I investigate learning within the contexts of cognition, affect/motivation, and identity. To understand how these learning processes are rooted in individuals’ lived experiences, I conduct qualitative and mixed-methods studies. These methodologies allow learners’ voices to shape our understanding of how learning occurs and the nuances of learning.
How do emotions and behaviors drive learning in different environments?
Emotions play an important role in learning, potentially impacting students’ behaviors and teachers’ responses. I investigate confusion, an emotional and metacognitive experience, specifically how students and teachers respond to it. In addition, I consider certain behaviors or strategies students employ, like help-seeking. Help-seeking is a social, self-regulatory strategy often employed when learners face obstacles en route to comprehension. Because learning exists in a sociocultural context, developing nuanced understandings of students’ experiences and assets can aid in developing adaptive and effective comprehension strategies and systems.
Questions I ask:
What factors play a role in determining the path undergraduate students take when feeling confused during learning?
How do first-generation students develop help-seeking behaviors and how did the pandemic impact their help-seeking processes? How do first-generation students develop and distribute capital in the context of helping/help-seeking?
What executive function strategies do 6th graders employ when playing a card game?
Do K-12 teachers’ perceived expectancy, value, and cost for supporting students’ emotions differ depending on the emotion (confusion, curiosity, interest, frustration)? What factors do teachers consider when evaluating expectancy, value, and cost of supporting students’ emotions?
Methods:
- Focus groups/Interviews
- Stimulated-recall interviews
- Think-aloud protocols
- Surveys (open- and closed-ended)
- Experimental
What is the role of context in learning processes and motivational experiences?
Learning is an emotionally connected, goal-directed, contextual process in pursuit of making meaning. To account for the cognitive processes and decisions students make during learning, I investigate contexts that allow students to exchange and negotiate divergent viewpoints, such as online discussions. Online discussions offer a site for investigating language processes, with a particular affordance for conversations supporting learning. I also investigate contexts such as racialized schools where race is salient due to messages/actions of students and teachers. Social inequity or racialized stressors may affect the academic motivation or performance of minoritized individuals. Encountering stereotypes, for example, can impact historically marginalized students’ psychological and emotional well-being, which can adversely affect their executive functioning, academic performance, and motivation.
Questions I ask:
How do graduate students with different levels of perceived belongingness describe their cognitive and affective experiences in different modes of academic discussion (face-to-face, online synchronous, online asynchronous)? How do graduate students with different levels of belongingness use the pronoun “We” when expressing themselves in different online discussion modes?
Do middle and high school students’ experiences of racial-ethnic stereotyping moderate the relation between executive functions and two sources of math-related self-efficacy?
Methods:
- Discourse analysis
- Surveys (open- and closed-ended)
- Secondary data analysis
How do the measures and research designs scholars have developed shape our understandings of learning and learners?
As much as we may try, research is not an objective practice. Standard measures of executive function are not culturally neutral, and a continued focus on individual factors in cognitive research can serve to reproduce deficit perspectives. Integrating contextual, systemic, and structural factors into work on learning can create the foundation for broader change that authentically supports minoritized individuals and those psychological research has often positioned as “other.” In addition, being critical about who we are as scholars, our positionalities, and the biases in our practices can position us toward conducting more responsible research with our partners.
Questions I ask:
How does research ignoring systemic factors in favor of individual factors reproduce inequalities?
How can we create frameworks for understanding executive functions, their development, and links with academic achievement that emphasize contextual factors?
What are the methodological and theoretical problems associated with current refutation text studies aimed at changing individuals’ previously held beliefs?
How do we think about knowledge revision in the context of critical literacy and culturally responsive pedagogy?
Methods:
- Critical review
- Perspectival review
- Surveys (open- and closed-ended)
- Experimental
Outreach