Read about the Author's Research

Laura Berk is pictured here with her two sons, David and Peter. David (right), a graduate of Grinnell College, received his masters in public health at Tulane University and masters in education from UC Santa Barbara. Currently, he teaches elementary school in Southern California. Peter (left) graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University and is a student at Loyola University of Chicago, School of Law. Laura E. Berk is a distinguished professor of psychology at Illinois State University, where she teaches human development to both undergraduate and graduate students. She received her bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her master's and doctoral degrees in educational psychology from the University of Chicago. She has been a visiting scholar at Cornell University, UCLA, Stanford University, and the University of South Australia. Berk has published widely on the effects of school environments on children's development and, more recently, on the development of private speech. Her research has been funded by the U.S. Office of Education and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. It has appeared in many prominent journals, including Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, and Development and Psychopathology. Her empirical studies have attracted the attention of the general public, leading to contributions to Psychology Today and Scientific American. Berk has served as research editor for Young Children and consulting editor for Early Childhood Research Quarterly. She is author of the chapter on the extracurriculum for the Handbook of Research on Curriculum (American Educational Research Association) and of the chapter on development for The Many Faces of Psychological Research in the Twenty-First Century (American Psychological Association). Her books include Private Speech: From Social Interaction to Self-Regulation, Scaffolding Children's Learning: Vygotsky and Early Childhood Education, and Landscapes of Development:An Anthology of Readings. In addition to Development Through the Lifespan, she is author of the two best-selling texts Child Development and Infants, Children, and Adolescents, published by Allyn and Bacon.