Contact Melissa
Melissa Burch
413.549.4600
On sabbatical fall 2025 and spring 2026.
Melissa Burch
Associate Professor of Cognitive Development
Melissa Burch, associate professor of cognitive development, received her B.A. in psychology from Franklin and Marshall College. She earned her Ph.D. in child development with a minor in interpersonal relationships from the University of Minnesota.
Melissa's research interests center on memory development, particularly memory for personal experiences. She has been exploring how parental verbal support may contribute to children's ability to recall the past.
In addition, she is interested in how emotion may affect reports of past experiences and how parents and children talk about these events.
She is currently examining autobiographical memory from a cross-cultural perspective to study how different socialization experiences may relate to the detail included in memory reports.
Recent and Upcoming Courses
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The majority of adults are able to read fluently, however, learning to read can be challenging. As children learn to read, the process is dependent on a number of skills and requires a great deal of adult guidance. We will focus on the development of the complex skill of reading, including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and higher-order processes that contribute to decoding and text comprehension. Because instruction can play a determining factor in children's acquisition of literacy skills, we will study early reading materials and examine strategies that are employed in the classroom to facilitate the acquisition of these skills. In addition, we will discuss the cultural importance of literacy. We will also consider the importance of multicultural children's literature and explore aspects of critical literacy in the classroom. Evaluation will be based on class participation, a series of short papers, and a longer final project Keywords:Literacy, education, childhood studies, child development
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Autobiographical memories for personal past experiences create our life stories. Our memories range from the mundane to the momentous. In this course we will explore psychological research to understand the functions and development of autobiographical memory. What are the basic cognitive processes that contribute to our ability to remember and report the past? How do we interpret past events to inform the development of our self-identity? How do social experiences contribute to the development of memory? We will also discuss how emotions at encoding and retrieval influence our recall of past experience as we make meaning of personal past experiences. Keywords:Psychology, memory, narrative
