Avi Kaplan

Temple University | TU · Department of Psychological Studies in Education

Current prominent models of identity face challenges in bridging across divergent perspectives and dimensions such as personal or social-collective, conscious or unconscious, and epigenetic or discursive-relational, and affording pursuit of research questions in ways that allow integrative answers. We address the special issue's goals by describing...

In this chapter, we describe the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI)—a conceptual model that integrates understandings from multiple perspectives on identity and motivation. By using the DSMRI we capture the rich, complex, dynamic, and contextualized nature of teacher identity, while anchoring it in established identity and motivational...

In this commentary, we propose a framework for applying the Complex Dynamical Systems (CDS) approach in educational research. Drawing on the conceptual articles in the special issue for ontological, theoretical, and methodological principles, and on the empirical articles for examples of these principles’ application, we suggest six interdependent...

Educational psychology is a field of inquiry that involves the application of psychological science to the investigation and improvement of educational phenomena, and reciprocally, to the enhancement of psychological science itself. Surprisingly, until relatively recently, the concept of identity has been mostly missing from the extensive education...

This paper describes the conceptual framework, methodology, and findings from an initial phase of research to inform the design of an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (NMAH) on the history of invention and innovation in sports. Organized by the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation,...

As a community of practice, educational psychologists are unpracticed in considering how educational policies might affect the phenomena they study. One reason is the traditional focus of educational psychology research on cross contextual individual processes, to the practical exclusion of the political context that frames teaching, learning, moti...

Discussions ought to be a core practice in social studies education (Kavanagh et al., 2019) given their potential to promote positive academic outcomes and develop future citizens (e.g., Hess & McCavoy, 2015). However, teachers often avoid enacting discussions because they lack the facilitation skills or conflate them with other forms of classroom...

Most teacher preparation programs focus on teaching classroom strategies and pedagogical content knowledge (Russ et al., 2016). Recently, researchers highlighted the need for professional development (PD) programs that focus on teacher identity exploration and development in order to facilitate the integration of PD elements (e.g., instructional st...

Teacher self-regulation of their instructional actions has received little scholarly attention. We note the dearth of research that goes beyond aggregated patterns of relations between constructs to explain teachers situated self-regulation of their practice. In the current study, we use a complex dynamic systems approach to conceptualize the self-...

In complex dynamic systems, the multilevel, non-standardized, interdependent, local contextual factors are integral to the system’s emergent behavior. These features have substantial implications for psychological intervention research.

Understanding how and why teachers make decisions about pedagogical practice is crucial for effective design of teacher training and professional development. Research on teacher motivation and practice has found associations between different motivational constructs (e.g., task value, self-efficacy, mastery achievement goals, autonomous regulation...

This comparative case study leverages dynamic systems theory to analyze how whiteness impacts social studies discussions about racial topics. Four white candidates facilitating discussions of African American history with predominantly Black students experienced identity tensions that led them to foreclose student discussion and privilege their own...

Motivation science has advanced tremendously in the past decade. However, it is now clear that future progress is going to be stalled by the extent of disagreement among motivation scientists to some basic, yet controversial, questions. To help move motivation science toward greater coherence, the editors recruited prominent scholars to debate thei...

Motivation science has advanced tremendously in the past decade. However, it is now clear that future progress is going to be stalled by the extent of disagreement among motivation scientists to some basic, yet controversial, questions. To help move motivation science toward greater coherence, the editors recruited prominent scholars to debate thei...

This tribute celebrates the distinguished scholarship and extraordinary life of Dennis Michael McInerney, who passed away in Hong Kong on May 20th, 2022. It is a testimony of his impact on our professional and personal lives while highlighting the multitude and depth of his scholarly contributions. McInerney was one of those thinkers who invited us...

Motivation science has advanced tremendously in the past decade. However, it is now clear that future progress is going to be stalled by the extent of disagreement among motivation scientists to some basic, yet controversial, questions. To help move motivation science toward greater coherence, the editors recruited prominent scholars to debate thei...

In this scoping study we synthesize the last two decades of research on social studies teacher identity (N = 114) to identify salient themes. Findings indicate an interest in an array of teacher identities: ethnic and cultural identities, sexual orientation, identities vis-à-vis curricular content and purposes, and civic values and beliefs. However...

Stories narrated from another person’s perspective are hypothesized to elicit reader’s empathy with the protagonist. In research, such stories – labeled “Point-Of-View” (POV) tasks – were found to reduce stigma of marginalized individuals (Batson et al., 1997), increase prosocial empathy (e.g., Herrera et al., 2018), and improve depth of historical...

