Welcome!

Welcome to 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.  Among others, questions that we ask are: What are the interactions of an effective teacher like?  For whom are they effective?  Why do some children do so well with one teacher but not another?

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: How stable are teacher-child interactions?  Is the variability in some ways a trait of the teacher? How large are rater effects in measuring teacher-child interactions?