Haley Vlach
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Psychology
How do young children learn, and how do they come to understand their own learning? This research looks at two sides of early development: children's growing ability to judge which study strategies work, and the word meanings that make up their early vocabulary.
- Fields
Psychology
Education Research
- Topics
metacognition
cognitive development
desirable difficulties
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Examine when children first understand that effortful strategies causing "desirable difficulties," such as spaced learning and retrieval practice (self-testing), improve long-term learning.
- Identify individual differences among children associated with the development of metacognitive thinking, or reflection on their own learning, about desirable difficulties.
- Test whether children's understanding of desirable difficulties can be changed during the early years of formal schooling, producing an open-access dataset for future research.
- Develop and validate a parent-report measure that captures the meanings, activities, social partners, locations and frequency of children's word use, going beyond counting vocabulary size.
- Test whether the quantity and diversity of word meanings children use at the start of a 9-month parent-report study predict later word learning and non-language developmental outcomes better than vocabulary size.
More about the research
Both projects ask what lies beneath common measures of learning and how early knowledge shapes later growth.
Why it matters
Knowing when children begin to understand effective study strategies, and whether that understanding can be taught early in school, could help families and educators support lasting learning. A richer measure of early word knowledge could explain why vocabulary predicts later success and give researchers a shared database for studying language development.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David Geary
University of Missouri-Columbia, MO·Psychology
Track the longitudinal development of core number knowledge, such as cardinality and counting, in preschoolers to identify early signs of school math readiness and math learning disability risk.
C Arrington
Georgia State University, GA·Neuroscience
Test whether inhibiting the left dorsal stream with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) slows sound processing and impairs learning and retention of similar-sounding made-up words in typical readers aged 16 to 21.
Tal Linzen
New York University, NY·Computer Science·Early-career
Explain why language models that predict the next word better match human reading times worse, by comparing model predictability estimates with human reading data.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.