Jennifer Coffman

Jennifer Coffman
University of North Carolina at Greensboro | UNCG · Department of Human Development & Family Studies

PhD

About

41
Publications
7,497
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
831
Citations
Introduction
Jennifer Coffman is an Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is also affiliated with the Carolina Consortium on Human Development at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Publications

Publications (41)
Chapter
In this chapter, the authors explore cognitive development across the first 5 years of life. Emphasis is on cognitive domains such as memory, attention, perception, executive functions, understanding of the physical world, and early numerical cognition. Descriptions of competence and performance – as well as specific foci on developmental change ar...
Article
Self‐regulation is an essential component of school readiness. Although in educational contexts self‐regulation is typically defined in terms of volitional processes, it also encompasses the activity of neurophysiological systems, including the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). In a prospective longitudinal study, 102 preschoolers ( M age = 4.8...
Article
Full-text available
Parent-child conversations are a widely recognized socializing mechanism, linked to children’s developing moral agency, empathy, and emotional competence. Similarly, parent-child conversations about gratitude have been linked to growth in children’s gratitude. However, the messages that parents and children exchange in conversations about children’...
Article
Research shows that children's early social competence predicts their later academic and interpersonal success. Accordingly, early childhood education programs increasingly aim to evaluate and support children's social skill development. Despite ample theoretical and empirical work demonstrating the role of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS)...
Article
Fostering gratitude is often among the socialization goals parents hold for their children. In this article, we explore work that portrays gratitude as a complex socioemotional process that occurs during a moment in time and becomes more frequent, integrated, and rich with development. Researchers have identified at least four parent socialization...
Article
Full-text available
We examined US parent and youth perceptions of how life events, both positive and negative, associated with COVID-19 resulted in changes in family and youth functioning. Families ( n = 105, 80% white, 48% male, and 87% mothers) completed surveys during the pandemic (May to July 2020) and 3 years prior (for youth ages M = 10.6, SD = 1.17 and M = 13....
Article
Exposure to higher levels of sociodemographic risk is associated with lower levels of academic achievement among young children. However, there is variability in the strength of this association, which may be traced to individual differences in physiological processes underlying self‐regulation. In the current study, we examined whether the respons...
Chapter
This book provides an understanding of memory development through an examination of the scientific contributions of eminent developmental scientist Peter A. Ornstein. His fifty-year career not only coincided with but also contributed to a period of extraordinary progress in the understanding of children's memory. The volume describes this historica...
Chapter
This book provides an understanding of memory development through an examination of the scientific contributions of eminent developmental scientist Peter A. Ornstein. His fifty-year career not only coincided with but also contributed to a period of extraordinary progress in the understanding of children's memory. The volume describes this historica...
Chapter
This book provides an understanding of memory development through an examination of the scientific contributions of eminent developmental scientist Peter A. Ornstein. His fifty-year career not only coincided with but also contributed to a period of extraordinary progress in the understanding of children's memory. The volume describes this historica...
Chapter
This book provides an understanding of memory development through an examination of the scientific contributions of eminent developmental scientist Peter A. Ornstein. His fifty-year career not only coincided with but also contributed to a period of extraordinary progress in the understanding of children's memory. The volume describes this historica...
Article
Full-text available
The current study is the first to examine how parents respond to children's ingratitude and how such responses impact children's later gratitude and internalizing symptoms. We focused on parental responses in families with children aged 6-9 years when gratitude may be actively forming as part of socioemotional learning and other-oriented behavior....
Article
The current longitudinal study examines changes in overall mental health symptomatology from before to after the COVID-19 outbreak in youth from the southeastern United States as well as the potential mitigating effects of self-efficacy, optimism, and coping. A sample of 105 parent–child dyads participated in the study (49% boys; 81% European Ameri...
Article
Most research examining the impact of early parental depression on the developing child has focused on the nature of parenting practices observed in depressed adults. Maternal elaborative reminiscing, or the extent to which mothers elaboratively discuss past shared experiences with their children, has a considerable influence on children's emotiona...
Article
The current study focuses on the relations between observed measures of children's self-regulation and academic achievement, as well as the extent to which observations of children's peer competence in preschool moderates these links. Data were drawn from 102 students (male = 48; M age = 4.82 years, SD age = 0.46 years) enrolled in pre-kindergarten...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this longitudinal study, we examined parent and youth perceptions of how life events, both positive and negative, associated with the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in changes in family functioning as well as youth functioning. We tested both direct effects of parent- and youth-reported negative and positive events as well as indirect or spillover e...
Preprint
Full-text available
The current longitudinal study examines changes in overall mental health symptomatology from before to after the COVID-19 outbreak in youth from the southeastern United States as well as the potential mitigating effects of self-efficacy, optimism, and coping. A sample of 105 parent-child dyads participated in the study (49% boys; 81% European Ameri...
Article
Full-text available
Although there is a rich literature on children’s strategies for remembering, little attention has been paid to characterizing developmental change within individual children and to examining mediators that may bring about such change. To address these issues, we assess children’s memory skills over time while simultaneously examining communicative...
Article
