Wendy Ostroff

Office

Education

Cognitive Science/Developmental Psychology
Ph.D. (2000) and M.S. (1998) in Psychological Science/Developmental Psychology,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: Blacksburg, Virginia.

Academic Interests

As an applied cognitive and developmental psychologist, my research is about learning—how we are born to do it, and how the many layers of our developmental systems allow it to emerge over our lifetimes.

I have studied attention and perception and how they arise from multiple layers of influence. I have also designed and implemented empirical studies with infants and children on native and nonnative language processing, imitation, the socioemotional underpinnings of communication, the role of emotion in guiding attention, and the role of articulation in language and literacy.

I am currently exploring links between metacognition (thinking about one's own thinking, monitoring and regulating mental operations), and the development of articulation within the field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The development of metacognition and articulation are linked to critical pedagogy, another passion of mine, based on the notion that learning is a process of invention, rather than one of accumulation.

My greatest goal is to discover, share and integrate cutting-edge knowledge about learning into on-the-ground teaching at all levels. In my first book, Understanding How Young Children Learn: Bringing the Science of Child Development to the Classroom (2012), I endeavored to make the scientific findings on motivation, attention, memory, cognition, and action accessible in meaningful ways to practitioners.In my second book about grounding classrooms in curiosity by opening up time and space, and by fostering imagination, effortless learning and intrinsic motivation.

I am passionate about innovative and emergent pedagogies and state of the art teacher education. The greatest joy of my career has been learning along with my students in seminars. While teaching here in Hutchins, I have created courses on learning and cognition, gender, language acquisition, identity, existential philosophy, Russian literature, neuroscience, epistemology, and psychopathology, to name a few.

Selected Publications & Presentations

Academic Books
Ostroff, W.L. (2022). Empowering Young Children: How to Nourish Deep, Transformative
Learning for Social Justice. New York, NY: Routledge. (Book Release Date: August 30, 2022).
Ostroff, W.L. (2016). Cultivating Curiosity in K-12 Classrooms: How to Promote and Sustain Deep
Learning. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. (Book Release Date: July, 2016).
Ostroff, W.L. (2012). Understanding How Young Children Learn: Bringing the Science of Child
Development to the Classroom. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. (Book Release Date: August 24, 2012).
Woolfolk Hoy, A. E.,& Perry, N. (2012). Child and Adolescent Development (W. Ostroff,
Contrib.). Columbus, OH: Pearson/Allyn & Bacon.

Fiction
Ostroff, W.L. (2025). Needing to Believe (That Life Was Worth Living). The Brussels Review:
Collected Works in Contemporary Art and Literature. Brussels, Belgium.
 

Academic Articles & Chapters
Panneton, R.P., Ostroff, W.L., Bhullar, N. & Netto, M. (2024). Plasticity in Older Infants’
Perception of Phonetic Contrasts: The Role of Selective Attention in Context. Infancy. Special
Issue: Developmental Plasticity in Early Human Development, 1-23.
https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12620
Ostroff, W.L. (2024). Empowering Ideas: Philosophy Dialogue Project. In C. Harrington (Ed.),
Creating Culturally Affirming and Meaningful Assignments: A Practical Resource for Higher
Education Faculty. Routledge.
Ostroff, W.L. (2023). Growing Prosocial Brains: How To Fine-Tune Challenging Behavior and
Encourage Responsibility and Agency In our Students. Educational Leadership, 81 (3), 70-75.
Ostroff, W.L. (2022). The Embodied Nature of Mathematical Learning. Exchange: Bridging
Research and Practice, November/December Issue, 41-44.
Ostroff, W.L. (2021). Losing Track of Time: The Young Child’s Meandering Path to Deep
Learning. Exchange: Bridging Research and Practice, September/October Issue, 20-24.
Ostroff, W.L. (2020). Teaching Young Children Remotely. Educational Leadership, 78(3), 20-25.
Ostroff, W.L. (2020). Empowering Children Through Dialogue and Discussion. Educational
Leadership, 77(7), 14-20.
Ostroff, W.L. (2020). The Cognitive Science and Neuroscience of Young Children’s Curiosity.
Exchange: Bridging Research and Practice, May/June Issue, 20-26.

Ostroff, W.L. (2019). The Art and Science of Transformation in the Hutchins Seminar. In D.
Hammond (Ed.), Education for an Engaged Citizenry: The Hutchins School of Liberal Studies.
Independently Published.
Ostroff, W.L. (2015). Asking to Learn. Educational Leadership, 73 (1), 97 – 99.
Ostroff, W.L. (2014). Don't Just Sit There: Pay Attention! Educational Leadership, 72 (2), 70 – 74.