Callie Little, Ph.D.
Research Interests
Dr. Callie Little is Assistant Professor of Psychology and core faculty in the Florida Center for Reading Research. Her work examines how child-specific factors such as genetic influences transact with environmental contexts to shape learning trajectories. To capture the complexity of environmental influence, Dr. Little integrates geospatial analyses into her research. These tools allow her to quantify environmental advantage and opportunity in innovative ways, providing richer insight into how neighborhood, community, and geographic contexts interact with children’s innate characteristics to influence reading development. Ultimately, her research aims to inform targeted, context-sensitive instruction that support children’s literacy and broader learning outcomes, ensuring that every child has the opportunity to thrive.
Lab Description
The Platypus lab’s current projects include a large NIH grant that uses a risk-resilience framework to understand COVID-19 impacts on children and uncover how and why COVID-19 impacted children's reading skills. Risk-resilience models recognize children have varying levels of risk factors that make them more or less likely to be affected by COVID-19 related disruptions to resilience factors like health, economic, and social supports. Through another NIH grant, the lab is focused on using personalized learning factors to identify and predict unexpected academic performance relative to a child’s risk or opportunity status.
