About me

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Developmental Psychology at the University of Southern California, mentored by Dr. Henrike Moll. Prior to starting my doctoral studies, I taught pre-k and second-grade for 3 years at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, MA. In the Boston area, I worked as a research assistant in Dr. Kathleen Corriveau and Dr. Paul Harris' labs, where I studied children's social cognitive development. I received my masters in Human Development and Psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and BA from Swarthmore College, where I studied interest development with Dr. K. Ann Renninger.

My research broadly focuses on children’s social-cognitive development. Specifically, I investigate the active role children play in teaching and learning through a developmental lens. In studying children’s pedagogical cognition, we gain insight into the role children play in cumulative culture and the principles that guide information transmission in children. Specific questions I am interested in studying include: 1) What factors influence young children’s decisions when deciding what to teach others? 2) What, according to children, is a good teacher? 3) What is the developmental trajectory of children’s teaching capacity? More broadly, I am interested in leveraging our understanding of children's social learning to improve student motivation and learning outcomes. 

Family: My husband, Oscar Leong, is faculty at UCLA in Statistics and Data Science. We welcomed our daughter, Gemma, in May of 2023. 

News

• January 2025: Our paper on children's teaching of objective information is published in Developmental Psychology.

• October 2024: I successfully proposed my dissertation! 

• October 2024: Our meta-analysis on children's selective teaching and informing is published in Developmental Science.

• June 2024: I presented our work on children's selective teaching of objective information at the Jean Piaget Society in Toronto.

• March 2024: I presented our meta-analysis at the Biennial Conference of the Cognitive Development Society in Pasadena.

• January 2024: Our paper on how children weigh sensationalism and veracity when teaching is published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

• January 2024: I am honored to have been awarded our department's Excellence in Scientific Writing Award.

• January 2024: Our paper on how children vary their instruction depending on the maturity of the listener is published at Child Development. 

• March 2023: I presented our work on children's selective teaching based on the role of the listener at the Society of Research on Child Development in Salt Lake City.