Lieny Jeon, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, has been selected as an Early Career Fellow in Early Childhood Education and Development by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Society for Research and Child Development (SRCD).
At the SRCD biennial meeting last week in Austin, she presented her paper, “The Moderating Role of Preschool Teachers’ Depression on the Associations between Children’s Disabilities Status and Social-Behavioral Competence,” at a symposium on Early Childhood Educators’ Social-Emotional Capacity and Classroom Quality.
“The fellowship advisory committee was very impressed with your research background and skills and your potential contribution to this fellowship program,” said Felice Levine and Lonnie Sherrod, co-executive directors of the advisory committee that made the selection, in a letter to Jeon.
The fellowship provides early-career scholars with the opportunity to participate in a research network focused on early childhood education and development.
Jeon’s research focus is on teachers’ psychological attributes and their associations with teachers’ interactions with children, classroom climate and children’s developmental outcomes, including executive functioning and social and emotional learning.
“My long-term goal is to identify, develop and test new strategies that can maximize teachers’ and children’s social-emotional well-being,” said Jeon.
With support from the Science of Learning Institute at Johns Hopkins University, she is also investigating the mutual influences of the cognitive and emotional executive functioning of teachers and children.
“Teachers who are equipped with better executive functioning will be able to provide sensitive and responsive caregiving, which in turn will promote children’s executive functioning,” she said.
At the AERA annual meeting later in the month, also in San Antonio, Ph.D. student Ashley Grant will present a paper that she co-authored with Jeon, “Teacher Turnover in Hard-to-Staff Schools: A Review of Theory in the Literature,” at a roundtable discussion on Exploring Teacher Turnover.
Early Career Fellows were also invited to an AERA-SRCD special joint symposium, “The Long-Term Outcomes of Early Child Care and Education and What to Make of Middle Year’s Fade-Out.”
