Kathryn Fletcher Ball State

An accomplished educator and researcher whose work primarily focuses on child and adolescent development, Kathryn Fletcher currently teaches undergraduate and graduate students at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Serving as a Professor within Ball State’s Department of Educational Psychology since 2001, Dr. Fletcher also maintains ties with a number of professional organizations, including the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Research in Child Development. Aside from the academic responsibilities she holds at Ball State, Kathryn Fletcher has published a wide range of scholarly articles that highlight her interest in early-life literacy, youth with special needs, and perfectionism tendencies in young people.

Several years after she joined the Ball State University faculty, Kathryn Fletcher submitted the findings of a study she conducted on image-stimulated learning to the journal Early Childhood Research & Practice. In this article, Dr. Fletcher explored how toddlers interact with picture books, based on background information provided by the test subjects’ parents. Asked to categorize their children’s interest level in books, parents filled out a questionnaire developed by the Stony Brook Family Reading Survey. While some parents categorized their offspring as highly engaged visual learners, others downplayed the importance of pictures as they related to their children's overall enthusiasm for books. In a pre-test, Kathryn Fletcher and her research partner displayed a series of eight photographs to each 15-month-old child involved in the study and noted their gestures (pointing, touching, grasping, and hitting) and their indicative curiosity and awareness.

Following a brief reading interaction, Kathryn Fletcher performed a post-test, which revealed that children who ranked as less interested in picture books actually demonstrated increased fascination with visual imagery compared to other test subjects. Supporting theories previously proposed by researchers, the outcome of Dr. Fletcher’s study opened up new avenues for debate regarding photographic stimuli and its effect on toddlers’ reading behaviors. To further her career aims in a socially beneficial way, Dr. Fletcher plans on forming a nonprofit organization that will collect and distribute books to disadvantaged youth.