This investigation extended work on the linkage between knowledge and remembering by exploring the relation between generic and episodic memory representations. Thirty 6‐year‐old children experienced a mock physical examination with some expected components omitted and other unexpected actions included. Immediately and again after 12 weeks, the chi...
Poster
Full-text available
There exists a sizable literature on the socialization of children’s cognition, highlighting associations between mother-child reminiscing and the development of young children’s autobiographical memory (see Fivush, Reese, & Haden, 2006). However, there is still quite limited understanding of the role of mother-child reminiscing in the facilitatio...
Article
Early childhood education programs, and particularly those designed to reduce gaps in school readiness between children in poverty and their more affluent peers, have increasingly addressed children’s self-regulatory abilities – their ability to manage behaviors, emotions, and cognitive processes. Although self-regulation is typically defined in vo...
Article
Gratitude is associated with a host of positive outcomes; yet, little is understood about the ways in which parents may foster gratitude in their children. The current study allows for the examination of one possible mechanism, namely parent–child conversations, that may be used to encourage gratitude in children. Using a rigorous experimental desi...
Article
Gratitude is a rich socioemotional construct that emerges over development beginning in early childhood. Existing measures of children’s gratitude as a trait or behavior may be limited because they do not capture different aspects of gratitude moments (i.e. awareness, thoughts, feelings, and actions) and the way that these facets appear in children...
Article
We examined micro developmental processes related to the socialization of children's gratitude by testing whether parents who engage in more frequent daily socialization practices targeting children's gratitude reported more frequent gratitude displays by their children after controlling for potential confounds. 101 parent-child dyads completed a b...
Article
As children transition from the early to later grades of elementary school, they become increasingly skilled at employing a variety of techniques – such as rehearsal and organizational strategies – for remembering information. Developmental changes in strategy use have been well documented, but little is known about the extent to which these “simpl...
Article
Data from a longitudinal investigation were used to examine the effects of mothers’ and teachers’ language on children’s developing mathematical competencies across the kindergarten year. Specifically, (1) mothers’ use of metamemory talk, or references to the process of remembering, and (2) teachers’ use of Cognitive Processing Language (CPL), or i...
Article
Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is a quantitative metric that reflects autonomic nervous system regulation and provides a physiological marker of attentional engagement that supports cognitive and affective regulatory processes. RSA can be added to executive function (EF) assessments with minimal participant burden because of the commercial avai...
Chapter
Parent Socialization of Children’s Gratitude Thank-You Note I wanted small pierced earrings (gold), You gave me slippers (gray). My mother said that she would scold Unless I wrote to say How much I like them. Not much. -Judith Viorst The desire to cultivate gratitude in ourselves and others dates back centuries, as is evident in the early writings...
Article
Current definitions of gratitude are based primarily on research with adults about their own experiences of gratitude, yet what children are grateful for, and how they understand, experience, and express gratitude may be very different. To better understand the forms that gratitude may take in children, we asked 20 parents in six focus groups to ta...
Article
Full-text available
Given that children’s exposure to gratitude-related activities may be one way that parents can socialize gratitude in their children, we examined whether parents’ niche selection (i.e., tendency to choose perceived gratitude-inducing activities for their children) mediates the association between parents’ reports of their own and their children’s g...
Article
Data from a large-scale, longitudinal research study with an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample were utilized to explore linkages between maternal elaborative conversational style and the development of children’s autobiographical and deliberate memory. Assessments were made when the children were 3, 5, and 6 years of age, and the resu...
Article
Although high-quality early educational environments are thought to be related to the growth of children's skills in mathematics, relatively little is known about specific aspects of classroom instruction that may promote these abilities. Data from a longitudinal investigation were used to investigate associations between teachers’ language while t...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Despite knowledge that intimate partner violence (IPV) can negatively affect children’s socioemotional and behavioral development, less is known about the impact of IPV on children’s cognitive development, including whether it influences their executive functioning (EF). The goal of the current study was to address this gap in the litera...
Article
Full-text available
The current study was designed to examine the relation between intimate partner violence (IPV) and children’s memory and drew from a socioeconomically and racially diverse sample of children living in and around a midsized southeastern city (n = 140). Mother-reported IPV when the children were 30 months old was a significant predictor of children’s...
Article
Full-text available
Developmental scientists have argued that the implementation of longitudinal methods is necessary for obtaining an accurate picture of the nature and sources of developmental change (Magnusson & Cairns, 1996; Morrison & Ornstein, 1996; Magnusson & Stattin, 2006). Developmentalists studying cognition have been relatively slow to embrace longitudinal...
Article
Building on longitudinal findings of linkages between aspects of teachers' language during instruction and children's use of mnemonic strategies, this investigation was designed to examine experimentally the impact of instruction on memory development. First and second graders (N = 54, Mage = 7 years) were randomly assigned to a science unit that v...
Article
Although much is known about the development of memory strategies and metamemory during childhood, evidence for linkages between these memory skills, either concurrently or over time, has been limited. Drawing from a longitudinal investigation of the development of memory, repeated assessments of children's (N=107) strategy use and declarative meta...
Article
Full-text available
This longitudinal study was designed to (a) examine changes in children's deliberate memory across the 1st grade; (b) characterize the memory-relevant aspects of their classrooms; and (c) explore linkages between the children's performance and the language their teachers use in instruction. To explore contextual factors that may facilitate the deve...
Article
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-130). Microfiche. s

Network

Cited By