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One of the field of psychology’s stated goals is to produce scholarship with findings that benefit the world. Over the last 10 years, psychology scholarship and its presumed societal benefits have been called into question due to the field’s history of questionable research practices, racism, and epistemic oppression. Calls for methodological, ethical, and practical reforms are essential to building a psychological science that is just, effective, reliable, and beneficial. Recently, these calls have been complemented by a push to reform how theory is developed and used in psychology. There is great need for better understanding and implementation of theory development, both in the field of psychology broadly as well as in its subdisciplines, including educational psychology. At the same time, educational psychologists have much to contribute to the tripartite calls for methodological, ethical, and theory reforms. In this paper, I explore theory development in psychology by discussing the importance of developing both the descriptive and explanatory aspects of theory as well as the need to refine how theory is evaluated and integrated. Then, I review how innovations and practices in educational psychology can inform the broader theory reform movement in psychology writ large. Finally, I identify important future directions for further advancing theory reform in psychology, including addressing ableism in the field, increasing the field’s hospitability for theory revision, furthering theory development transparency, and more deeply integrating theory development into preparation programs.

Despite strong evidence that students’ self-regulated learning (SRL) capacity and performance predict important academic and lifelong learning outcomes, SRL remains largely absent from educational standards and curricula. That absence has implications for students, surely, but it also affects what pre-service teachers learn and how in-service teachers interact with students, resulting in inconsistent at best, and non-existent at worst, instruction and support for SRL. A better understanding of how teachers support metacognition and SRL is needed to enhance teachers’ competence for these vital aspects of education and also to advocate for the inclusion of SRL in educational reform. The articles in this special issue make significant advances toward understanding teachers’ support of SRL and how to bolster it, in turn affording more and better arguments for advocacy. My goal in this article is to synthesize the ideas in these articles to tell a story of teachers’ support for metacognition and SRL, which in turn implies a prototypical model with implications for future research on teacher competence for supporting SRL and future professional development that enhances teachers’ professional vision and performance. Future scholarship can be enhanced via modern methodologies and analytic techniques, which the articles in this special issue also illustrate. The story told in this special issue is an important step toward a future where SRL takes its rightful place as a key component of educational reform.

Trauma-informed design is an emerging concept that combines elements of interior design, environmental psychology, and clinical psychology. Previous reports describe the potential impact of the physical space and design of homeless shelters on positive psychological outcomes (Pable, 2012). However, there is little known research on these outcomes. This article provides preliminary support for positive outcomes through a program evaluation of a trauma-informed design of resident bedrooms at two homeless shelters in North Carolina. Residents (

Using traces of behaviors to predict outcomes is useful in varied contexts ranging from buyer behaviors to behaviors collected from smart-home devices. Increasingly, higher education systems have been using Learning Management System (LMS) digital data to capture and understand students’ learning and well-being. Researchers in the social sciences are increasingly interested in the potential of using digital log data to predict outcomes and design interventions. Using LMS data for predicting the likelihood of students’ success in for-credit college courses provides a useful example of how social scientists can use these techniques on a variety of data types. Here, we provide a primer on how LMS data can be feature-mapped and analyzed to accomplish these goals. We begin with a literature review summarizing current approaches to analyzing LMS data, then discuss ethical issues of privacy when using demographic data and equitable model building. In the second part of the paper, we provide an overview of popular machine learning algorithms and review analytic considerations such as feature generation, assessment of model performance, and sampling techniques. Finally, we conclude with an empirical example demonstrating the ability of LMS data to predict student success, summarizing important features and assessing model performance across different model specifications.

Epistemic cognition involves the thinking executed as people discern what they know versus what they question, doubt, or disbelieve. Effective or adaptive epistemic cognition underlies the higher-order thinking required for life in the 21st century and has been positively correlated with academic achievement. As such, researchers have designed a number of educational interventions with the goal of developing students’ epistemic cognition, but no comprehensive examination of their efficacy exists. Therefore, we conducted a meta-analysis to better understand the effect of epistemic cognition interventions upon academic achievement and what characteristics differentiated their efficacy. Twenty-six experimental and quasi-experimental studies met our inclusion criteria. Using 28 independent samples and 59 effect sizes, we found epistemic cognition interventions had a statistically significant, medium-level effect on academic achievement (Cohen’s d = 0.509, p < .001). Moderator analyses revealed interventions based in guided forms of instruction and models emphasizing justification and reconciliation of objectivity and subjectivity were more successful than other interventions, suggesting several promising directions for future research and practice. Surprisingly, we found that shorter interventions were generally more successful in promoting academic performance than longer ones. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

Background: The modern world is rife with complex challenges that require citizens to weigh multiple, conflicting claims and competing methods for discerning truth from falsehood. Such evaluations ...

