New Faculty Scholar Award Invests in Child Development and Education Scholarship

Gift shaped by alumna’s lifelong commitment to research and practice in these areas

By Sarah Steimer

Throughout her career, including more than three decades as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Illinois State University, Laura E. Berk, (AM’67, PhD’69 Education), has focused on advancing research and practice in child development and education.

“Almost everything I did in my career that was especially meaningful — and even beyond that, my community-focused endeavors, my service — links back to  my experiences as a graduate student at UChicago,” Berk says. “For example, several UChicago courses profoundly shaped the way I thought about development, how I wished to study it, and also the significant part of my career devoted to teaching.”

That commitment continues with her recent gift to the Division of the Social Sciences to create the Laura E. Berk Faculty Scholar Award. It will support emerging distinguished scholars whose work shares the same focus to which Berk dedicated her career.

Berk, now a Distinguished Professor of Psychology Emerita at Illinois State University, says that her goal in funding the award is to help reinforce studies of education at UChicago, particularly those that explore early childhood development.

“The University of Chicago has a long tradition of commitment to the study and implementation of high-quality education, from the preschool years through graduate school,” Berk says. “I wanted to help sustain and strengthen that commitment in a way that would emphasize early childhood development and education.”

“This generous gift from Laura allows the Division to meet a crucial need in supporting faculty who are opening new ground in the study of child development and education,” says Dean Amanda Woodward. “This visionary fund has created resources that support scholars at a critical point in their careers — as their research is on a strong upward trajectory, growing in ambition and garnering increased recognition across the field. With these funds, the Division can both recognize their achievements to date and provide means to continue to fuel their field-defining research.”

After receiving her bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, Berk worked for the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity in New York, which was administering some of the very first Head Start programs. After applying to a master’s program at the University of Chicago, the university reached out to say they had an available a U.S. Office of Education graduate research training fellowship, and asked if she would change her application status to the doctoral program. Berk agreed, and earned both her master's and doctoral degrees in child development and educational psychology from the University of Chicago.

Berk describes her time at UChicago as stimulating and challenging — especially during her first- year of the fellowship, during which she conducted research for several faculty members. One of those faculty members, and the eventual chair of her doctoral committee, was  Philip Jackson, who was an expert on education pioneer John Dewey and, in the tradition of Dewey, devoted much of his scholarship to understanding children’s lived experiences in classrooms. Berk says that Jackson had a tremendous influence on her career and that working with him led her to become immersed in the study of children's cognitive and social development in natural contexts, beginning with preschool classrooms.

Her dissertation explored children's encounters with small, everyday frustrating events that challenge their immediate desires. Observing 2- to 5-year-olds at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, as well as in Montessori and Head Start classrooms, Berk found that these interruptions of children’s desires were especially frequent during free play, and that children’s responses to them were mostly constructive and adaptive—for example persisting or asking for help (rather than giving up) when a task was beyond their ability, and sharing or simply refusing (rather than crying or attacking) in the face of a meddling peer. Berk’s dissertation laid the groundwork for her later investigations into how school environments affect young children’s developing self-regulation skills.

After leaving UChicago, Berk became a faculty member at Illinois State University in the Department of Psychology. She has published numerous articles in scientific journals and chapters in edited volumes, on such topics as child-care quality, the development of children’s private (self-directed) speech, and the role of make-believe play in development. She has also reached out to general audiences, writing for parents and teachers in her books Awakening Children’s Minds and Scaffolding Children’s Learning. Her deep concern with teaching human development led her to author a series of higher-education textbooks — Child Development; Infants, Children, and Adolescents; and Development Through the Lifespan — that have been read by millions of students and translated into 15 languages. 

In her home community of Normal, Illinois, Berk is founder of Illinois Art Station, a center that provides educative and self-expressive experiences in the visual arts to children and adolescents through classes, camps, outreach programs, and events— with a special effort to reach underserved and at-risk youth. Illinois Art Station recently joined the Town of Normal’s Cultural Arts District, becoming one of five city projects that enrich community life through the visual and performing arts.

Although UChicago’s Department of Education formally closed in June 2001, Berk chose to provide a gift to researchers working broadly in the field of education. The endowment grants three years of extra funding to celebrate each selected scholar’s already achieved distinction while boosting their continuing progress. Berk’s goal, she says, is to support faculty whose work has direct implications for policy and/or practice. 

Lin Bian, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology whose work explores young children’s stereotypes and sociomoral expectations, is the award’s inaugural recipient. Berk says that Bian, who was chosen by a committee of senior scholars, is a perfect fit for the award. 

“I think her work is absolutely remarkable,” Berk says. “It’s significance for educational applications, interventions, and policy is immediately evident. She's the ideal candidate, and she demonstrates that commitment to the field of education — and specifically to early childhood development and education — is very much alive and prospering at the University of Chicago.”

Bian joined the Department of Psychology as an Assistant Professor in 2021, and her work explores the development of social cognition, with an emphasis on children’s reasoning about social categories. Her research has two main veins: o/ne addresses the acquisition and consequences of stereotypes about social groups for children’s interests and motivation. The second focuses on infants’ and toddlers’ sociomoral expectations, especially how those expectations affect behaviors within versus across group boundaries.

“I’m incredibly honored to be the inaugural recipient of the Laura Berk Faculty Award,” Bian says. “I’ve long admired Dr. Berk’s work and the way she has combined rigorous research with a commitment to improving the lives of children and families. Receiving an award that bears her name is especially inspiring because it reflects the kind of scholarship I aspire to pursue.”