Dr. Julia Mendez is an Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology at Temple University. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 from the APA-approved program in School, Community and Clinical Child Psychology. She also received a master's degree in Psychological Services from Penn. She completed her undergraduate studies in psychology at Duke University. Dr. Mendez has completed school-based and clinical internships as part of her doctoral training. She worked in the Ewing, NJ school district and received training at the Center for Children's Support at the University of Medicine and Dentristry of New Jersey in Stratford, NJ in cognitive behavioral intervention and family therapy with child victims of sexual abuse. Dr. Mendez has worked as a clinical psychologist with the Philadelphia chapter of the United Cerebral Palsy Association.
Before joining Temple University in 2003, Dr. Mendez worked for four years as an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina. In March, 2001, she received a five-year grant to establish the Head Start Quality Research Center at the University of South Carolina. The purpose of the center is to develop and test a preventive intervention designed to promote home-school connection and parent-child interactive learning for children attending Head Start programs. Dr. Mendez plans to use the last two years of grant funding to continue this intervention research with Head Start programs in the Philadelphia area. There are 8 HSQRC sites located at universities around the country and consortium members meet quarterly in Washington, D.C. to discuss research and serve as an advisory board for the Head Start Bureau. Presently, consortium members are overseeing the Family and Children Educational Survey, 2003, which is a multidimensional study involving a nationally representative sample of families and children enrolled in Head Start programs. Dr. Mendez has teaching and research interests related to the impact of poverty on the development of young children, life span developmental psychology, risk and resilience, and clinical interventions for minority children and families.
Dr. Mendez is a licensed psychologist in the state of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Mendez has a new grant funded by the Department of Health and Human Services titled "Adaptation and Evaluation of a Parenting Intervention with Families of English Language Learners attending Head Start."
The proposed project objectives are in response to Head Start's mission of promoting family involvement and home–school collaboration in order to enhance English Language Learner children's early learning and development. This proposal outlines a plan for implementing a parenting intervention that exposes ELL families to the educational, mental health, and family involvement components of Head Start contained within the National Performance Standards. The manualized curriculum is designed to offer parents hands-on experience with educational activities that take place within their children's Head Start classrooms, in order to promote increased parent-child interaction at home and parent involvement in school. The twelve-week Parent Excellence Series will be delivered to small groups of Head Start parents via a bilingual facilitator and a co-facilitator familiar with Head Start (e.g. teacher or family partner). During year one, the intervention will be adapted for use with specific populations of ELL families. Years two and three will be used to evaluate the program using a randomized design to determine effects of the program on key stakeholders and participants, including children, parents, and teachers. Additional project objectives involve replication of the intervention procedures with a sample from a different Head Start program partner and conducting cultural factors research. Specifically, psychometric properties of newly adapted and existing measures for bilingual populations will be evaluated and concurrent validation studies are planned. In addition, the impact of cultural variation in family attitudes towards school readiness, acculturation, and key child and parent covariates will be assessed in relation to children's school readiness outcomes. This project will sample 40-50 ELL children per year who are members of primarily Spanish-speaking or Turkish-speaking families, for a total sample of 150 bilingual children and families.
