Peer-Reviewed Articles

2025

Gravelle, D., Brooks, P. J., & Sawyer, J. E. (2025). Disentangling effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests on implicit anti-Black bias. Acta Psychologica.

2024

Gravelle, C. D., Sawyer, J. E., Rualo, G., & Brooks, P. J. (2024). A critical activist orientation predicts lower latent ableist bias. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 24, 1032–1056.

2023

Sawyer, J. E. (2023). Can private speech and sociodramatic play promote perspective taking and reduce egocentrism? A Post-Vygotskian reply to Piaget. American Journal of Play, 15(3), 254–280.

Sawyer, J. E., & Gampa, A. (2023). Social movements as parsimonious explanations for implicit and explicit attitude change. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 27(1), 28–51.

Gampa, A., & Sawyer, J. E. (2023). Transforming neoliberal social psychology into an emancipatory science: A call to abolish the police. Annual Review of Critical Psychology.

2021

Sawyer, J. E., & Brooks, P. J. (2021). Sociodramatic play enhances preschoolers’ private speech and motivation across activities. Cognitive Development, 59, 101073.

2020

Sawyer, J. E., & Gampa, A. (2020). Work alienation and its gravediggers: Social class, class consciousness, and activism. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 8(1), 198–219.

Schlesinger, M., Sawyer, J. E., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Fabiano, R. (2020). Play Captains on Play Streets: A community-university playful learning and teen leadership collaboration. Collaborations: A Journal of Community-Based Research and Practice, 3(1), 5, 1–13.

Schlesinger, M. A., Hassinger-Das, B., Zosh, J. M., Sawyer, J. E., Evans, N. E., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2020). Cognitive behavioral science behind the value of play: Leveraging everyday experiences to promote play, learning, and positive interactions. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 19(2), 202–216.

Murano, D., Sawyer, J. E., & Lipnevich, A. (2020). A meta-analytic review of preschool social and emotional learning interventions. Review of Educational Research, 90(2), 227–263.

2019

Sawyer, J. E., & Goldstein, T. (2019). Can guided play and storybook reading promote children’s drawing development? Empirical Studies of the Arts, 37(1), 32–59.

2018

Sawyer, J. E., & Gampa, A. (2018). Implicit and explicit racial attitudes changed during the Black Lives Matter movement. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(7), 1039–1059.

Sawyer, J. E., & Stetsenko, A. (2018). Revisiting Marx and problematizing Vygotsky: A transformative approach to language and speech internalization. Language Sciences, 70, 143–154.

2017

Sawyer, J. E., Obeid, R., Bublitz, D., Schwartz, A., Brooks, P. J., & Richmond, A. J. (2017). Which forms of active learning are best? Comparing cooperative learning and writing-to-learn across modalities. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 3(4), 257–271.

Sawyer, J. E. (2017). I think I can: Preschoolers’ private speech and motivation in playful versus non-playful contexts. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 38, 84–96.

2016

Sawyer, J. E. (2016). In what language do you speak to yourself? A review of private speech and bilingualism. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 36, 489–505.

Book Chapters & Reference Works

Brooks, P. J., & Sawyer, J. E. (2022). Michael Tomasello. In J. Vonk & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer.

Sawyer, J. E., & Rifino, M. (2020). Transforming educational alienation into collective agency in community colleges. In T. Ober, E. Che, J. Brodsky, C. Raffaele, & P. Brooks (Eds.), How We Teach Now, Volume 2: The GSTA Guide to Transformative Teaching (pp. 224–238). Society for the Teaching of Psychology.

Sawyer, J. E., & Brooks, P. J. (2018). Conducting Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in diverse undergraduate psychology classrooms. SAGE Research Methods Cases.

Sawyer, J. E., & Obeid, R. (2017). Cooperative and collaborative learning: Getting the best of both worlds. In R. Obeid, A. Schwartz, C. Shane-Simpson, & P. J. Brooks (Eds.), How We Teach Now: The GSTA Guide to Student-Centered Teaching. Society for the Teaching of Psychology.

Stetsenko, A., & Sawyer, J. E. (2016). Culture and development. In H. Miller (Ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Theory in Psychology, Vol. 2 (pp. 211–213). SAGE.

Sawyer, J. E., & Richmond, A. S. (2016). Adolescent development. In R. A. Gurung & A. S. Richmond (Eds.), Discover Psychology: Instructor’s Manual, Vol. 3. Diener Education Fund Publishers.

Sawyer, J. E., & Richmond, A. S. (2016). Factors influencing learning. In R. A. Gurung & A. S. Richmond (Eds.), Discover Psychology: Instructor’s Manual, Vol. 3. Diener Education Fund Publishers.

Shane-Simpson, C., Brooks, P. J., Hotez, E., Sawyer, J. E., & Dow, E. A. (2015). Web-enhanced collaborative learning in undergraduate psychology courses: Examples using the ASD Video Glossary, CHILDES, and Wikipedia. In R. V. Nata (Ed.), Progress in Education, Vol. 36 (pp. 25–47). NOVA Science Publishers.

Brooks, P., Dow, E., Jović, S., Kreniske, P., Panjwani, A., Sawyer, J. E., Schwartz, A., Shane-Simpson, C., Yannaco, F., & Yuksel-Sokmen, P. (2014). Useful books and websites for developing pedagogy in the teaching of psychology. In J. E. N. Busler, B. C. Beins, & W. Buskist (Eds.), Preparing the New Psychology Professoriate: Helping Graduate Students Become Competent Teachers, 2nd ed. (pp. 258–275). Society for the Teaching of Psychology.

Sawyer, J. E., & Stetsenko, A. (2014). Lev Vygotsky. In P. Brooks & V. Kempe (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language Development (pp. 663–666). SAGE.

Lopez, E., Sawyer, J. E., Biedenkapp, S., & Irigoyen, M. (2010). Interpreters to support linguistically diverse students and families. In A. S. Canter, L. Z. Paige, & S. Shaw (Eds.), Helping Children at Home and School III: Handouts for Parents and Educators. National Association of School Psychologists.

Public Scholarship

Gampa, A., & Sawyer, J. E. (2021). A people’s psychology of (anti-)racism. Science for the People, 23(3), 56–59.

Hirsh-Pasek, K., Sawyer, J. E., Schlesinger, M., & Talarowski, M. (2019). Philadelphia Playful Learning City Playbook.

Hassinger-Das, B., Schlesinger, M., Sawyer, J. E., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2019). Playing to learn: Inside and outside of school. Parents League Review, 24–28.

Sawyer, J. E., & Ayer, D. (2018). Montessori and “playful learning.” Montessori Public, 3(1), 4–5.

Sawyer, J. E., & Gampa, A. (2018). Building a Marxist psychology. International Socialist Review, 111.

Goldstein, T., & Sawyer, J. E. (2018). The developmental magic of children’s drawing. Psychology Today.

Dore, R., Sawyer, J. E., Schlesinger, M., Shirilla, M., Golinkoff, R., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2018). Playful learning: A way to maximize after school time. After School Today.

Sawyer, J. E. (2014). Vygotsky’s revolutionary theory of human psychological development. International Socialist Review, 93, 74–101.

Selected Talks & Media

Sawyer, J. E. (2015).
A Tale of Two Psyches: Upper-Class and Working-Class Psychology.
Socialism 2015, Chicago, IL. Audio recording.

Sawyer, J. E. (2012).
Vygotsky’s Theory of Language and Education.
Socialism 2012, Chicago, IL. Audio recording.