Dr. Cecilia Cheung is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. After obtaining a Bachelor’s of Social Science and a Master’s of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, she received a Doctorate in Developmental Psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Cheung's research focuses on the role of parents, teachers, and peers in children and adolescents' school motivation and achievement. Her research uses a cross-cultural approach to explicate pathways of children's development across diverse cultural contexts. Findings from her research have been published in high-impact journals in the fields of education and child development. Dr. Cheung's research has been funded by national and international agencies, as well as private foundations. She is recipient of two prestigious early career research awards from the American Psychological Association and the Society for Research in Child Development.
My research aims to understand how children’s environment shapes their motivation and achievement in school. To this end, I have primarily focused on the role of parents. In one line of research, I have examined the effects of parents’ involvement in children’s learning in the United States and China, with attention to the mechanisms underlying the effects. A second line has centered on the role of children’s disclosure of their everyday activities to parents in children’s academic adjustment, focusing on the contribution of the socialization context. In a third line of work, I have begun to investigate relationships in the classroom – specifically, children’s relatedness to teachers – to elucidate how the effects of such relationships on children’s achievement vary across cultures.
