Elizabeth Canning

Now published: Our paper investigating cognitive processes of ingroup favoritism across 20 countries. Free to read (hashtag#OpenAccess) at www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2417456122

“Asking for help feels like a weakness”: factors shaping first-year students’ expectations of STEM course office hours - International Journal of STEM Education Background Office hours are one of the most ubiquitous resources for students in STEM courses. However, there has been only limited work examining what students think of STEM course office hours, and ...

What do first-year students think about STEM course office hours? How do these perceptions change over time? So excited to share a new paper in the International Journal of STEM Education where we conducted a longitudinal study to find out! 1/7 stemeducationjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10....

Business professionals in formal attire engaged in discussions near large office windows with city views at dusk.

📊 New #PSPB research highlights the impact of the STEP scale - a tool that measures how safe or threatening people perceive different environments to be. Researchers report that environmental cues significantly impact engagement and belonging.

Read more: ow.ly/6mAE50WyCwi

As women became a larger share of undergraduate student bodies in the United States over the course of the 20th century, research on gender-related topics increased in science as a direct result.

Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence - Nature Communications Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often show lower academic achievement, commonly linked to limited resources. Here, the authors show that reduced exploration–a behavior tuned for learning...

Thrilled to share our new @NatureComms
paper: "Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence." www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵1/7

The Relation Between Perceived Mental Effort, Monitoring Judgments, and Learning Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis - Educational Psychology Review Accurately monitoring one’s learning processes during self-regulated learning depends on using the right cues, one of which could be perceived mental effort. A meta-analysis by Baars et al. (2020)…

Imagine going to the gym and thinking "lifting this heavy weight is hard, so lifting it is not making me stronger." Not how it works, right? Yet that's, in essence, how many students view mental effort and learning. Let's help students embrace mental effort. #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky

Perceptions of Safety and Threat in the Environment: The STEP Scale - Lora E. Park, Deborah E. Ward, Kristin Naragon-Gainey, Elizabeth A. Canning, Nicole Koefler, Zaviera A. Panlilio, Valerie Vessels,... The Safety and Threat in Environment Perceptions (STEP) scale assesses perceptions of environments as safe (welcoming, inclusive) or threatening (critical, inti...

New paper out from the Self & Motivation Lab on Safety and Threat in the Environment Perceptions (STEP). The STEP scale assesses people's overall, gut-level impressions of any given space and uniquely predicts engagement, interest, & desire to recruit others
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Our new paper is out! 🎉

Led by Echo Yan (along with @drmuenks.bsky.social), we used a vignette-based experiment to test the effects of perceived instructor and peer field-specific ability beliefs (FABs) on students' motivation, psychological experience, and anticipated behavior:

t.co/WnzqHsvGyn

Syntactic and Semantic Gender Biases in the Language on Children’s Television: Evidence From a Corpus of 98 Shows From 1960 to 2018 - Andrea C. Vial, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Ruyuan Zuo, Shreya Haval... Biased media content shapes children’s social concepts and identities. We examined gender bias in a large corpus of scripts from 98 children’s television progra...

🔥Excited to share our new paper in PsychScience! Shout out to best-ever collaborators Aida Davani, @ruyuan-zuo.bsky.social, @shreyahavaldar.bsky.social, Eleanor Chestnut, @mdehghani.bsky.social & @andreicimpian.bsky.social 🧵1/8…
doi.org/10.1177/0956...

How do our brains and bodies support social learning in real time?

We take an ecological and multimodal neuroscience approach to study mutual prediction and social coordination when learning with others.

It took 5 full years for this one! Full open-access pre-print: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Cool paper with an great title.

Across the world, boys are much more likely to overestimate their math ability than girls.

People from high SES backgrounds do the same

www.iza.org/publications...

Screenshot of article published in Psychological Bulletin titled "Teacher–Student Relationships and Student Outcomes: A Systematic Second-Order Meta-Analytic Review"

A meta-analysis of meta-analyses substantiates that teacher-student relationships matter for academic & other outcomes. "Thus, it is central to train teachers to develop positive TSRs to give their students a sense of safety and belonging." #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky doi.org/10.1037/bul0...

