Network Members

Chair

Jacquelynne Eccles

Staff

Todd Bartko Deanna Migut

Executive Members

Phyllis Blumenfeld
Cynthia Garcia Coll
Catherine Cooper
Greg Duncan
Robert Granger
Jennifer Greene
Aletha Huston

James Johnson
John Modell
Diane Scott-Jones
Deborah Stipek
Barrie Thorne
Tom Weisner
Heather Weiss

Associate Members

Andrew Fuligni
Hanne Haavind
Penny Hauser-Cram
Robin Jarrett
Diane Ruble
Ruben Rumbaut
Walter Secada

Todd Bartko is the Executive Director of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Successful Pathways through Middle Childhood. His Ph.D. is in Human Development and Family Studies from the Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include contextual influences (families, neighborhoods, schools) on youths at risk for emotional problems and on the protective effects of children's involvement in organized activities.

Jacquelynne Eccles serves as the chair of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Pathways through Middle Childhood. She is Professor of Psychology and a Research Scientist at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. She is also the Chair of the Combined Program in Education and Psychology at the University of Michigan. Her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology is from University of California at Los Angeles. Her research interests range from gender-role socialization, teacher expectancies, and classroom influences on student motivation to social development in the family and school context.
For additional information concerning Dr. Eccles current research, go to http://www.isr.umich.edu/rcgd/arl/

Phyllis Blumenfeld is Professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles. Her research focuses on motivation and instruction, and on classroom processes. She advocates project-based learning, an approach to classroom teaching and learning that is designed to engage students in collaborative investigations of real problems using technological tools in order to enhance understanding, thinking, and motivation.
Robert Granger , Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration at the Manpower Demonstration Research Center, is an expert on programs and policies for low-income children. Dr. Granger divides his time at MDRC between leading research projects focused on young parents and children and serving as MDRC's Chief Financial and Administrative Officer. Before joining MDRC in 1989, he worked at the Bank Street College of Education, first as Executive Director of the Child Development Associate Program, and later as Senior Policy Analyst, Vice President for School and Community Services, and Executive Vice President. Selected by the MacArthur Foundation as a core member of its research network on middle childhood, Dr. Granger has conducted numerous empirical studies; in recent years, he has focused particularly on public policies related to teen mothers and children on welfare. He received a B.A. from Claremont Men's College in 1968 and an Ed. D. in Early Childhood Education from the University of Massachusetts in 1973.
Aletha Huston is University Distinguished Professor of Human Development and Family Life, Psychology, and Communication Studies and Co-director of the Center for Research on the Influence of Television on Children at the University of Kansas. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Huston's work is focused in two primary areas: 1) ecological contexts outside the family that affect children, including television, child care, sex role structures, and economic circumstances, and 2) the application of research to public policy.

Barrie Thorne is Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University. Dr. Thorne has done ethnographic research on gender relations in elementary schools, focusing on children as actors in the present and on their group lives and collective practices--perspectives eclipsed by the framework of "socialization." She is interested in bringing children more fully into sociological and feminist thought and in examining connections among age, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity.

Tom Weisner is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. Weisner's research program explores the hypothesis that the single most important influence on the development of children and the adaptation of families is the cultural place in which development and adaptation occur. Weisner has developed an ecocultural model for this work. The ecocultural model includes the resources and constraints afforded by family social ecology, parental values and goals, and processes of family adaptation. This model is currently being applied to a longitudinal study of children growing up in nonconventional and countercultural families; a longitudinal study of families with developmentally delayed children; and cross-cultural research on change and development.
Heather Weiss, founder and director of the Harvard Family Research Project, is nationally recognized as one of the key initiators of the family support movement. She has been an advisor to numerous government and private programs while serving on a variety of advisory boards. She has written extensively about family support programs--including those in school settings, child and family policy, and evaluation strategies. Recent work includes Evaluation Options for Family Resource Centers, and Raising Our Future: Families, schools and Communities Joining Together, a handbook of family support programs for parents, educators, community leaders and policy makers.

HomePage