Fay Brown, PhD

A significant part of the work that I do focuses on helping educators and parents develop or enhance their awareness of the importance of a developmental understanding for effectively teaching and rearing children. Along this line, I have worked with colleagues to develop instruments that we are utilizing to collect pre and post-test data particularly from teachers, to ascertain their use of developmental principles in working with their students, and the impact of such developmental focus on students' behavior and their academic performance. Over the years, I have also been interested in examining the relationship between the level of acting out behaviors of elementary grade students who have often been labeled as “problem students,” and their ability to read. I suspected that for some students, the greater their reading difficulty, the more behavior problems they would exhibit. Data that I collected from several schools both qualitative and quantitative, confirmed that suspicion. I also found that for those same students, when they participated in an intervention reading program that I directed, both their behavior and reading skills improved in as quickly as six weeks and continued to improve as the school year progressed. I continue to work with some of those schools to help them improve conditions that will result in more positive trajectories for their students.