Teacher professional development programs (PD) have the potential to improve teacher self-efficacy (Cheon et al., 2018); produce autonomy-supportive behaviors (Cheon et al., 2012); and embolden and elaborate teacher knowledge and engagement (Patterson, 2015). However, while studies have examined the overall effects of PD, there is a dearth of liter...

There are significant theoretical (e.g., Hess, 2009) and empirical justifications (e.g., Reisman, 2015) for centering discussion as an important mechanism for learning social studies. This qualitative, interpretive case study (Yin, 2017) hopes to open a new avenue for inquiry in this space--- the role of emotions in pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’) fa...

This paper describes the conceptual framework, methodology, and findings from an initial phase of research to inform the design of an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (NMAH) on the history of invention and innovation in sports. Organized by the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation,...

Focusing on episodes of student-generated and -sustained talk during document-based disciplinary history discussions, this study explored what teacher candidates prioritize and value about social studies discussions, and how these priorities align with their actions and goals as facilitators. Using a complex systems-based model, we investigated can...

Question generation is theorized to support comprehension, self-regulation, and achievement, yet the empirical base for whether and how student-generated questions are associated with comprehension monitoring and whether they predict performance remain open questions. To address these, we investigated the questions undergraduate students in an intr...

This chapter focuses on classroom environments and teacher practices that promote students’ growth motivation. Growth motivation centers on a focus to improve and grow and the belief that ability is malleable. It encompasses several similar concepts in motivation literature—growth mindset, incremental theory of intelligence, learning goals, and mas...

Social studies teachers are encouraged to employ classroom discussions to deepen student learning, develop text-based argumentation, and promote skills central to life in a democratic society (Castro & Knowles, 2017; Garret, 2017; Ho, McAvoy, Hess, & Gibbs, 2017). Yet, despite continued emphasis in pre-service teaching methods courses, discussions...

The high failure rate of students in "gateway" science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses has been a persistent problem for biology programs nationwide. Common wisdom contends that addressing this problem requires major curricular overhauls. While desirable, such large systematic changes are often expensive or impractical. We...

Teacher motivational factors influence pedagogical praxis. While research has explicated and established patterns and relations between motivational constructs, there is a dearth of research that attends to decisions and actions that teachers enact moment-by-moment within a dynamic and complex classroom setting. The current study investigated the m...

Although teachers' learning has been increasingly recognised as nonlinear and contextually responsive, few studies have extended these under-standings to the design and evaluation of professional development. In this case study, we examine nonlinear and contextual manifestations of high school science teachers' professional learning from a complex...

Opportunities to engage with science exist in a variety of non-formal educational contexts, but rarely have studies examined ways to leverage science interest and learning at community science events and other single-attendance occasions. This study builds on Yeager and Walton’s (2011). concept of brief, wise interventions by using open-ended promp...

Education and identity have always been intertwined. However, it is only in the middle of the twentieth century that the term identity has been applied to refer to the personal attributes that influence and are influenced by education. But the term identity quickly caught on and assumed diversity of meanings in variety of fields, including in educa...

In the United States, the Interstate Teacher Assessment Consortium (InTASC) Standards and Learning Progressions inform pre-service teacher curricula and in-service teacher professional development and evaluation policies (Council of Chief State School Officers, CCSSO, 2013). We apply a complex dynamic systems (CDS) lens to analyze the Standards doc...

For a 90-second intro, please see https://youtu.be/i1SJRRuH2q4

Educational decision-makers like superintendents and school board members in the United States preside over 54-million public school students in 98-thousand public schools, and make decisions that influence the educational opportunities and experiences of students, families, teachers, and administrators (McFarland et al., 2019). Yet, research on ed...

Whereas science teachers often express initial enthusiasm about the student‐centered, reform‐oriented instructional strategies they encounter in professional development (PD), they rarely adopt them in practice. One possible obstacle is a mismatch between these strategies and teachers' beliefs about what is possible and desirable in their particula...

The past decade has seen a tremendous growth in scholarship that relates theoretical concepts from the identity and motivational literatures, connecting who people believe they are to why they behave the way they do. An important aspect of this emerging scholarship has involved interventions that target people’s identity in order to promote their m...

In this commentary, we complement other constructive critiques of educational randomized control trials (RCTs) by calling attention to the commonly ignored role of context in causal mechanisms undergirding educational phenomena. We argue that evidence for the central role of context in causal mechanisms challenges the assumption that RCT findings c...

