Jeremy Sawyer

• Ph.D. Developmental Psychology
• Professor (Assistant) at Kingsborough Community College

Private speech and bilingualism have been fruitful but generally separate avenues for investigating the relations between social interaction, language, and cognition. Surprisingly, the private speech of bilinguals has received little attention outside the context of second language acquisition. This paper reviews extant research regarding (1) how t...

Theoretical work in developmental and educational psychology views learning as a collaborative process of socially constructing knowledge. This chapter reviews theories of inquiry-based teaching and collaborative learning with specific examples of how to implement these theories in web-enhanced undergraduate coursework. Focusing on undergraduate co...

Despite legal efforts to reduce societal barriers, people with disabilities still face ableist bias, stereotyping, and stigma. According to the social movement hypothesis, people's participation in and identification with activist movements may reduce bias towards social outgroups. Alternatively, people's intergroup attitudes and bias may influence...

INTRODUCTION: Despite legal efforts to reduce societal barriers, people with disabilities still face anti-disability bias, stereotyping, and stigma. According to the social movement hypothesis, people’s participation in and identification with activist movements may reduce bias towards social outgroups. Alternatively, people’s intergroup attitudes...

Recently, interest in aggregate and population-level implicit and explicit attitudes has opened inquiry into how attitudes relate to sociopolitical phenomenon. This creates an opportunity to examine social movements as dynamic forces with the potential to generate widespread, lasting attitude change. Although collective action remains underexplored...

Vygotskian theory suggests that sociodramatic play, private speech, and motivation are deeply intertwined in development. This study used fishing and puzzle tasks to explore how preschoolers (N = 47) used private speech to verbally mediate their engagement and motivation in activities with differing demands. We experimentally manipulated pedagogica...

Community colleges are among the few U.S. higher education institutions with open admissions, historically a tremendous victory for working-class and students of color. In the late 1960s, student strikes won the unprecedented opening of admissions at CUNY, transforming a nearly all-White, middle-class student body to a majority of students of color...

Participating in play affords physical, social, and cognitive benefits. Here, we review the cognitive behavioral science literature highlighting the value of play and describe the different types of play along with the evidence linking play to positive outcomes for children in areas such as social-emotional, cognitive, academic, and social-emotiona...

This meta-analysis summarized the effects of universal and targeted social and emotional learning (SEL) interventions in 48 studies on the development of social and emotional skills and the reduction of problem behaviors in 15,498 preschool students. For universal SEL interventions delivered to all students, a random-effects model with 33 primary s...

Work activity is central to human psychology. However, working conditions under capitalist socioeconomic relations have been posited as psychologically alienating. Given the negative impact of work alienation on well-being and mental health, we conducted two studies of the relations between social class, work conditions, and alienation. We also exa...

Playful learning is a context in which children learn very effectively. The enjoyable nature of play helps draw children in and allows them to focus and learn while having fun. Play does not need a ton of bells and whistles; a simple play space featuring visually interesting block play or other child-friendly activities is enough to get children in...

Following Marx, Vygotsky saw the historical origins of language in labor, geared to coor-dinating productive activity that transforms the world and humans themselves. Thiscollaborative activity entails dynamic interactivity, productive practicality and the pro-found sociality and historicity of language. Vygotsky’s attempted to advance psychology o...

Children’s drawings are implicated in their emotional, cognitive, artistic, and semiotic development, raising the question of how early educators may best facilitate drawing development. This study compared three activities to determine their relative efficacy in promoting children’s drawing. Seventy-seven preschoolers from a Head Start program wer...

Lab-based interventions have been ineffective in changing individuals’ implicit racial attitudes for more than brief durations, and exposure to high-status Black exemplars like Obama has proven ineffective in shifting societal-level racial attitudes. Antiracist social movements, however, offer a potential societal-level alternative for reducing rac...

Lab-based interventions have been ineffective in changing individuals’ implicit racial attitudes for more than brief durations, and exposure to high-status Black exemplars like Obama has proven ineffective in shifting societal-level racial attitudes. Anti-racist social movements, however, offer a potential societal-level alternative for reducing ra...

Despite support for active learning, little research has directly compared active techniques to determine which are most beneficial for student learning and motivation. The current study compared the active-learning techniques of cooperative learning (CL) and writing-to-learn (WTL) while also varying the modality of presentation (textual or multime...

Learning in small groups plays an increasing role in modern pedagogy. There is strong evidence that students working in small groups outperform students working individually in several key areas, including knowledge development, critical thinking skills, social skills, and course satisfaction. This chapter compares the theory behind cooperative...

Vygotskian theory and empirical evidence suggest that children’s private speech and pretend play contribute to their development of motivational processes. Given current U.S. preschool expansion, and resurgent debates over the merits of play-based vs. non-play-based approaches to early childhood education, this study conducted an experimental inves...