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Kevin Miller's research interests lie in understanding the interaction among: (1) Cultural influences, including language and symbol systems; (2) Schooling processes; and (3) The development of literacy and basic mathematical competence. He is interested in bridging the gulf between developmental researchers (who focus on children's contributions to their own cognitive growth) and school-based researchers (who focus on the contributions that schooling makes to children's development). Most of his research involves cross-cultural comparisons between children growing up in China and the United States. His research falls into two parts. The first involves looking at how the course of cognitive development varies as a function of cultural influences, including the language you speak and the symbol system you use to read or do mathematics. For example, English differs from Chinese in having explicit marking of word boundaries (i.e., putting spaces between words). Chinese is written in equally-spaced characters, with one or more characters making up a word (but with no special marking of word boundaries). Chinese characters correspond to syllables in the spoken language and thus are on average a smaller unit than words. We have collected eye-tracking data in both children and adults reading text in their native language to look at the nature of development among readers of these very different orthographies. College students in both China and the U.S. look quite similar, but there are interesting differences among children in the two countries. In particular, lack of explicit marking of word boundaries seems not to be a stumbling block for Chinese children. At the same time, long English words do cause problems for American children, who often have to re-fixate a long word several times before they recognize it. This suggests that the problem of breaking words down into more digestible chunks is a key source of difficulty in the development of reading. The ability to compare the course of development of reading in two very different orthographies provides a powerful method for distinguishing universal difficulties in development from those that are due to specific features of particular aspects of children's experience in the culture in which they are growing up. The second part of his research involves recording classrooms in China and the United States in order to understand how the nature of schooling differs in these two societies. His research team then uses these video records to study how viewers (particularly teachers) watch classrooms, and what they can learn from studying classroom processes in their own and other cultures. |
