@laurengh
NSF SBE Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard and UMich • Incoming Professor at TCNJ • Interdisciplinary researcher studying what kids think about AI • Science Communicator • R Stats nerd • Passionate about Pedagogy • FirstGen 🏳️🌈
And to be clear— I love the job I have! TCNJ was a dream fit in so many ways, and I’m so, so grateful that they felt the same. I just highlight these numbers, particularly for graduate students, to share a bit more about what it looks like to be on the market right now.
I did let 2 institutions know I was taking an offer before they made their final decisions, but I think it’s still insightful. The job market was tough this year. I would consider this an extremely successful year for me, and there was still the very real possibility I ended up without a position.
I think it’s amazing how much my postdoc has clearly helped me define myself as a scholar and improve in my ability to articulate that on paper and thru Zoom. But I’m struck by the paucity of positions for me to apply to in comparison to 2 years ago and my low turnover rate from in person to offer.
For comparison, 2 years ago straight out of graduate school, I applied to 82 positions on the east coast, received 8 Zoom invites, 3 on campus interviews, and one offer for a non-TT position at an R1. I had no R1 TT interviews, Zoom or otherwise.
8 of my Zoom invites came from SLACs or regional public colleges, 3 from R1s. I had 1 in person interview with an R1 institution. I was location bound— barring a few exceptions, almost all of my applications were to schools in the eastern time zone.
Some job market stats, because I think it’s important to talk about! My job market cycle felt slim this year. I applied to 47 jobs across psychology, education, information science, and comm departments. I received 11 Zoom invites and 8 in person interviews, which translated into 1 offer. #acjobs
I see evidence of this in my ongoing work, with children describing chatbots as “basically Google” and applying their own digital literacy skills to these AI-enabled sources (e.g. “it’ll search it up on Google and pick the best sources”).
This has huge implications for our current era of AI-enabled search. School age children who view using chatbots like ChatGPT as similar to conducting a Google search may be willing to impute Google’s trustworthiness to chatbots without feeling the need to think critically about their differences.
We also found that children’s cue use changed with age: 4-6 year old children rely on the familiarity of a source when deciding whether to trust it, but by age 7 children apply epistemic rules of thumb across kinds, treating novel search engines like Google based on similar features and functions.
🚨 Out now in Child Development!
We asked 4- to 8-year-old children about getting answers from Google and a teacher. By age 6, children endorsed Google’s ability to answer correctly more often and believed that Google would also be better at answering questions about the world around them.
Lauren stands in front of greenery. She is smiling and wearing a navy blue silk blouse and black trousers with blue flowers on them.
Starting January 2027 I’ll be joining The College of New Jersey as a tenure track assistant professor in Applied Cognition. The dream of dreams was to accept a position near New York City at an institution with liberal arts sensibilities but ample research resources. TCNJ immediately felt like home.
🧵New preprint: Adults often agree with their ingroup even when evidence says otherwise. Why?
To find out, we studied kids, who show the same tendency but *before* political identities take hold. With developmental data, we can see the basic psychological ingredients.
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
1/11
My research students can get lab hours this week by studying for finals with each other, but they have to send me a picture of their work together. Which means I get fun pictures of chemistry worksheets and papers next to matching coffee cups to break up the monotony of my inbox. 13/10 recommend.
Call for Submissions Issue 28: General Issue The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP) seeks scholarly work at the intersection of teaching, learning, and research with technology • Textual and multimedia submissions - interdisciplinary approaches in humanities, sciences, and social sciences welcome • Audio/visual presentations, interviews, dialogues, or conversations; creative/artistic works; manifestos; or other scholarly materials and/or methodologies - work addressing labor and care considerations of teaching and creating projects with digital technology
Have you thought about submitting something to JITP but your idea didn’t quite fit with our themed issues? Submit to our **GENERAL ISSUE** by December 15th and show us how you think about the intersection of teaching, learning, and research with technology. See you in our inbox!
