Dana McCoy

Research Fellow

Department of Global Health and Population

Dana Charles McCoy is a post-doctoral research fellow for the Saving Brains Initiative with a joint appointment between the Department of Global Health and Population and the Center on the Developing Child.  Her research focuses on understanding the ways that poverty-related stressors in young children’s home, school, and community environments impact their cognitive and socioemotional development.  In addition to studying these processes, Dana is interested in the development, refinement, and evaluation of interventions that promote positive development in the United States and internationally.  Her work makes use of experimental and quasi-experimental methodology that promotes causal inference, as well as novel measurement paradigms that allow for more ecologically valid approaches to capturing complex individual and contextual processes.  Dana received her AB in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College and PhD in Applied Psychology from New York University.

 

Selected Publications:

McCoy, D. C., Roy, A. E., & Sirkman, G. (in press). Neighborhood crime and school climate as predictors of elementary school academic quality: A cross-lagged panel analysis, American Journal of Community Psychology.

McCoy, D. C. (in press). Early violence exposure and self-regulatory development: An ecological systems perspective, Human Development.

Raver, C. C., McCoy, D. C., Lowenstein, A. E., & Pess, R. P. (2013). Predicting individual differences in low-income children’s executive control from early to middle childhood, Developmental Science, 16, 394-408.

Tubbs, C., & McCoy, D. C. (2012). Early childhood development: An introduction. In Wuermli, A., & Lundberg, M. (Eds.), Economic crisis and the next generation: Protecting and promoting young people’s development. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

Raver, C. C., Smith Carter, J., McCoy, D. C., Roy, A., Ursache, A., & Friedman, A. (2012).Testing models of children’s self-regulation within educational contexts: Implications for measurement. In J. Benson (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (pp 245-270). Burlington, VT: Academic Press.

McCoy, D. C., Raver, C. C., Lowenstein, A. E., & Tirado-Strayer, N. (2011). Assessing self-regulation in the classroom: Validation of the BIS-11 and the BRIEF in low-income, ethnic minority school-aged children. Early Education & Development, 22, 883-906.

McCoy, D. C., & Raver, C. C. (2011).Caregiver emotional expressiveness, child emotion regulation, and child behavior problems among Head Start families. Social Development, 20, 741-761.