Prentice Starkey, Ph.D.
Senior Research Associate
WestEd

Prentice Starkey’s work focuses on child development and education (birth through childhood/infant-toddler programs through elementary school). Some of his specific interests include the early development of mathematical cognition, mathematics education, children in poverty, and early educational interventions. He is principal investigator on two funded research projects: Development and Evaluation of a Family Math Program for Head Start, a bi-generational early math intervention project; and Temporal Segmentation of Speech by Infants, an investigation of numerical and speech processing during infancy. Representative publications include "Numerical Abstraction by Human Infants," in Cognition (with E.S. Spelke and R. Gelman, 1990); "The Early Development of Numerical Reasoning," in Cognition (1992); "A Bi-generational Mathematics Intervention Project with Head Start Families," in Proceedings of the National Head Start Research Conference (with A. Klein, 1994); "The Development of Children’s Mathematical Thinking: Theory, Research, and Practice," in the Handbook of Child Psychology, 5th edition (with H. P. Ginsburg and A. Klein, in press). Prentice Starkey is also a member of the Institute of Human Development.

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