Catherine McBride-Chang[1] is a Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong,[2] and her area of expertise is in developmental psychology specializing in the acquisition of early literacy skills [3]
Books she has published include Children's Literacy Development and Reading Development in Chinese Children.
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Catherine McBride-Chang received her BA in Psychology from Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. She received her MA in 1992 and PhD in 1994 from the University of Southern California, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL. Dr. McBride has published on a variety of topics in developmental psychology, including parenting, child abuse, peer relations, creativity, as well as reading development and impairment. The author of approximately ninety peer-reviewed journal articles, she has also edited one book (2003, Praeger) entitled Reading Development in Chinese Children (with Professor H.-C. Chen) and written a book entitled Children’s Literacy Development (2004, Oxford University Press). McBride-Chang is an Associate Editor of Developmental Psychology and currently serves on the editorial boards of six additional journals; these are the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, the Scientific Studies of Reading, Annals of Dyslexia, Reading Research Quarterly, the Journal of Educational Psychology, and Psychological Science. She is also a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and serves on the Board of the Scientific Studies of Reading.
Her current research interests are social and cognitive development, especially reading (activity) and vocabulary development,cross-cultural comparisons of the incidence of learning disability, and cultural influences on achievement issues. The topics she researches include details of the orthography of written language, and achievement issues. The skills in learning to read are discussed with regard to incidence rates of dyslexia worldwide.
The importance of McBride-Chang's work is firstly the provision of a global overview of the prerequisite skills for early literacy acquisition, and secondly a perspective which demonstrates how disabilities and problems vary by culture, as the dynamics of the language, the orthography of the alphabet, and the age at which students learn varies by country. Trends across continents are commented on, which give support to concerns that problems in one culture, such as boys' achievement. can also be problematic in other cultures. One of the most interesting results is that rates of dyslexia differ by country, and is correlated with the spelling and phonetic rules associated with the language. English is one of the more difficult languages,with many irregular spellings and pronunciations, and notably a higher rate of diagnosed dyslexia in the population than countries where the alphabet script is more phonetically pronounced. This impacts current educational thinking under the No Child Left Behind Act: to provide support with response to intervention for struggling readers rather than just use a discrepancy model, the gap between Full Scale Intelligence Test Score and a student's achievement on a standardized testing measure for special educational identification.