Quickly after its introduction in the early 1980′s, achievement goal theory blossomed into one of the most popular frameworks in motivation research. Over three plus decades, the theory evolved in a number of ways. Some of these developments brought about much-needed conceptual and methodological clarity; but, they also involved a shift away from q...

This article answers a call for increased scientific precision in the conceptualization of student engagement by contributing a definition of engagement at the microlevel grain size of individual students’ momentary involvement in academic tasks. We build on the Classroom Engagement Framework, and use a dynamic systems perspective to offer a concep...

Two common goals of science teacher professional development (PD) are increased content knowledge (CK) and improved readiness to teach through inquiry. However, PD assessment challenges arise when the context is structured around inquiry-based, participant-driven learning, and when the content crosses scientific disciplines. This study extended the...

We investigated the perceived costs and barriers of a teaching career among Latino preservice teachers and how these men conceptualized costs relative to their race-ethnic identity, gender identity, and planned persistence in the profession from an expectancy-value perspective. We used a mixed-method approach that included a content analysis of ope...

Expectancy-value theory highlights the roles of students' expectancies, task values, and perceived costs in their motivation and achievement. While ample research has highlighted the positive associations of expectancy beliefs and task values with academic achievement, research on students' perceived costs is in its infancy. We investigated the tem...

Current motivation theory and research face serious theoretical, methodological, and practical challenges. One central challenge is the fact that research has focused mainly on motivation for traditional achievement tasks such as graded assignments and normative educational trajectories. Arguably, current motivation theory and research may be inade...

One common form of outreach by colleges of engineering is the ambassador program, whereby students interact with middle and high school audiences in an effort to promote STEM-related career choices. Although the impact of such programs on K-12 students' knowledge and attitudes has been examined, less is known about the impact on the ambassadors the...

Self-regulated learning refers to a recursive process of loosely sequential phases involving planning and evaluating external and internal resources; setting goals and selecting courses of action; monitoring progress and regulating motivation and strategies; and reviewing and evaluating success. High ability may influence this dynamic and complex p...

Scholars have called for new conceptualizations of teachers’ learning that capture the complex, contextualized, and dynamic nature of professional growth. In this article we describe the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI) that portrays teacher learning as inseparable from the complex and dynamic processes by which teachers form their pr...

Teachers’ experiences during the early years of teaching are crucial for teachers' motivation, learning, decision-making, and retention in the profession. In the current study, we approach teachers’ experiences, meaning-making, and career-related decisions from the perspective of the teacher’s professional identity formation, and conceptualize iden...

The predominant aggregate-statistical analyses in motivational research manifest assumptions incompatible with understanding motivation as dynamic, contextual, and variable among individuals. Using constructs from expectancy-value-cost (EVC) theory, we collected 13 weekly waves of data from 145 undergraduate students during one semester of an intro...

This paper presents findings from a two-phase mixed methods study investigating the phenomenological structure of self-relevance among ninth-grade junior high school biology students (Phase 1: N = 118; Phase 2: N = 139). We begin with a phenomenological multidimensional definition of self-relevance as comprising three dimensions: the academic conte...

Teaching and learning disciplinary knowledge such as mathematics inevitably engages students in forming their identities. Despite the increasing research on students’ identities and identity formation in the mathematics classroom, relatively little has been suggested regarding how mathematics teachers may promote positive academic identities in rel...

In response to the need for a diverse, highly skilled STEM workforce that can work collaboratively and communicate effectively, colleges of engineering have developed diversity-focused recruitment, retention, and outreach efforts. Many programs have also begun to emphasize technical communication skills. A national organization that integrates thes...

With the increasing number of undergraduate students with psychiatric disabilities enrolling in college, and the disproportionately high attrition rates in this group, the current study aimed to understand these students’ experiences and identify barriers that they face in higher education contexts. Specifically, whereas past research suggests that...

Critics of the predominant approach to teacher learning and professional development (PD) question its mechanistic, reductionist, linear underlying assumptions. This theoretical paper explores a specific ecological, dynamical systems perspective on skill acquisition (Gibson, 1979; Newell, McDonald & Kugler, 1991; Saltzman, Nam, Goldstein & Byrd, 20...

While motivation is commonly interpreted as an individual student’s characteristic, motivational perceptions and beliefs, such as causal attributions of success and failure, are embedded in cultural meanings and contextual practices. The current study aimed to investigate causal attributions among Arab high school students in Israel and to interpre...

Museum educators and exhibition planners commonly anticipate and leverage visitors’ background, beliefs and goals to promote meaningful experience and learning. In this article, we propose that such visitor characteristics are themselves worthy targets of design with potentially desirable effects on visitors’ experience and identity change. We desc...

