My research began by examining how adult-child interactions shape children’s development. As my work evolved, I increasingly recognized that conditions surrounding adult-child interactions, especially unequal access to resources, shape what families and educators can provide for children.
Jiang, Y., Kaplan, B., & Ko-Wong, L. (2026). Does teacher talk matter too? A meta-analysis of partial correlations between teachers’ language practices and children’s language development from preschool to third grade. Review of Educational Research, 96(4), 1136–1172. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543251339131
Hassani, A., Flores, M., Streuli, S., Jiang, Y., Wishard Guerra, A., & Fielding-Miller, R. (2025). After mandates end: Complex decision making regarding COVID-19 masking in San Diego elementary schools through the social ecological model. Journal of School Health, 95(8), 597–603. https://doi.org/10.1111/josh.70026
Jiang, Y., Guerra, A. W., Cohen, S. R., Brown, T. T., Lin, N. T., Molgaard, M., & Iversen, J. (2024). Echoing parental scaffolding style in co-constructed narratives: Its impact on executive function development in diverse early school-age children. Early Education and Development, 35(6), 1335–1352. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2024.2360872
My first-generation and working-class background and transnational experiences across China and the United States have made me acutely aware that disadvantage involves not only access to material resources, but also whose knowledge and practices are recognized and given authority.
Jiang, Y. (2026). Navigating the “ideals”: A comparative case study of early educators’ sensemaking of quality in the United States and China. Teaching and Teacher Education, 182, Article 105796. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2026.105796
Kim, S., Ko-Wong, L., & Jiang, Y. (2026). Critical race theory perspectives on bullying victimization of marginalized minorities. In M. Sapouna, R. A. Willems, & P. K. Smith (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of bias-based bullying. Cambridge University Press.
Development and education are complex, relational, and culturally situated, and the methods we use shape what becomes visible. My methodological research examines how emerging computational tools can bridge quantitative and qualitative inquiry to capture this complexity.
Jiang, Y., Ko-Wong, L., & Valdovinos Gutierrez, I. (2025). The feasibility and comparability of using artificial intelligence for qualitative data analysis in equity-focused research. Educational Researcher, 54(3), 153–163. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X251314821
Jiang, Y., Liu, S., & Fisher, P. A. (2026). A comparative evaluation of structural topic models and BERTopic for short, open-ended survey responses [Preprint]. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.23093