Professor Jacquelynne S. Eccles (Wilbert McKeachie Collegiate Professor of Psychology, Education and Women´s Studies) received her PhD from UCLA in 1974 and has served on the faculty at Smith College, the University of Colorado, and the University of Michigan. In 1998-99, she was the Interim Chair of Psychology at the University of Michigan. She is chair of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Successful Pathways through Middle Childhood and was a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Successful Pathways through Adolescence. She was SRA (Society for Research on Adolescence) program chair in 1996, has served on the SRA Council, and is now President-Elect. She was also Program Chair and President for Division 35 of APA. At present, she is on the CBASSE Committee of the National Academy of Science and is chair of the NAS Committee on After School Programs for Youth. Her awards include: the Spencer Foundation Fellowship for Outstanding Young Scholar in Educational Research, the Sarah Goddard Power Award for Outstanding Service from the University of Michigan, the APS Cattell Fellows Award for Outstanding Applied Work in Psychology, SPSSI´s Kurt Lewin Award for outstanding research, and the University of Michigan Faculty Recognition Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Her 1993 American Psychologist article was reprinted in the APA volume recognizing outstanding articles from the last 50 years. She is a Fellow in American Psychological Association, American Psychological Society, and Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.
Professor Eccles has conducted research on topics ranging from gender-role socialization, teacher expectancies, and classroom influences on student motivation to social development in the family and school context. With close to 200 publications, Professor Eccles´s most recent work focuses on the longitudinal study of the development and socialization of the following types of psychological influences on motivation, activity choice and involvement: self-perceptions of competence, task values and interests, life goals, self-schema, motivational orientation, and mental health. Professor Eccles is particularly interested in the role schools, families, neighborhoods, and ethnicity play in ontogeny of these belief and motivational systems. This is included in three ongoing investigations: (1) an investigation of the declines in adolescents´ motivation, self-concept, and mental health associated with the junior and senior high school transitions: (2) an investigation of the development of self-schema and motivational beliefs during middle childhood years in the context of family and school environments; and (3) an investigation of the impact of family, social class, school, neighborhood, and ethnicity on the development of motivation, self-schemas, mental health, and engagement in both positive and risky activities among a large sample of black and white adolescents. |