Increases in technology use, among youth and adults, are concerning given the volume of information produced and disseminated in the modern world. Conceptual models have been developed to understand how people manage the large volume of information encountered during intentional learning activities with technology. What, if anything, do people learn when they happen upon news and other information while using technology for purposes other than learning? Questions like this highlight the need to understand incidental learning, i.e., learning that occurs when people, who are pursuing a goal other than learning such as entertainment, encounter information that leads to a change in thinking or behavior. In this article, we integrate theory and research from multiple scholarly literatures into the Technology Incidental Learning Effects (TILE) model, which provides a framework for future research on how incidental learning occurs and what factors affect this process. Current research on incidental learning can be informed by educational psychology scholarship on dual-processing, motivation, interest, source evaluation, and knowledge reconstruction. The TILE model points to many promising future directions for research with direct implications for modern society, including the need to better understand how and why people move from merely noticing to engaging with incidentally exposed information as well as how to help people successfully manage the large amounts of information they encounter when using technology for purposes other than learning.

The synergies that result from synthesising conceptual models and findings from self-regulated learning and formative assessment research are launching a new era of scholarship. They drive new ques...

We use confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to test the validity and reliability of three non-cognitive factors—resilience, grit, and growth mindset—as well as to examine whether those factors predict academic success for a sample of students primarily represented by first-year African American students at three Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and one Minority Serving Institution (MSI). The findings indicate that initial growth mindset and grit scores predicted GPA, whereas changes in resilience over the academic year predicted the number of credit hours taken at the end of the first year. Results add to the ongoing debate about the credibility and utility of noncognitive factors for fostering success.

The overall purpose of this study was to investigate the role of personal relevance in conceptual change. First, we used an experimental design to investigate the role of augmented activation—which...

Scholars have lamented that current methods of assessing student performance do not align with contemporary views of learning as situated within students, contexts, and time. Here, we introduce and...

Literacy instruction in the 21st century must bolster students’ ability to critically process text and craft well-reasoned written argumentation. The authors investigated changes in fourth-grade st...

First-year courses have been used to bolster college student success, but empirical evidence on their efficacy is mixed. We investigated whether a first-year science of learning course, focused on self-regulated learning, would benefit first-generation college students. We randomly assigned students to a treatment condition involving enrollment in the course, a comparison condition in which students had access to online course materials only, or a control condition. From this larger study, we recruited 43 students to participate in a laboratory task involving learning about the circulatory system with a computer. We found that treatment and comparison students experienced greater changes in conceptual knowledge than the control group, and we found differences in the enactment of monitoring and strategy use across conditions.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Adams School of Dentistry is developing a transformative curriculum that prepares students to enter contemporary practice. The Advocate, Clinician, and Thinker (ACT) framework will provide the basis for developing a resilient workforce capable of meeting emerging health care needs over the next 40 years.

There is a lack of research and practice focused on how to foster higher-order processing, such as creative performance, within higher education settings. To address this gap in research, we chose to study pedagogical practices in schools of art and design, where one of the intended learning outcomes is creativity. Based upon data gathered as part of a larger study (Sawyer in Thinking Skills and Creativity, http://doi.org/10.1016/J.TSC.2018.08.002 , 2018), we found that among a large number of creative performance pedagogical practices we identified, a subset seemed to foster self-regulated learning (SRL). Therefore, the goal of our study was to identify the ways art and design professors enacted practices that foster their students’ self-regulation during learning and performance. We found these professors utilized a number of direct and indirect methods of fostering their students’ SRL, all intended to enhance students’ ability to enact creative performance. In addition to revealing interesting comparisons between SRL in art and design and other more commonly studied contexts such as science or history, our findings suggested numerous directions for expanding SRL models, including a greater focus on process as the outcome of SRL, a need to continue research into SRL during higher-order processing, and gaps regarding the development of SRL.

