Research Site Close-up:
Tripoli, Tyre, Chouf Mountains, Jounie and Keserwan, Koura, and Beirut, LEBANON
Sunni and Shia Islam; Druze faith; Maronite, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant Christianity
PIs: Tamer Amin (Lead) • Maliki E. Ghossainy (Co-PI)
SINGAPORE
PI: Kushnir
Tamer Amin (PI) earned his MA and PhD in developmental psychology from Clark University, USA. He is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Education at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. His research focuses on conceptual change in science learning. He has been examining how the cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual metaphor can help uncover image schematic structures implicit in the language of science and how these can support and sometimes hinder learning scientific concepts. In a parallel line of research, he is investigating the challenges of teaching and learning science in the multilingual contexts of the Arab world and how these challenges might be overcome.
Maliki E. Ghossainy (Co-PI) completed her PhD in developmental psychology and her MS in statistics from The University of Texas at Austin in 2016. She studies the ways that children demonstrate early signs of epistemic vigilance, that is, the ability to selectively prefer some informants as good sources and judiciously avoid some informants as bad sources. Her research is particularly focused on the ways in which children rely on nonverbal or implicit cues to infer credibility. She has found evidence of a dramatic change between ages 5 and 6 in children’s use of nonverbal leakage to infer that a speaker may be lying and is currently investigating the underlying mechanisms that may explain these findings. She is also currently studying the role of linguistic behaviors on the epistemic judgements of bilingual children in Lebanon and the USA. In addition to serving as co-PI for this research team, she is the Senior Research Scientist for the Developing Belief Network, and is currently based at Boston University.
Images of Lebanon, a research site for this sub-grant.