Lindsey Richland
Assistant Professor
Department of Comparative Human Development and the College
Lindsey Richland investigates children’s cognitive and analytical reasoning development. Specifically, she experimentally explores children’s emergent ability to draw relationships and generalize between structured representations such as through metaphor and analogy. She also examines these abilities in the context of classroom mathematics and science instruction. The ability to construct commonalities and distinctions between representations, such as between problems or concepts, is a fundamental part of expert-like learning in mathematics and science. Thus for this line of her research, she studies everyday instruction in the United States and internationally to develop practice-relevant tools grounded in theory for improving student outcomes in these domains.
Her work has been published in such venues as Science, Developmental Science, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, and Cognition and Instruction. A CAREER award from the National Science Foundation as well as grants from the Institute of Education Sciences and the Office of Naval Research support her work. In 2008, she was awarded a prestigious National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Richland received her PhD and MA in developmental psychology and cognitive science from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2003 and her BA in anthropology from Princeton University in 1998.
