Jayanthi Mistry

• PhD
• Professor at Tufts University

Contested racial identity-the discrepancy between one's self-identified race and socially assigned race-is a social determinant of health and may contribute to overweight and obesity. Obesity is associated with a host of short- and long-term health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, a leading cause of death. Individuals racialized as Bla...

The study reported in this paper was conducted as part of a collaborative research project designed to develop a culturally sustaining approach to science, technology, and engineering education in preschool classrooms. Readiness through Integrative Science and Engineering (RISE) is an integrated approach to providing professional development suppor...

In this article, parental role construction is framed from a sociocultural perspective. Applying this perspective foregrounds the need for researchers and practitioners to gain an insider’s understanding of how families themselves construct their roles in supporting children’s education. By doing so, the field can reimagine family–school partnershi...

How teachers' changes in their science teaching practices unfold over time remains unclear. We need greater understanding of the processes at work in professional development (PD) and how to sustain those processes that are effective over time. Effective PD processes are seen as those that recognize teacher change is multidimensional—taking an inte...

Although researchers and practitioners have acknowledged that family engagement in children’s schooling occurs in many forms, most studies and program efforts continue to focus primarily on school-based participation, or the school-to-home link. Embedded within this notion of family-school partnership is the reification of a power differential betw...

Background The principle of equity is fundamental to many current debates about social issues and plays an important role in community and individual health. Traditional research has focused on singular dimensions of equity (e.g., wealth), and often lacks a comprehensive perspective. The goal of this study was to assess relationships among three do...

In the field of psychology, there have been increasing calls to address the hidden diversity among Asian American Pacific Islanders as well as their experiences with racialization and marginalization in the U.S. Utilizing qualitative methods, the present study examined the process of developing critical reflection of marginalization and invisibilit...

In the past decade, there has been a significant increase in the number of dual-language learning (DLL) preschool children. Guided by the literatures on home-school partnership and caregiver ethnotheories, the present study explored parents’ and teachers’ understandings of natural learning opportunities in DLL children’s homes and surrounding commu...

In this paper, we articulate a conceptual model for the process of ethnic identity development and integration among Asian American children and youth that offers potential explanations for their marginalization as they negotiate multiple facets of their identities and locate themselves in local and national contexts. The conceptual model is based...

The purpose of this chapter is to present initial findings of teacher practice outcomes to illustrate promising aspects of the readiness through integrative science and engineering (RISE) professional development (PD) approach for informing early childhood science, technology, and engineering (STE) curriculum and PD interventions. In this chapter,...

Background/Context In the context of increasing accountability mandates in the preK–12 education system, the importance of professional development (PD) supports for early childhood educators is recognized. Education leaders emphasize the importance of partnering with teachers to inform the development of effective PD approaches. This partnering pr...

In this introductory chapter, the authors will explore research seeking to “flip the script” with respect to where authority and expertise are located within home-school connections in ethnocultural communities. The primary aim is to describe how a reorientation from the predominant “school-to-home” perspective to a “home-to-school” perspective in...

In this chapter, we highlight two core assumptions of contemporary sociocultural perspectives that have valuable implications for understanding children's development, especially within educational settings. These interrelated assumptions are: a) the inseparability of person and context and b) culturally situated meaning making as the integration o...

This study examined interpretations of motherhood among adolescents who have experienced rapid repeat births (second births within 24 months of the primiparous birth). Analyses of participants’ descriptions of their transitions to motherhood indicate four modal narratives that vary along two axes: the adoption of a motherhood identity, and the natu...

This paper examined heterogeneity in parents’ patterns of goal attainment following home visiting. Young mothers (n = 696) participating in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluation of a statewide home visiting program were classified, using latent class analysis (LCA), according to their pattern of goal attainment (i.e., educational attainmen...

We briefly respond here to the commentaries to the Special Section focused on Asian American child development by Cheah, Lee, Beaupre, and Zhou, and McLoyd. We consider three questions raised in their comments. What does it mean to focus on Asian Americans? How should we examine development across the life course? How can we generate more policy- a...

The diversity of circumstances and developmental outcomes among Asian American children and youth poses a challenge for scholars interested in Asian American child development. This article addresses the challenge by offering an integrated conceptual framework based on three broad questions: (a) What are theory-predicated specifications of contexts...

Objectives: Our aim was to estimate the effects of Healthy Families Massachusetts, a statewide home visiting program serving first-time adolescent parents, on parenting, child development, educational attainment, family planning, and maternal health and well-being. Methods: We used a randomized controlled trial design to randomly assign the 704...

The proliferation of youth leadership and empowerment programs in the past decade reflects the promise of such programs as a means of promoting youth development. However, as Rhodes and Dubois (2006) note, the widespread adoption of mentoring programs as a vehicle for youth development has occurred without much attention to empirical research on th...

http://ase.tufts.edu/tier/documents/2015_MHFE2finalReport.pdf

The challenge of integrating biology and culture is addressed in this chapter by emphasizing human development as involving mutually constitutive, embodied, and epigenetic processes. Heuristically rich constructs extrapolated from cultural psychology and developmental science, such as embodiment, action, and activity, are presented as promising app...

