Julia Leonard

Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence - Nature Communications Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often show lower academic achievement, commonly linked to limited resources. Here, the authors show that reduced exploration–a behavior tuned for learning...

Thrilled to share our new @NatureComms
paper: "Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence." www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵1/7

Is research, in fact, me-search? In the latest issue of @psychscience.bsky.social Observer, @julia-a-leonard.bsky.social and I go toe-to-toe on this age-old question.

The Learning Lab is heading to CogSci 2025 (@cogscisociety.bsky.social) to share our latest research! Come say hello!

Congrats!!!!!!

Just 1 week left to apply! 🙏 Pls share with anyone you think might be interested. If there are any Q's, get in touch!
👉 3x PhD position: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html
👉 2yr Postdoc position: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

Wirecutter crowned Ben & Jerry’s the best vanilla ice cream. I scoffed.
Our lab managers Surya and Nat ran a blind taste test.
Guess what won?
Ben & Jerry’s.
Science is brutal.

Amazing opportunity!!!!!!!

Minor Drama: Emanuel Almborg’s Baby Group - Amant Amant is an arts organization that fosters artistic experimentation and dialogue across disciplines through residencies and public programming. Amant is situated in the New York City borough of Brookl...

On 6/21, come to @amant-arts.bsky.social for the exhibition On Education and a screening of Baby Group by Emanuel Almborg — with commentary by me!

A joyful blend of art and science, the film explores how a group of babies behave in the absence of adults.

www.amant.org/programs/115...

Member Spotlight: 2025 Spence Awardee Julia Leonard on Celebrating Children’s Progress This Yale University researcher discusses her efforts to understand children’s approach to learning.

Honored to win the 2025 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award! You can read more about my research and journey here www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

with @mika-asaba.bsky.social and @mariannazhang.bsky.social - an all star team!

New preprint! Despite ongoing efforts to combat gender bias in education, our work reveals a striking and under-explored challenge: By the time children enter elementary school, children already expect adults to hold gender stereotypes and approve when adults act on them.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

@leonardlearnlab.bsky.social had a great time at @srcdorg.bsky.social

We just had our last lab meeting with @leonardlearnlab.bsky.social seniors. 🥺 Some of these folks have been in the lab for as long as I have! A true honor to work with these brilliant and wonderful people!

Check out our symposium on *parents' lay theories of cognitive development* at #SRCD2025!

Ft. work by @reutshachnai.bsky.social, @julia-a-leonard.bsky.social, @dominicgibson.bsky.social, and yours truly, discussed by @andrewshtulman.bsky.social !

Come check out the lab's research at @srcdorg.bsky.social this week! @leonardlearnlab.bsky.social

Congrats to my first PhD student Dr Flora Zhang!!!!! Make sure to check out her amazing work on intuitive theories of acquisition (and why they matter) @leonardlearnlab.bsky.social

So so so terrible! I’m sorry Tristan this is wild

I'm writing today with a big request during a difficult time for all of us. Together, we've grown Children Helping Science into a cornerstone for online developmental research. Researchers from roughly 150 institutions have conducted remote studies with over 15,000 families since 2020, with many of those families returning to participate in multiple studies across labs. The CHS team and infrastructure is currently supported almost entirely by the United States government (NSF and NIH). Like many US researchers, we're facing substantial uncertainty about what this means for our financial stability over the coming months and years, and we are hard at work pursuing every angle to keep this platform available to the community. This includes exploring new funding strategies we have previously not considered, like possibly allowing some carefully vetted companies to display ads to families. Researchers will continue to be able to use the CHS platform for free, but your support right now is critical. At the same time, we know that many of you, especially those of you in the United States, are facing the same instability to present and future funding as we are. Today, we are asking for three FREE actions from all of you to support our immediate fundraising efforts:

**Send us your citations.** If you have publications that collected data or advertised studies through CHS or Lookit, please share those references. These citations are essential for demonstrating CHS’s impact to funders. A list of all the citations we're aware of is linked here, in case you're not sure whether we have your recent articles. **Send us publicly shareable materials and press coverage.** If you have cute study designs, engaging visuals, or images of adorable kids (with the necessary permissions) we’d love to use them in presentations to potential funders. Similarly, if your research has been covered in any public media (university publications, podcasts, news articles), please send these to us. **Share your funding applications and ideas.** If you are preparing a grant proposal (to any funding source), please reach out to discuss how you can include a budget line to support CHS. If you have ideas for joint projects, or even of funders you think we should reach out to - we're all ears! And if you have ever received funding to conduct studies using CHS/Lookit, please also make sure we know about it.

You can do all of these things right now at this link (https://forms.gle/zFnzrVURntdZizMK8). Please also feel free to email us (best address: mekline@mit.edu) with any other questions or ideas. We are committed to keeping CHS running and serving this community, and we will do everything in our power to keep the lights on. Thank you for helping to make CHS such a wonderful community resource and for helping us in whatever ways you can! With appreciation, Melissa Kline Struhl Executive Director Laura Schulz Scientific Director

The platform I run, Children Helping Science, is supported almost entirely by US government science funding, both directly and in collaboration with CHS researchers.

Here's the note we sent to users today - we need help gathering your stories and citations! Submit here: forms.gle/zFnzrVURntdZ...

So excited for @relbelluck.bsky.social to be joining the lab!!!!

Overparenting Is Holding Kids Back—Here’s What to Do Instead Overparenting can hinder kids' independence. Research shows that reframing everyday tasks as learning opportunities helps parents step back and let kids grow.

Overparenting can hold kids back—but our research shows that framing tasks as learning opportunities helps parents step back and foster kids' independence! ✨ Read more in our latest Psychology Today piece: www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/deve...
@julia-a-leonard.bsky.social @mika-asaba.bsky.social

<em>Child Development</em> | SRCD Journal | Wiley Online Library Overparenting—taking over and completing developmentally appropriate tasks for children—is pervasive and hurts children's motivation. Can overparenting in early childhood be reduced by simply framing...

Overparenting is on the rise and hurts children’s motivation starting in early childhood. How can we help parents step back? Our new paper in Child Dev shows that pointing out learning opportunities reduces overparenting.

srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

For decades, developmental psychologists have noticed that optimism declines with age. Why does this presumably good thing decrease across development? In this Nature Reviews Psych article, @jessicas.bsky.social and I draw from prior hypotheses to offer an integrated account.