This chapter explores the use of video game avatars in the classroom to analyze social ethics through experiments with traditional rhetorical concepts. The authors begin by providing an overview of five rhetorical traditions (ethos, ēthopoeia, suasoria, delivery/performance, dramatism) before discussing how writers, game designers, and players might consider the role of avatar design (including abstraction, detail-oriented, pre-designed) and backstory in single- and multi-player game environments. Such practices, the authors propose, aid in developing a student’s sense of phrōnesis—practical wisdom and prudence—in and beyond digital environments. The authors conclude by tracing out a sequence of activities addressing three ontological perspectives on avatars through the ethics of play.

As the research on the use of educational technologies increases, greater focus is being placed on the psychological processes underlying teaching and learning with these tools. In this research review, we examine six contemporary technologies identified in the 2020 edition of the Horizon Report through the lens of educational psychology theory. Specifically, we highlight the educational, cognitive, and social psychological processes that unfold during teaching and learning with each technology and illustrate how considering these processes can inform study and use of educational technologies and subsequent learning outcomes.

The digital age has provided both opportunities and challenges to learning. Concepts that were once represented in text or static pictures now also can be shown in dynamic visuals or interactive animations. The advent of new technologies, such as social media as well as virtual and augmented realities, has allowed people to discover a myriad of perspectives on issues and ideas. Theoretical and empirical work has shown that use of these multiple representations and perspectives should and can benefit learning. However, there is also ample evidence that these benefits are infrequently achieved. Scholars have identified reasons why people might struggle to learn with multiple inputs, but there still are gaps in the literature. In this chapter, we suggest that critical thinking frameworks can enrich an understanding of learning from multiple inputs and identify some of the difficulties that learners face. We specifically address how critical thinking models might contribute to an understanding of how learners identify key features and credible evidence, which critical thinking dispositions might contribute to better use of multiple inputs, and how cognitive biases interfere with learning.

Proficiency in strategic processing is beneficial for accomplishing tasks in a variety of domains. It has been linked to achievement outcomes across the lifespan, though effective strategic processing varies across learning tasks and contexts. Given this, research methods that are capable of capturing dynamic strategic processing are helpful, though they can produce a lot of data that can be challenging to analyze. These data may be analyzed using variable-centered approaches, depending on the nature of the data and research aims. In this chapter, first we outline the differences between variable-centered and person-centered analyses in the study of strategy use and strategic processing. Then we outline different kinds of variable-centered analyses that can be employed to understand and represent these data. We conclude with a summary of observations about the use of variable-centered analysis in the extant literature, as well as practical implications and future directions.

Many educators ask their students to conduct research using online information sources. Such sources vary in trustworthiness and quality and despite conventional wisdom, students are not naturally adept at vetting these sources. Empirical research has shown that successful online learning often requires effortful activities such as self-regulation and epistemic cognition. Frequent exertion of such effort may explain why people report feeling exhausted by the conflicting information sources they encounter online. Such feelings of exhaustion may be akin to ego-depletion, where frequent or excessive acts of self-control make subsequent acts of self-control more difficult to enact. Recent criticisms of the ego-depletion paradigm warrant empirical research with different tasks, such as learning online, but such work is scarce, with a lack of research utilizing both process (i.e., what people do) and product (i.e., what people have learned) measures. Therefore, in this study, we randomly assigned 53 college students to either an ego-depletion or control condition and then asked them to use a computer to learn about a complex topic: single-payer health care models. Despite a rigorous ego-depletion treatment, we found no detectable group differences in terms of either process or product data. Our findings contribute to the ongoing controversy about the replicability of ego-depletion effects, as well as whether and how they affect learning.

Researchers and many educators agree that the ability to self-regulate learning is important for academic success. Yet, many students struggle to anticipate learning difficulties and adjust accordingly. Further, despite theorizing that self-regulated learning involves adaptation across learning cycles, few researchers have examined students’ evaluative judgments, their implications for students’ behavior in a subsequent learning cycle, or their effects on achievement. Utilizing data from a large, introductory college biology course, we examined how struggling students’ evaluative judgments made after a first unit exam predicted changes in learning behaviors as well as how those changes predicted performance on a subsequent exam. We used natural language processing to analyze data from a reflective essay written after a first unit exam, identifying language that reflected evaluation of prior studying and plans to adapt learning. Then, we utilized digital traces of learning behaviors to measure students’ actual adaptation of their use of learning resources. Results from a path analysis revealed students’ evaluations predicted how extensively they discussed plans to adapt their learning process. Plans to adapt described in written reflections predicted an increase in the frequency of desirable learning behaviors, which in turn predicted higher subsequent exam scores, after controlling for previous exam performance. These findings provide empirical evidence of multiple theorized self-regulated learning processes, including how evaluations of learning at the end of a learning cycle can inform planning and behavior changes in a subsequent learning cycle, and that increases in the enactment of effective learning strategies predicts improved performance in complex learning tasks.

