Ian Thacker

University of Texas at San Antonio | UTSA · Department of Educational Psychology

Teachers of mathematics play a significant role in students' perceptions of their mathematical ability and future career choices. Although a variety of studies have investigated teachers' biases, most of this work does not distinguish between teachers' accurate assessments of their students' academic ability and their implicit biases. In this rando...

We investigated knowledge and attitudes before and after reading refutation texts augmented by different kinds of persuasive information and how emotions mediated the process of knowledge and attitude change. Undergraduates (N = 424) enrolled in 4 universities from 3 countries read a refutation text on genetically modified foods (GMFs) and were the...

The goal of this design-based research study was the creation and evaluation of a mini-unit intended to foster perceptually grounded understandings of the concept of slope in middle-school students. Central to this unit was an innovative device designed to create a productive pedagogical space between student intuition for steepness and formal defi...

The success of professional development programs has typically been determined based on their impact on teacher learning, without much attention being given to the data sources used. Large-scale studies have generally relied on teachers' self-reports, whereas small-scale studies have included more direct assessments and observations of teacher lear...

Background Women and people of color continue to be underrepresented in many STEM fields and careers. Many studies have linked societal biases against the mathematical abilities of women and people of color to this underrepresentation, as well as to earlier measures of mathematical confidence and performance. Recent studies have shown that teachers...

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic initiated major disruptions to higher education systems. Physical spaces that previously supported interpersonal interaction and community were abruptly inactivated, and faculty largely took on the responsibility of accommodating classroom structures in rapidly changing situations. This study employed intervie...

The purpose of this preregistered study was to examine whether patterns of teachers' race and gender biases found in prior research would emerge in a virtual teaching context. We asked a national sample of 989 teachers to evaluate student work pictured in screenshots of a virtual classroom showing students explaining their work. We randomly assigne...

The COVID-19 outbreak spurred unplanned closures and transitions to online classes. Physical environments that once fostered social interaction and community were rendered inactive. We conducted interviews and administered surveys to examine undergraduate STEM students’ feelings of belonging and engagement while in physical isolation, and identifie...

Informal learning environments, such as museums, provide unique opportunities for science learning. They are deliberately designed to impact public understanding of science and shape visitors’ attitudes and behaviors. As a developing technology, augmented reality (AR) offers the transformative potential to support museums’ educational missions by e...

Refutation texts are designed to facilitate the revision of inaccurate knowledge; however, studies have documented backfire effects wherein respondents become less accurate when exposed to a factual correction compared to another. Here, we explored whether epistemic emotions mediated knowledge revision or backfire processes when reading experimenta...

Choice of assignment has been shown to increase student engagement, improve academic outcomes, and promote student satisfaction in higher education courses (Hanewicz, Platt, & Arendt, Distance Education, 38(3), 273-287, 2017). However, in previous research, choice resulted in complex procedures and increased response effort for instructors (e.g., A...

Existing stereotypical beliefs regarding mathematical ability as being innate and being associated with men more have severe consequences for female students' perceptions of their mathematical ability, their course-taking decisions, and eventually, their decision to enter and stay in STEM fields. Yet how such beliefs compare among educators at diff...

Texts presenting novel statistics can shift learners’ attitudes and conceptions about controversial science topics. However, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms underlying this conceptual change. The purpose of this dissertation study was to investigate two potential mechanisms that underlie learning from novel statistics: numerical esti...

Some research suggests that teachers’ beliefs and thoughts about the nature of mathematical knowledge and knowing (broadly termed epistemic dispositions) comprise an important factor that influences their practice. However, to date, there is no systematic review of the empirical literature on mathematics teachers’ epistemic dispositions. The purpos...

Texts presenting novel statistics can shift learners' attitudes and conceptions about controversial science topics. However, not a lot is known about the mechanisms underlying this conceptual change. The purpose of this study was to investigate two potential mechanisms that underlie learning from novel statistics: numerical estimation skills and ep...

Teachers' beliefs play a significant role in students' academic attainment and career choices. Despite comparable attainment levels between genders, persistent stereotypes and beliefs that certain disciplines require innate ability and that men and women have different ability levels impede students' academic career paths. In this study, we examine...

We examined asynchronous online discussion boards, specifically those that are unmediated by teacher figures, to identify characteristics of these spaces that support or constrain students as they seek help in mathematics. We analyzed 86 questions and 114 associated responses posted to two Khan Academy discussion boards centered around two related...

The purpose of this design based research study was to better understand and build from students’ perceptual experiences of visual representations of the greenhouse effect. Twenty undergraduate students were interviewed as they engaged with an online visualization for the learning of the greenhouse effect. We found that, even though all students ag...

When participants in inquiry refer to an object, they may, unbeknown to them, construct the object differently. They thus tacitly attribute different idiosyncratic senses for their respective constructions and consequently draw different inferences regarding the phenomenon under investigation. A single person, too, may shift between alternative con...