Dear Lauren, We are writing to inform you that your abstract submission, titled, Children and technology: Emerging scholars, emerging methods, emerging directions, has been accepted for inclusion at CDS 2026 as a pre-conference workshop. Congratulations!
Over the moon because I’m chairing a pre-conference at CDS with a group of researchers I so admire and bringing back my personal favorite pre-conference with a new twist in the process!
Transparent and comprehensive statistical reporting is critical for ensuring the credibility, reproducibility, and interpretability of psychological research. This paper offers a structured set of guidelines for reporting statistical analyses in quantitative psychology, emphasizing clarity at both the planning and results stages. Drawing on established recommendations and emerging best practices, we outline key decisions related to hypothesis formulation, sample size justification, preregistration, outlier and missing data handling, statistical model specification, and the interpretation of inferential outcomes. We address considerations across frequentist and Bayesian frameworks and fixed as well as sequential research designs, including guidance on effect size reporting, equivalence testing, and the appropriate treatment of null results. To facilitate implementation of these recommendations, we provide the Transparent Statistical Reporting in Psychology (TSRP) Checklist that researchers can use to systematically evaluate and improve their statistical reporting practices (https://osf.io/t2zpq/). In addition, we provide a curated list of freely available tools, packages, and functions that researchers can use to implement transparent reporting practices in their own analyses to bridge the gap between theory and practice. To illustrate the practical application of these principles, we provide a side-by-side comparison of insufficient versus best-practice reporting using a hypothetical cognitive psychology study. By adopting transparent reporting standards, researchers can improve the robustness of individual studies and facilitate cumulative scientific progress through more reliable meta-analyses and research syntheses.
Our paper on improving statistical reporting in psychology is now online 🎉
As a part of this paper, we also created the Transparent Statistical Reporting in Psychology checklist, which researchers can use to improve their statistical reporting practices
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Whatever powers-that-be decided CDS, MPA, and AERA could all be the same weekend really had a thing against me personally, I fear.
I desperately want to do a stats teaching demo this job cycle just to pull this out of my back pocket.
If you need me, I’ll be playing with this all day.
hadley.github.io/genzplyr/
Lauren’s project research team at Pizza House to start off the Fall semester right. 15 individuals are seated at a long table smiling with much pizza and garlic bread.
Feeling so proud of my 14!!! research assistants this week. Four submitted abstracts to MPA, our regional conference, yesterday and tomorrow 10 of them are joining me for a quarterly book club on @mcxfrank.bsky.social and colleagues’ fantastic Experimentology text (Chapters 1-4). What a good group.
Had a great time a few weeks ago talking about OpEds with MIT graduate students!
Hello! R-Ladies Boston is hosting a #dataviz virtual round robin where we show off some cool figures we made or working on! Come join us for a fun time! www.meetup.com/rladies-bost...
10 MORE DAYS! I would love to see some #DISI #CogDev #SciComm submissions come through!
A friend of mine gave my website a refresh and now it is so pretty. More features to come, but for now you can see my basic overview at laurengirouard.com. So spiffy!
Started my own little rejection collection for this job cycle and it officially has its first entry. Hopefully I’ll get to balance it out in the coming weeks. And if not, more pizza for me! ;)
Really great read from @biblioracle.bsky.social this morning.
open.substack.com/pub/bibliora...
Denver is quite possibly my favorite place on earth, I’ll have my eyes peeled!
It’s job market season & I’m back on the market for the first time since leaving grad school. It’s quite gratifying to give my materials a full refresh & see how much I’ve grown as a scholar. If you’re looking for a cog/dev researcher who maybe also loves a stats class, you know where to find me! 😉
The second half of my dissertation is officially in press at Child Development. I hear I’ve successfully avoided the curse of carrying your dissertation around for years. These studies have some of my favorite findings from my time in graduate school, so I can’t wait to see them out in the world!
Due to a recent influx of problematic submissions, PsyArXiv has switched to pre-moderating its content. If your submitted preprint had not yet been approved, it will be temporarily inaccessible to the public (you can still view your preprint when logged into your OSF account). #PsychSciSky