College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

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.