Development in School Contexts

Department of Psychology

2023 DISC Lab

Welcome!

Welcome to Dr. Tim Curby's Development in School Contexts (DISC) Lab website! Our work examines how children grow and behave when in classrooms settings. Specifically, we examine how teacher-child interactions serve as a mechanism for children's development. Much of our current work examines children's emotional development in classroom settings. Among others, questions that we ask are: What does good emotion-focused teaching look like? How do we help teachers become more effective at emotion-focused teaching?

We are also interested in the measurement of teacher-child interactions. If we can't measure these interactions well, then we are going to have difficulty (reliably) relating these interactions to children's development. Measuring interactions is difficult because they are enormously complex and they are constantly changing. Thus, we have a series of measurement questions that we ask, too, including: What are the observable behaviors of teachers that promote children's emotional skills? How stable are teacher-child interactions? How large are rater effects in measuring teacher-child interactions and how do we reduce them?