THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Susan C. Levine is the Rebecca Anne Boylan Distinguished Service Professor of Education and Society in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. She joined the faculty after receiving her Ph.D. in Psychology at M.I.T. Her research focuses on early spatial and numerical thinking and how they relate to each other. She is particularly interested in the malleability of mathematical thinking and the kinds of adult-child interactions that foster learning in these domains, both at home and at school. In lab studies, she examines the development of children’s understanding of natural number and fractions and interventions that support this development. In addition, her research examines the relation of math achievement and math attitudes in children, and how the math attitudes of parents and teachers impact children’s math outcomes.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
Levine, S.C., Suriyakham, L., Rowe, M., Huttenlocher, J. & Gunderson, E. A. (2010). What counts in the development of children’s number knowledge? Developmental Psychology, 46, 1309-1313. DOI.
Levine, S.C., Ratliff, K.R., Huttenlocher, J. & Cannon, J. (2012). Early puzzle play: A predictor of preschool spatial skill. Developmental Psychology, 48(2), 530-542. DOI.
Hurst, M.A., Shaw, A., Chernyak, N., & Levine, S.C. (2020). Giving a larger amount or a larger proportion: Stimulus format impacts children’s social evaluations. Developmental Psychology, 56(12), 2212-2222. DOI.
Pantoja, N., Schaeffer, M.W., Rozek, C.S., Beilock S.L. & Levine, S.C. (2020). Children’s math anxiety predicts their math achievement over and above a key foundational skill. Journal of Cognition and Development, 21(5), 709-728. DOI.
Raudenbush, S.W., Hernandez, M., Goldin-Meadow, S., Carrazza, C., Foley, A., Leslie, D., Sorkin, J.E., & Levine, S.C. (2020). Longitudinally adaptive assessment and instruction increase numerical skills of preschool children. PNAS, 117(45), 27945-27953. DOI.
Berkowitz, T., Gibson, D.J. & Levine, S.C. (2021). Parent math anxiety predicts early number talk. Journal of Cognition and Development, 22(4), 523-536. DOI.
Eason, S., Nelson, A. Dearing, E. & Levine, S.C. (2021). Prompting young children’s numeracy talk in play: The role of parent questions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 207(8). DOI.
Levine S.C. & Pantoja, N. (2021). Development of children’s math attitudes: Gender differences, key socializers, and intervention approaches. Developmental Review. DOI.
Frausel, R., Richland, L., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Levine, S.C. (2021). Developmental trajectories of early higher-order thinking talk differ for typically developing children and children with unilateral brain injuries. Mind, Brain and Education, First published: 05 October 2021. DOI.
Johnson, T., Burgoyne, A.P, Mix, K.S., Young, C., & Levine, S.C. (2022). Spatial and mathematics skills: Similarities and differences related to age, SES, and gender. Cognition, 218. DOI.
Hurst, M., Butts, J. & Levine, S.C. (in press). Connecting symbolic fractions to continuous proportion using a fraction card game. Developmental Psychology.
Hurst, M. & Levine, S.C. (accepted). Children’s understanding of most is dependent on context. Cognition.