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Associate Professor of Research
Department of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
Georgia Southern University, United States
Academic profiles
Research interests
- Metacomprehension as a cognitive construct and its latent dimensions
- Motivation and metacognitive strategy training
- Confidence judgments and self-regulated learning
- Academic environment factors and faculty retention
Education and career
I am a triple graduate of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), having received my bachelor’s degree in political science and sociology (2004), and my master’s degree (2008) and Ph.D. (2012) in Educational Psychology, Learning Foundations. My areas of expertise are research methods, statistics, and learning and cognition. I previously held several positions at the UNLV School of Nursing, including teaching, research, and postdoctoral work.
I have more than five years of experience preparing grant proposals for a variety of funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Health Resources and Services Administration, and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. This experience included identifying suitable grant funding opportunities; preparing budgets and budget justifications; writing the technical sections of grant proposals (e.g., background and significance, aims, research design and methods, data analysis plan); and managing funded projects in collaboration with co-principal investigators.
During my tenure at the Center for Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Education (CMSEE), my main responsibilities were to support faculty from the Center’s three member colleges —Education, Engineering, and Sciences— in identifying grant opportunities related to STEM education; preparing the technical sections of grants; developing budgets; submitting proposals; and managing funded projects.
Current work
In my current position as Associate Professor of Research (tenure and promotion granted effective August 1, 2019) in the Department of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading at Georgia Southern University, I teach research methods and statistics courses. My research examines the role of motivation and metacognitive strategy training in student performance, confidence judgments, and metacomprehension within self-regulated learning theory; the latent dimensions of metacomprehension as a cognitive construct; and, more recently, how various academic environment factors influence faculty members’ intention to stay in or leave academia, among other lines of research.