 he received a Fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has received honorary degrees from twenty colleges and universities, including institutions in Ireland, Italy and Israel. In 2004 he was named an Honorary Professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai. The author of over twenty books translated into twenty-three languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. During the past two decades, he and colleagues at Project Zero have been working on the design of performance-based assessments; education for understanding; the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and assessment; and the nature of interdisciplinary efforts in education. In recent years, in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, Gardner has embarked on a study of GoodWork—work that is at once excellent in quality and also socially responsible. The GoodWork Project includes studies of outstanding leaders in several professions--among them journalism, law, science, medicine, theater, and philanthropy-- as well as examination of exemplary institutions and organizations. In 2001, Basic Books published Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet, the first book to issue from Gardner and colleagues’ current research study. Other recent books are The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Facts and Standardized Tests, the K-12 Education that Every Child Deserves (Penguin Books, 2000) and Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century (Basic Books, 1999). In 2004, two new books have been published: Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing our Own and Other People’s Minds and Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work (with Wendy Fischman, Becca Solomon, and Deborah Greenspan). (Gardner photo credit: Jay Gardner)
 

Online biography: http://hugse9.harvard.edu/gsedata/Resource_pkg.profile?vperson_id=316

Online bibliography: http://www.pz.harvard.edu/PIs/HGpubs.htm

Freely available online articles:
Boix-Mansilla, V. & Gardner, H. (n.d.) Assessing Interdisciplinary Work at the Frontier. An empirical exploration of 'symptoms of quality.'

Project Web sites:
The GoodWork Project: Interdisciplinary Study


   

   
  Paul van Geert

Online biography & bibliography: click here

Freely available online articles: Not available

Project websites: Not available

Video:
Dynamic Modeling of Mind, Brain, and Education Relationships


Mind, Brain, and Education conference papers:
Dynamic systems theory: a tool for understanding development and education
Model of learning and teaching Instructions
Model of learning and teaching
(MS Excel Document)

   

   
  Usha Goswami
  Usha Goswami is Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. She is currently engaged in setting up a Centre for Neuroscience in Education at the Faculty.

Prior to moving to Cambridge in January 2003, she was Professor of Cognitive Developmental Psychology at the Institute of Child Health, University College London. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1987, her topic was reading and spelling by analogy. Her current research examines relations between phonology and reading, with special reference to rhyme and analogy in reading acquisition, and rhyme processing in dyslexic and deaf children's reading. A major focus of the research is cross-linguistic. Current research projects include cross-language studies of the impact of deficits in auditory temporal processing on reading development and developmental dyslexia, neuroimaging studies of the neural networks underpinning reading in good and poor deaf adult readers, studies of reading development and its precursors in deaf children with cochlear implants, and a set of projects are based around lexical statistics, investigating the impact of 'neighbourhood relations' (similarity relations such as rhyme) in phonological and orthographic processing in different languages.

Usha Goswami has received a number of career awards, including the British Psychology Society Spearman Medal (awarded for early career research excellence), the Norman Geschwind-Rodin Prize (a Swedish award for research excellence in the field of dyslexia), and Fellowships from the National Academy of Education (USA) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany). She advised on the National Curriculum and the National Literacy Project, and was one of the three UK members of the Managing Committee of the European Concerted Action on Learning Disorders as a Barrier to Human Development (COST-A8). She is a member of the Neurosciences and Mental Health Board of the Medical Research Council, and of the Cross Board Group of the Medical Research Council. She is also Editor of Applied Psycholinguistics, and is on the editorial boards of Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Reading and Writing, Reading Research Quarterly, Dyslexia, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Cognitive Development and Developmental Science.

 

Online biography & bibliography:
http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/staff/goswami.html

Freely available online articles:
Goswami, U., Thomson, J., Richardson, U., Stainthrop, R., Hughes, D., Rosen, S. and Scott, S.K. (2002). Amplitude envelope onsets and developmental dyslexia: A new hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99, 10911-10916.

Goswami, U. (2004). Neuroscience and education. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 1-14.

Project Web sites:
http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/sites.html

Mind, Brain, and Education conference paper: Acquiring Language and Literacy: Cross-Language Considerations and Phonological Awareness

   

   
  Robert Kahn
Robert Kahn
 
Robert Kahn is Director of Landmark School’s Elementary Middle School. Mr. Kahn began teaching at Landmark in 1972 and joined the faculty fulltime in 1974. In 1979, he and his wife Mary relocated to Wolfville, Nova Scotia and founded Landmark East, modeled after Landmark in Massachusetts. The school grew from from six original students to more than 70 in its first five years. In 1983, the Kahns returned to the U.S. where Rob became Dean of Students at Landmark’s Lower School. In 1985, he was appointed Director of the Lower School. His prior teaching positions include Reading, Language Arts, and Mathematics, and he has also held Supervisory positions in Reading and Language Arts. Mr. Kahn has his A.B. from Harvard, M.S.Ed from Simmons, and is a Certified Special Education Administrator in Massachusetts.
   