Identity development during adolescence and young adulthood can become more complex when an individual becomes aware that he or she is racially, ethnically and/or culturally different. Awareness of difference can lead to a period of disequilibrium where a person copes with a shift in self-perception and worldview (e.g., Erickson, 1968; Marcia, 1980...

In this chapter, we document key scholarship in integrating culture and child development in the first decade of the 21stst century. We argue that there is a two-fold challenge for an integration of perspectives from cross-cultural, cultural, and developmental psychology: (11) to resolve continuing debates regarding the conceptualization of culture...

We discuss the historical bases and conceptual features of developmental science, a field that seeks to describe, explain, and optimize intraindividual change and interindividual differences in intraindividual change across the life span. Framed by relational developmental systems theories of human development, developmental science involves the in...

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This chapter presents insights from the Hindu life stages and lifespan constructs to argue for a dialectic synthesis and integration rather than an oppositional stance between the "one-size-fits-all" and the "one-theory-for-every-culture" relativistic perspective. The dialectical nature of the Hindu lifespan constructs that integrate structural and...

We report the results of a study about how early childbearing affected the educational trajectories of nine Puerto Rican teenage mothers living in New England. Raised largely on the mainland, participants chose to carry pregnancies to term and to participate in a parenting program for young mothers. Upon examination of shared meaning-making around...

For children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds the ability to maintain flexible identities and integrate multiple facets of self is a crucial developmental task. We present a conceptual model for the development of expertise in navigating across cultures, delineating how community characteristics interact with family and indivi...

Calls for cultural sensitivity in the design and implementation of human services programs have become a standard response to the increasing diversity among the families and communities being served. In this article, we take a critical look at the construct, using data from a multi-year evaluation of a statewide family support program. We examine h...

In this chapter, we represent current understanding of the interface between culture and child development, by drawing on three subfields of psychology—cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and developmental psychology. We begin by providing a brief overview of three subfields of psychology, highlighting how the interface between culture...

The study of gestural narratives of deaf children, reported in the article by Van Deusen-Phillips, Goldin-Meadow, & Miller, is uniquely situated to address the question of whether spoken language is critical in enculturating children or whether aspects of a culture may be instantiated through nonverbal means. Through careful analysis of narratives...

In a classic study, Istomina (1977) found that preschool children remembered more items when remembering served a meaningful purpose then when it was for the purpose of reporting recall to an adult. Istomina's findings have not been replicated in several recent attempts; however, we argue that these attempts have not focused sufficiently on the pur...

The present study examines differences in the social play of toddlers from four communities. Fourteen children, between the ages of 12 and 24 months, from four cultural communities (San Pedro, Guatemala; Kecioren, Turkey; Dhol-Ki-Patti, India; Salt Lake City, United States) participated in the study. This paper is based on an analysis of data from...

In this Monograph, we examine how toddlers and their caregivers from four cultural communities collaborate in shared activities. We focus both on similarities across communities in processes of guided participation--structuring children's participation and bridging between their understanding and that of their caregivers--and on differences in how...

This chapter describes a sociocultural perspective on the development of children's narratives. children's narrative development is considered to be broadly situated in the social contexts, cultural institutions, and practices in which narratives are created and shared with one another. More specifically, children's narratives and their narrative s...

This work presents landmark research concerning the vital dynamics of childhood psychological development. It’s origin can be traced to the late 1970s, when several psychologists began to challenge existing notions of cognitive development by suggesting that such functioning is bound to specific contexts and that cognitive development is based on t...

In this Monograph, we examine how toddlers and their caregivers from four cultural communities collaborate in shared activities. We focus both on similarities across communities in processes of guided participation-structuring children's participation and bridging between their understanding and that of their caregivers-and on differences in how gu...

Pairs of unacquainted preschool children and 6 to 8 month old infants were observed individually for 10 minutes in a laboratory playroom as the infants' mother attempted to engage the child in interaction with her baby. There were approximately equal numbers of male and female children in two age groupings-2 to 3 years and 4 to 5 years old. Childre...

The role of social interaction in guiding children’s development is receiving increasing attention as an explanation for children’s rapid learning (Azmitia, 1988; Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989; Rogoff, 1986, 1990; Valsiner, 1987; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1979). This increasing emphasis on the facilitating role of adults and peers helps to place chi...

The present research was designed to examine children's use of preacquired script knowledge in recalling newly presented objects and events embedded within strongly and weakly scripted story narratives. In contrast to previous investigations of children's recall for the events and episodes of stories, the study focused on children's recall of taxon...

This chapter describes perspectives on memory development provided by cross-cultural research and theory. We argue that the development of memory skill is closely tied to familiar tasks which children and adults practice and to the purpose for remembering the material. Furthermore, memory development is broadly situated in the social contexts and c...

the dyadic (especially the mother-child) relationship is the unique or ideal prototype of children's social relationships / examine that assumption, arguing that in many cultural communities, children's development occurs in the context of structured and diverse relationships with a variety of other people (including the mother) in groups larger th...