Amy Kerivan Marks, Ph.D.
Interested in understanding the psychological processes that promote academic success among ethnic and racial minority students, Dr. Marks joined Dr. García Coll's lab as a psychology graduate student in 2003. She has since been engaged in numerous studies, and is currently coauthoring a book with Dr. García Coll that takes an in-depth look at how contexts - peer, family, and community - shape children of immigrants' ethnic identities and academic pathways through middle childhood. For more about her other research, read on!
Current Research
Being Bicultural In Adolescence: Social, cognitive and affective regulation processes in students' ethnic identity development.
Amy Marks is currently using a mixed-methods approach to understand how bicultural and monocultural students structure and use their ethnic and cultural identities. Through this research, she hopes to appreciate how ethnic identity and social cognition relate to risk for academic problems (and conversely, support academic success) among ethnic minority students.
The first of several studies on this topic was initiated in 2003, documenting multiple characteristics of emerging ethnic identity in middle childhood - a period in children's lives previously thought to be of little importance in actively forming ethnic identities. Using data from all three years of the Children of Immigrants: Development in Context study, the study found that Portuguese, Dominican and Cambodian children of immigrants consistently and accurately characterized their ethnic identities. Further, having a strong sense of ethnic identity (e.g., pride in ethnic heritage, a sense that being a member of the ethnic group is important) was associated with increased social preferences to play with children of both their ethnic/racial ingroup (e.g., children from the same ethnic or racial background), and their ethnic/racial outgroup (e.g., children from a different ethnic and/or racial background). This research helps us to understand some of the early characteristics of ethnic identity development, and lends support to other recent research indicating that ethnic pride is important for children's early socialization with peers of other, diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds. Click here for a copy of the journal article (coming soon).
In a second series of studies, collectively called Characterizing Biculturalism in Adolescence (publications in preparation), Dr. Marks and colleagues are using interviews, computer-based cognitive tasks, and psychophysiological data to take a comprehensive look at the affective regulation and the explicit/implicit cognitive processes involved in forming students' ethnic identities. Using both experimental and qualitative methods, this research ultimately aims to understand how these identities relate to academic attitudes and outcomes from mid-adolescence through young adulthood.
Early academic skills among American Indian and Alaska Native children.
Though the majority of Dr. Marks' current research is with students in middle childhood and adolescence, early childhood (particularly when children are first entering school in 
kindergarten) is also a critical time in children's lives for building strong, positive academic pathways. For children of color, who are more likely to live in poverty than their white peers, this transition can be a particularly important one, as research has shown that early intervention in preschool can help to close some of the racial gaps observed in academic performance later in life.
To date, very little is known in psychology about most developmental processes among American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) children - including the transition to school. For this understudied group - who are known to be at a particularly high risk for school dropout later in adolescence - past studies have largely taken a de
ficit-based research approach to understanding development. In other words, most studies of AIAN youth tell us what is going wrong, not necessarily what is going right. To address the need for longitudinal research documenting both positive and negative correlates of academic skill development among AIAN children, Dr. Marks & Dr. García Coll recently completed a growth modeling study of AIAN children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. Using this nationally representative dataset, they found that AIAN children entered kindergarten with math and language skills similar to those of other students of color. Importantly, AIAN children whose teachers reported them as having a positive attitude toward learning entered kindergarten with a mathematical ability score almost one standard deviation higher than their peers with a slightly less positive approach to learning. Remarkably, having a positive approach to learning was as strong a contributor to subsequent academic cognitive gains as having at least one parent with a college education. Click here for a copy of the journal article.
Future research plans
To continue the research goals described above, future studies will use a combination of experimental and large-scale population modeling approaches to understand how students of color develop their ethnic identities and the social skills necessary to succeed in school. Along these lines, a recently funded project using national databases will begin later this year to examine the characteristics of peer, family and neighborhood contexts that support immigrant adolescents' success in school.
Above: Amy Marks and fellow Psychology grad students at the 2005 American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life, Brown University. Top, Left to Right: Mika MacInnis, Dr. Hilary Stebbins, Zohar Zephrani, and Amy Marks; Bottom: Stephanie Crowley, and Theresa Didonato.
Links to other research interests & collaborations
For information on past research projects and colleagues at Stanford University, check out the Pediatric Behavioral Physiology Laboratory, and the Children's Health Counciloutcomes research department.
To learn about the Adolescent Development Study, directed by Dr. Mary Sullivan, visit the Brown University Center for the Study of Children at Risk.
Education
Brown University Ph.D., 2007
Psychology
Cornell University B.A., 1998
Biology & Society
Contact Information
Hunter Laboratory of Psychology
89 Waterman Street
Box 1853
Brown University
Email: Amy_Marks "at" brown "dot" edu
akmarks "at" suffolk "dot" edu