   
  Tami Katzir
Tami Katzir Tami Katzir's research centers on reading development and reading breakdown. Her interests revolve around three connected areas: the first represents an effort to link different developmental perspectives on the breakdown of written language. The second attempts to connect converging lines of research from brain imaging studies of reading to comparisons of cognitive profiles of children with reading disabilities in different languages. In her third area of interest, she is committed to research that directly bridges the theoretical and the applied; for example, the application of brain-based theories of dyslexia in the design of intervention for reading-impaired children. Taken together, this work incorporates a multidimensional approach to the investigation of the underlying causes and manifestations of dyslexia and to its prediction and intervention.

 

Online biography & bibliography: http://hugse9.harvard.edu/gsedata/resource_pkg.profile?vperson_id=49494

Freely available online articles:
Wolf, M., & Katzir-Cohen, T. (2001). Reading fluency and its intervention. Scientific Studies of Reading, 5(3), 211-239.

Project Web sites: Not available

Video:
Applying Cognitive Neuroscience to the Investigation of Developmental Dyslexia

   

   
  Tom Liao
Tom Liao earned his B.A. and M.S. in physics at Brooklyn and Adelphi Colleges and then his Ed.D. in science education at Teachers College (Columbia University). He has published numerous books and articles on diverse topics including computer literacy and integration. In his previous position, he was chairperson of the department of technology at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Mind, Brain, and Education conference paper: The Ross School-Convergence of the Ross Spiral Curriculum and Mind/Brain Research ( Jennifer L. Chidsey, Bruce Stewart, & Tom Liao)
   

   
  Chris Murphy
Chris Murphy Chris Murphy has spent his entire professional life studying and educating people with language-based learning disabilities. He has been Head of the High School at Landmark School in Beverly, Massachusetts since 1990, where he has held a variety of positions since 1977 including teacher, tutor, academic case manager, and Academic Dean.

The mission of Landmark School is to educate and empower people with language-based learning disabilities so that they may reach their educational and social potential.

Mr. Murphy is experienced in curriculum evaluation and design, teacher training, and has served as counselor to students and families as they transition from high school. He has also been a consultant to a number of private and public schools, assisting them in developing strategic responses to students with language-based learning disabilities. He is a frequent presenter at seminars and workshops and an adjunct lecturer in Special Education for Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts.

Mr. Murphy holds a Master of Arts degree in Rehabilitation Counseling from Assumption College and is currently pursuing his doctorate in Educational Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania.

   

   
  Laura-Ann Petitto
My basic research is concerned with uncovering the biological mechanisms and environmental factors that together determine how our species acquires language, as well as how language is organized in the brain. Moving beyond the fact that language is lateralized largely in the Left Hemisphere of the human brain, I am deeply interested in uncovering what is the precise neural basis of this Left Hemisphere language specialization: Is this tissue dedicated to the production and processing of sound and speech, per se, or to aspects of the grammatical patterning that underlies all human language? What happens to specific neural tissue for language both (i) when it develops normally and (ii) when it develops in a-typical ways (as in Dyslexia)? I am further fascinated by the question of how bilingual language exposure impacts the brain's neural circuitry for language, both in the developing bilingual children and in adult bilinguals, including when is the optimal age for bilingual language exposure. To answer these research questions, I have used a number of innovative approaches, including (i) Cognitive Neuroscience investigations using modern brain-scanning techniques (fMRI, PET) of the neurological substrates in the brain underlying monolingual and bilingual language representation and use, (ii) studies of language acquisition in young monolingual and bilingual children, as well as basic studies of how signed languages are acquired in early life, specifically, American Sign Language (ASL) and Langue des Signes Québécoise (LSQ), and (iii) cross-species analyses of the extent to which chimpanzees can (and cannot) master aspects of human language. Based on these findings I have proposed an account of how language is aquired that specifies the ways that genetic and environmental factors interact to produce language in children, and I have also articulated an hypothesis specifying the neural basis of the human language capacity in the adult brain.

Educational Implications and "Bridging the Gap": As a Professor in both The Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and The Department of Education at Dartmouth College - as well as being the Chairman of Dartmouth's newly revitalized Department of Education - I am fundamentally committed to bridging the gap between the discovery of basic research findings about young children's development and their direct (yet principled) application to contemporary educational policy and practice in the United States. See Dartmouth's Department of Education web site for more information about our exciting new directions. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~educ/

 

Online biography: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~lpetitto/

Online bibliography:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~lpetitto/#anchor1449021
http://www.ncela.gwu.edu/oela/summit/PetittoReferences.pdf

Freely available online articles:
Petitto, L. A. & Kovelman, I. (2003). The Bilingual paradox: How signing-speaking bilingual children help us to resolve bilingual issues and teach us about the brain’s mechanisms underlying all language acquisition. Learning Languages, 8, 5-18.

