College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Phone: (626) 815-6000, Ext. 3114
Email: jcole@apu.edu
Office Location: Modular Offices, Undergraduate Psychology, Room 108
Office Hours: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., or by appointment

Juanita McLean Cole is a developmental psychologist whose teaching and research stresses the cultural aspect of child development, especially in the areas of health, literacy, and schooling. Her current work is organized around the design and evaluation of culturally responsive web-based, after-school activities that promote basic literacy, reading comprehension, mathematics, and logical reasoning, as well as the analysis of culturally proficient health literacy and physical activity interventions to reduce BMI gains in African American and Latino elementary school children. Cole also works with community-based longitudinal study on the factors that influence struggling adolescent readers and writers engagement with and participation in after school poetry clubs. A major thrust of Cole’s work is to identify the key aspects of contextual environments that shape developmental experiences in middle childhood through the adolescent transition in ways that can impact policy and practice. She is an affiliated scholar in the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition at the University of California San Diego.

Ph.D. - Howard University
M.A. - Pepperdine University
B.A. - San Diego State University

Presentations
Cole, J. M. Culture Matters: Enriching Literacy through Responsive Instruction and Computer Technology, paper presented at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Honolulu, 2004.

Cole, J.M. Culture, Computers, Literacy, Active, Play: Findings from Project CCLAP and it's effectiveness in Reducing Ethnic Disparities in Reading, paper presented at the Annual Meeting for Minority Postdoctoral Fellows of the National Science Foundation. Atlanta, 2004.

Cole, J.M. and Hilliard, V. R. Reading Wars, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, 2004.

Publications
Cole, J.M. and Hilliard, V. R. "Effect of Web-Based Curriculum on Children's Reading Performance and Reading Motivation." Journal of Educational Computing Research, Vol. 34, 4 (2006): 517-525.

Cole, J.M. and Grant, N.D. (In press). "Influence of Expressive Dance on African American Girls Body-Image Perception and Academic Motivation." Journal of Early Adolescence.

Cole, J.M. and Boykin, A. Wade. (In press). "Examining Culturally Structured Learning Environments with Different Types of Music-Linked Movement Opportunity." Journal of Black Psychology.

Health Disparities Research Scholar, National Institute of Health, 2003-07
Research Fellow, Center of Excellence in Partnership for Community Outreach, Research on Health Disparities and Training (EXPORT), University of California, San Diego, 2004-07
Minority Post-doctoral Fellowship, National Science Foundation, 2002-04