Factors Influencing Student Motivations and Experiences in STEM Course Office Hours | CBE—Life Sciences Education Office hours are a part of nearly all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, with many academic and affective benefits for students who attend. However, despite their ubiqui...

2️⃣ new papers to share! First is a paper in CBE-Life Sciences Education led by former undergrad Gabby Dauber '24, examining student motivations and experiences in STEM course office hours (OH). She conducted interviews with students about their knowledge of and 1/5 www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/...

(PDF) Students' Costs in Chemistry, Statistics, and English: Exploring Course, Time, and Gender Author Note PDF | Situated expectancy-value theory posits that students' academic outcomes are influenced by their expectancy beliefs and the value they place on... | Find, read and cite all the research you need...

🚨🚨🚨 New publication alert! We took a look at students' reported costs in chemistry, statistics, and English composition and examined how they differed over time, across courses, and by gender! @ecallen.bsky.social

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Since 1954, "The Handbook of Social Psychology" has been the field’s most authoritative reference work, and today is the launch of the 6th edition. Best news? The HSP is now open-access—free to read, download, and share.

the-hsp.com

Abstract for new PNAS article

It’s a tough time for STEM education research right now, but we are still excited to share our new PNAS paper, “Divergence in children’s gender stereotypes and motivation across STEM fields”! We have big surveys (2,765 students in Grades 1-12), 2 pre-registered studies, and open data. (1/13)

University students pursue performance goals (trying to outperform classmates) for various reasons. In this study, the most prevalent and least healthy reason was to impress parents; performance goals had benign effects when pursued to impress classmates or teachers ;

Can email nudges to teachers boost their students’ math progress? Our new megastudy in @pnas.org with Zearn tested 15 interventions with 140K+ teachers & 3M students.

✅ The best email—prompting teachers to check student progress—increased math lesson completion by 5%

Read more: bit.ly/4iAxMrV

These coffee meet-ups were my absolute favorite part of AERA as a graduate student and I am so exciting to be hosting one this year!

I love that so much!

As PI of a grant on this list, I'm proud of the work we're doing to help ALL students reach their academic goals with evidence-based strategies in the classroom. This work is important not only for students and instructors, but for society at large. We will not stop.

bsky.app/profile/sylv...

Why is the Institute of Education Sciences important for students, teachers, schools, and for the United States?

AERA and COPAFS Statement on the New Administration’s Sudden Termination of National Center for Education Statistics Contracts AERA and COPAFS Statement on the New Administration’s Sudden Termination of National Center for Education Statistics Contracts

AERA and COPAFS have issued a statement on the sudden termination of 169 contracts within IES, including those that NCES holds for the collection and reporting of education statistics. Read the full statement: www.aera.net/Newsroom/AER...

Plastic black ammo box locked with a 5-letter combination lock

There's lots I can't control right now but I did create a fun escape room/puzzle box activity as a review for my undergrad social cognition class and watching them race through the puzzles today brought me joy 😍 1/

Scientists and journalists need to figure out right quick how to explain to the average person how a massive change in research indirects will impact the medical care they and their children get (eg at the local children’s hospital), the education their children will get, the price of tuition, etc.

Sustaining EDI efforts in a challenging new normal Science-backed strategies to navigate challenges and sustain EDI commitments.

Check out this article from APA's "Monitor on Psychology" that features one of my papers in PPS! www.apa.org/monitor/2025...

You should all register for Ben's workshop! I used one of @benheddy.bsky.social's activities today in Achievement Motivation. There was tons of laughter and it was proclaimed "the best day ever." (1/5) @aeratepsig.bsky.social @aera-motsig.bsky.social

If you're an NSF PI like me, you might be wondering: Will my grant be suspended or terminated next week?

A few key things to know: First off, remember that NSF is **congressionally mandated** to evaluate broader impacts. And laws like CHIPS and Science supersede EOs.

But also... 🧵 thread

A framework for understanding effective allyship

Review by Evava S. Pietri, Charlotte E. Moser, Veronica Derricks & India R. Johnson

Web: go.nature.com/4hISncq
PDF: rdcu.be/d8tYJ

#psychology #socialpsych