Petitto, L. A., Katerelos, M., Levy, B., Gauna, K., Tétrault, K., & Ferraro, V. (2001). Bilingual signed and spoken language acquisition from birth: Implications for mechanisms underlying bilingual language acquisition. Journal of Child Language,
28(2), 453-496.

Project Web sites:
Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory for Language & Child Development


Video:
The Acquisition of Language


Mind, Brain, and Education conference paper: New findings from Educational Neuroscience on Bilingual Brains, Scientific Brains, and the Educated Mind

   

   
  Robert Plomin
Robert Plomin is MRC Research Professor of Behavioral Genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry in London and Deputy Director of the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre, which he and Michael Rutter launched in 1994. The goal of the SGDP Research Centre is to bring together genetic and environmental research strategies to study behavioral development, a theme that characterizes Plomin’s research. His current research includes a study of 10,000 pairs of twins born in England during 1994-96 on developmental problems in language, cognition and adjustment. Now that the twins are in the early school years, his research has begun to focus on learning abilities and disabilities and the implications of genetic research for education. Plomin’s special interest is in harnessing the power of molecular genetics to identify genes that affect complex dimensions and disorders in order to advance our understanding of the developmental interplay between genes and environment. He has published more than 500 papers and is senior author of the major textbook in the field (Behavioral Genetics, Worth Publishers, 4th edition, 2001) as well as author of a dozen other books including Genetics and Experience: The Interplay Between Nature and Nurture (Sage Publications, 1994). His most recent edited book is Behavioral Genetics in the Postgenomic Era (APA Books, 2003).
 

Online biography & bibliography:
http://web1.iop.kcl.ac.uk/iop/Departments/Sgdpsy/Staff/Senior/RP/home.shtml

Project Web sites:
Genetic-Environmental Study of Emotional States in Siblings (GENESIS)

Mind Brain and Education Conference papers:

Brain, Mind, and Education: Genetic Links
Genetics and Educational Psychology
Genetics and Developmental Psychology

   

   
  David Rose
In 1984 David Rose helped to found CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) with a vision of expanding opportunities for students through the innovative development and application of technology. Rose specializes in developmental neuropsychology and in the universal design of learning technologies that will impact learning for the diverse students found in today’s classrooms. In addition to his role as co-executive director of CAST and the principal investigator for CAST’s U.S. Department of Education supported National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum, Dr. Rose lectures at Harvard University Graduate School of Education. He is the co-author of Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning (ASCD, 2002) and speaks at national conferences on education technology. Dr. Rose has testified at a hearing on education technology before the U.S. Senate’s Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and he advises state departments of education on policies related to the education of students with disabilities. Rose received his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
 

Online biography & bibliography: http://hugse9.harvard.edu/gsedata/Resource_pkg.profile?vperson_id=260

Freely available online articles:
Rose, D.H. & Meyer, A. (2002). Teaching every student in the digital age: Universal Design for Learning. Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Rose, D., & Meyer, A. (2000). The future is in the margins: The Role of technology and disability in educational reform. United States Department of Education White Paper.

Project Web sites: CAST

Mind, Brain, and Education conference paper: Learning in the Digital Age

   

   
  Elizabeth Spelke
 

Online biography & bibliography: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/index.html?spelke.html

Freely available online articles:
Hauser, M. D. & Spelke, E. S. (in press). Evolutionary and developmental foundations of human knowledge. In M. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The Cognitive Neurosciences, III, Cambridge: MIT Press.

Lipton, J.S. & Spelke, E.S. (2003). Origins of number sense: Large number discrimination in human infants. Psychological Science, 14(5), 396-401.

Project Web sites:
Laboratory for Developmental Studies (Harvard University)

Video:
Core Knowledge and Cognitive Development

Mind, Brain, and Education conference paper:Core Knowledge, Combinatorial Capacity, and Education:
The case of number

   

   
  Manfred Spitzer
   

   
  Bruce Stewart
Bruce Stewart earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California. His research interests include applied mathematics, computational science, and dynamical systems; he is co-author of Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, published by John Wiley and Sons. Since 1997 he has helped teachers at the Ross School design and implement math and science curriculum integrated with cultural history.

Mind, Brain, and Education conference paper: The Ross School-Convergence of the Ross Spiral Curriculum and Mind/Brain Research ( Jennifer L. Chidsey, Bruce Stewart, & Tom Liao)
   

   
  Maryanne Wolf
 

Online biography: http://ase.tufts.edu/faculty-guide/download/mwolf-cv.pdf

Online bibliography:
http://ase.tufts.edu/faculty-guide/faculty.asp?id=mwolf

Freely available online articles: Not available

Project Web sites:
Center for Reading and Language Research

Mind, Brain, and Education conference paper: Novel Connections

   

   
  List of resources compiled by Research Services at the Monroe C. Gutman Library, Harvard Graduate School of Education

 

 

 
     
   

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