Callie Little
check Recruiting a graduate student for Fall of 2026
Education
Florida State University, 2016
Research Interests
Dr. Little is Assistant Professor of Psychology and core faculty in the Florida Center for Reading Research. Her work examines how child-specific factors such as genetic influences transact with environmental contexts to shape learning trajectories. To capture the complexity of environmental influence, Dr. Little integrates geospatial analyses into her research. These tools allow her to quantify environmental advantage and opportunity in innovative ways, providing richer insight into how neighborhood, community, and geographic contexts interact with children’s innate characteristics to influence reading development. Ultimately, her research aims to inform targeted, context-sensitive instruction that support children’s literacy and broader learning outcomes, ensuring that every child has the opportunity to thrive.
Lab Description
The Platypus lab’s current projects include a large NIH grant that uses a risk-resilience framework to understand COVID-19 impacts on children and uncover how and why COVID-19 impacted children's reading skills. Risk-resilience models recognize children have varying levels of risk factors that make them more or less likely to be affected by COVID-19 related disruptions to resilience factors like health, economic, and social supports. Through another NIH grant, the lab is focused on using personalized learning factors to identify and predict unexpected academic performance relative to a child’s risk or opportunity status.
Little, C. W., Lancaster, H. S., Johnson, R. M., Kennedy, P. C., Taylor, J. E., Ganley, C., … Hart, S. A. (2025). Charting the Shift: Age as a Moderator of the Genetic and Environmental Influences on Reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2025.2561985
Little, C.W., Erbeli, F., Francis, D.J., Tynan, J. (2022) Developmental trajectories for literacy and math skills from primary to secondary school. Journal of Research in Reading. 45(1), 65-82. doi: 10.1111/1467-9817.12382
Hart, S.A., Little, C.W, & van Bergen, E. (2021). Nurture might be nature: Cautionary tales and proposed solutions. Science of Learning. 6(1), 2. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-020-00079-z.
Little, C.W., Larsen, S.A., Byrne, B., Logan, J.A.R., Olson, R.K., Coventry, W.C. (2020). Exploring the influence of early childhood education and care on the etiology of achievement. Behavior Genetics. 50, 387-400. doi: https://oi.org/10.1007/s10519-020-10013-z
Little, C.W., Lonigan, C.J., Phillips, B.M. (2020). Differential patterns of growth in reading and math skills during elementary school. Journal of Educational Psychology. 113(3), 462. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000635
Little, C.W, Hart, S.A., Phillips, B.M., Schatschneider, C., & Taylor, J.E. (2019). Exploring neighborhood environmental influences on reading comprehension. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. 62, 173-184. doi: 10.1016/j.appdev.2019.02.009