Effective interventions are needed to bolster students’ argumentation capacities, an area in which they consistently struggle. Quality Talk (QT) is an approach to small-group classroom discussion shown to support students’ oral argumentation with preliminary evidence that it may also bolster students’ written argumentation. Teachers often must adapt interventions to their local context, balancing needed flexibility with sufficient adherence to fidelity to reach expected efficacy. The present study was conducted over one school year with two fifth-grade teachers and their 46 students. In Phase I, two participating teachers implemented a refined version of QT, and we examined the effects on students’ oral and written argumentation performance. While typical gains in students’ oral argumentation performance were evidenced, students’ written argumentation did not improve to the degree expected, particularly in terms of performance with unfamiliar texts. In Phase II, both teachers reincorporated a component of QT (i.e., regular post-discussion written argumentation practice) they had adapted in Phase I, and one teacher added a new written argumentation scaffold designed to further bolster students’ transfer from oral to written argumentation. By the end of the study, students from both classes evidenced growth in written argumentation, but the students from the class receiving the writing scaffold outperformed comparison class students with large effects. Findings underscore the importance of including regular post-discussion written argumentation practice and illustrate the added value of a new written argumentation scaffold, while also contributing to a better understanding of how to balance flexibility and fidelity for efficacious QT implementation.

Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in Journal of Educational Psychology on Sep 3 2018 (see record 2018-43394-001). In the article, there is an error in Table 7 which contained a production-related error. Overall N was listed as “1,9,319” when it should be “159,319.” All versions of this article have been corrected. Please see erratum for full description.] Epistemic cognition, defined as the ways that people acquire, justify, and use knowledge, has been a prominent area of scholarship in educational psychology for nearly 50 years. Researchers have argued that epistemic cognition is a key predictor of many 21st century learning outcomes including critical thinking, scientific literacy, and historical thinking, among others. Despite a large volume of quantitative empirical research on epistemic cognition and academic achievement, there has been no published systematic analysis of this literature. We conducted a meta-analysis of 132 nonexperimental studies in this literature, and found epistemic cognition, as measured predominantly in terms of beliefs, was positively correlated with academic achievement, r = .162, p < .001, indicating a small but meaningful relationship. Moderator analyses revealed models and instruments focusing on development and justification of knowledge had higher correlations with academic achievement than those focused on constructs related to authority. We found evidence supporting domain-general, domain-specific, and topic-specific conceptualizations of epistemic cognition, and stronger correlations when the specificity of the epistemic cognition measure matched the specificity of the achievement measure. Conceptual knowledge and argumentation performance were more strongly associated with epistemic cognition than declarative or procedural knowledge performance. Finally, we found epistemic cognition predicted academic achievement from elementary school through graduate school, suggesting the importance of studying epistemic cognition across all educational levels. These findings have direct implications for honing epistemic cognition theory, creating better measures of epistemic cognition, and developing effective educational interventions on this critical topic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)

Students often struggle to comprehend complex text. In response, we conducted an initial, year-long study of Quality Talk, a teacher-facilitated, small-group discussion approach designed to enhance students’ basic and high-level comprehension, in two fourth-grade classrooms. Specifically, teachers delivered instructional mini-lessons on discourse elements (e.g., questioning or argumentation) and conducted weekly text-based discussions in their language arts classes. Analysis of the videorecorded discussions showed decreases in teacher-initiated discourse elements, indicating a release of responsibility to students, whereas students’ discourse reflected increased critical-analytic thinking (e.g., elaborated explanations or exploratory talk). Importantly, statistically and practically significant increases were evidenced on written measures of students’ basic and high-level comprehension, indicating the promise of small-group discourse as a way to foster individual student learning outcomes.