What is the meaning of prevalent research findings of low associations between motivation and students’ achievement? In this paper, I assume a critical perspective on this question, and argue that researchers’ infatuation with constructs has led to losing sight of the phenomena involved in the production of achievement. Overall, I argue that motiva...

Working within a self-determination theory (SDT) framework, this study used cluster analysis to examine the naturally occurring types of homeschool-learning environments parents (N = 457) have created. Measures of support for student autonomy, mastery goal structure, and use of conditional regard were adapted for a homeschool context and used as co...

Research has found students’ epistemic beliefs to predict their achievement goal orientations. Much of this research emerged from the dimensional approach of epistemic beliefs, which hypothesized a relationship between particular independent dimensions of epistemic beliefs with different achievement goals. Research in this approach has primarily ap...

The current study employed an emergent theoretical model of teaching role-identity and motivation to investigate the change in conception of and motivation for teaching in higher education of research graduate students who teach in the United States. Fifteen participants took a graduate-level seminar as part of a two-course teaching professional de...

Higher Education has become a crucial component in the transformation of contemporary societies throughout the world, particularly in developing countries and among so-called “traditional” communities. However, the changing norms and expectations regarding completion of postsecondary degrees from students and employees involve social and cultural c...

This article reports on the development of a theory-informed assessment instrument for use in evaluating environmental education programs. The instrument involves coding learners’ brief reflective writing on five established educational and social psychological constructs that correspond to five important goals of environmental education: promoting...

Much research in educational psychology concerns group differences. In this study, we argue that Bayesian estimation is more appropriate for testing group differences than is the traditional null hypothesis significance testing (NHST). We demonstrate the use of Bayesian estimation on gender differences in students’ achievement goals. Research findi...

In the current chapter, we review central contemporary motivational perspectives that differ in their theoretical assumptions about the nature of motivation and about the role of the environment in people’s motivation. We highlight the central assumptions of each perspective about the source and malleability of motivation, and about mechanisms of m...

From an ecological perspective, learning and development in childhood and throughout the lifespan occur in the context of interactions within complex social networks. Collectively, the articles in this special issue illuminate three important themes related to teacher-student interactions within instructional contexts: relationships, competence, an...

Student cognition and motivation, as well as institutional policies, determine student course grades and retention in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. Regarding cognition, study skills relate to course grades, and grades relate to retention in STEM. Several aspects of motivation are related to both grades and retenti...

In his March 2015 inaugural editorial, incoming Journal of Educational Psychology (JEP) editor Steve Graham explained his intention to build on the leadership of esteemed previous JEP editors, but also to go beyond “the status quo” to making “JEP even better” (p. 1) by setting criteria for the manuscripts that would pass the bar for peer review. Gr...

Recent theory and research suggest that self-regulation is not a unitary set of strategies, and that students may employ different types of self-regulation strategies in ways that correspond with different motivational orientations. In this paper, we describe a situated case study approach to investigate the motivational orientation and self-regula...

This paper describes a conceptualization of role-identity and motivation as a complex dynamic system and its application to teachers’ professional role-identity and motivation. The Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI) conceptualizes role identity as a dynamic system comprised of four components that are continuously emerging to inform mot...

Identity exploration is a central mechanism for identity formation that has been found to be associated with intense engagement, positive coping, openness to change, flexible cognition, and meaningful learning. Moreover, identity exploration in school has been associated with adaptive motivation for learning the academic material. Particularly in t...

Research concerning different standards in performance goals – the achievement goal of demonstrating ability – has found little difference in cognition and behavior between normative (social-comparative) oriented and outcome-oriented standards. The present study tested differences in affect between performance goals with these different standards....

The current proposal describes a study employing an emergent theoretical model of teaching motivation to investigate the change in conception of teaching in higher education of graduate student instructors participating in a higher education professional development (PD) seminar. Qualitative content analysis of pre-PD and post-PD reflective essays...

The current short-term longitudinal study investigated the role of college students’ identity development and motivational beliefs in predicting their chemistry achievement and intentions to leave science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors. We collected 4 waves of data over 1 semester from 363 diverse undergraduate STEM students enrol...

The focus of this study is on the role of achievement goals in students’ persistence. The authors administered 5 puzzles to 96 college students: 4 unsolvable and 1 relatively easy (acting as a hope probe). They examined whether and how persistence may deteriorate as a function of failing the puzzles, as well as whether and how persistence may rebou...

This chapter argues that self-regulated learning is not a unitary construct. Rather, students' different purposes of engagement in the task meaningfully distinguish between different types of self-regulation.