Their research was published in the journal Infant Behavior & Development, which is an international and interdisciplinary journal, publishing high-quality work on infancy.
Reflecting the ethos of Elon University’s Teacher-Scholar-Mentor model, Sabrina Thurman, associate professor in the Psychology Department in Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences, recently published a peer-reviewed scholarly research article with a former research mentee Rebecca Rose ’23. The article, titled “Infants’ organization of pull-to-stand behaviors during play: A longitudinal investigation,” was recently published in the international and interdisciplinary journal Infant Behavior and Development.
In this empirical report, Thurman and Rose tracked how gains in pull-to-stand, standing and walking experience contributed to infants’ selection of more skilled pull-to-stand strategies and reorganized how infants used pull-to-stand behaviors to facilitate free play. They found even after months of practice pulling-to-stand, infants continue to modify their arm and leg movements and use various strategies to pull up. Infants also seem to use pull-to-stand differently during play as they gain experience over time, first to engage with objects and later to move about a play space. This research highlights the importance of studying coordination patterns of pull-to-stand in context.
Thurman is an active mentor of undergraduate research, a research seminar leader for the Center for Engaged Learning’s 2023-2025 research seminar on Mentoring Meaningful Learning Experiences, and is the director of the Infant Development Laboratory at Elon University. Thurman initially met Rose in 2021 when Rose was an undergraduate student at the university. Rose was an Elon College Fellow and joined Thurman’s research team as a mentee during her sophomore year, where she contributed to several research studies on infant motor development. Rose
began this research on infant’s pull-to-stand behaviors during her time at Elon and presented her work at the biennial conference for the Society for Research in Child Development in Salt Lake City, Utah in 2023. Rose completed requirements for the research project and Elon College Fellows, and graduated from Elon University in 2023.
The journey to publishing this research took a considerable amount of time, and Thurman and Rose continued to collaborate and deepen this project after Rose’s graduation. They completed a range of new analyses beyond those included in Rose’s Fellows research, which required thorough literature reviews and meticulous data interpretation. Before finalizing the publication, Thurman and Rose also presented their work at two major professional conferences in 2024 at the IEEE International Conference of Developmental Learning in Austin, Texas, and at the International Conference of Infant Studies in Glasgow, Scotland. These presentations played a critical role in enhancing the project. The feedback they received from these conference presentations provided invaluable insights that helped refine their analyses and strengthened the article’s overall impact.
Altogether, this research project took Thurman and Rose four years to complete. This is not uncommon for developmental research projects that involve behavioral video coding, which requires researchers to watch recorded infant behaviors and mark moments of interest for analysis using specialized software. This work requires strong perseverance, high attention to detail and refinement which meant the road to publication was a long journey, but it paid off and resulted in a meaningful mentored research study that advanced both student learning and the field of infant motor development.