Jeffrey Alan Greene

• PhD in Educational Psychology, MA in Measurement, Statistics and Evaluation
• Professor (Associate) at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Introduction The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of a randomized control trial designed to test the effect of a brief intervention used to improve self-regulated learning (SRL) in gateway biology courses using joint estimation of graphical models. Methods Students ( N = 265; n = 136) from three sections of a hybrid-format introduct...

The increasing ubiquity of digital technologies in the twenty-first century has led to calls for education reform focused on digital literacy, but what exactly does this term mean? The concept of digital literacy has evolved much since its evolution from media and new literacies scholarship, resulting in a myriad of definitions. Previous attempts t...

Educators, families, and students continue to debate whether homework promotes academic achievement. A resolution to this debate has proven elusive, given the often-mixed findings of the relationship between homework behavior, typically measured with often-unreliable student self-reports and achievement. We argue better estimates of these relations...

Throughout 2023 and 2024, we served as co-guest editors of a topical collection in Educational Psychology Review on The Past, Present, and Future of Theory Development in Educational Psychology. In this topical collection, authors of prominent theories in the field were invited to reflect upon how they generated, developed, and iterated their ideas...

Self-regulated learning (SRL) process is temporally bounded and unfolds over time. Achieving insights into temporal dynamics in SRL processing, however, requires not only fine-grained data collection and methods but also modeling approaches that accurately account for the sequential structure of the events during the SRL process. Addressing this, w...

Undergraduates enrolled in large, active learning courses must self-regulate their learning (self-regulated learning [SRL]) by appraising tasks, making plans, setting goals, and enacting and monitoring strategies. SRL researchers have relied on self-report and learner-mediated methods during academic tasks studied in laboratories and now collect di...

Even highly motivated undergraduates drift off their STEM career pathways. In large introductory STEM classes, instructors struggle to identify and support these students. To address these issues, we developed co‐redesign methods in partnership with disciplinary experts to create high‐structure STEM courses that better support students and produce...

Educators and instructional designers have used the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework to guide their design of inclusive instruction for students with and without disabilities. Despite UDL having entered its 4th decade of development and research, there have been ongoing critiques of UDL for lacking clarity in definition, challenges wit...

More and more, people are abandoning the active pursuit of news, assuming instead that important information will be pushed to them via their social media networks. This approach to news makes people susceptible to the vast amounts of misinformation online, yet research on the effects of this kind of engagement is mixed. More research is needed on...

Undergraduate STEM lecture courses enroll hundreds who must master declarative, conceptual, and applied learning objectives. To support them, instructors have turned to active learning designs that require students to engage in self-regulated learning (SRL). Undergraduates struggle with SRL, and universities provide courses, workshops, and digital...

The affordances of computer‐based learning environments make them powerful tools for conveying information in higher education. However, to most effectively use these environments, students must be adept at self‐regulating their learning. This self‐regulation is effortful, including a myriad of processes, including defining tasks, making plans, usi...

Individuals who engage in self-regulated learning (SRL) tend to perform better in complex learning tasks. However, learners’ ability to self-regulate can vary. To understand and support learners’ SRL, collecting information about their engagement in specific learning processes in the context of learning tasks is necessary. However, SRL is sufficien...

Capturing evidence for dynamic changes in self‐regulated learning (SRL) behaviours resulting from interventions is challenging for researchers. In the current study, we identified students who were likely to do poorly in a biology course and those who were likely to do well. Then, we randomly assigned a portion of the students predicted to perform...

Undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students’ motivations have a strong influence on whether and how they will persist through challenging coursework and into STEM careers. Proper conceptualization and measurement of motivation constructs, such as students’ expectancies and perceptions of value and cost (i.e., exp...

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....

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 a...

Given the rapid pace of technological change, access to unlimited information, and diverse forms of complex text, the importance and demand for enhanced literacy skills is greater than ever. Accordingly, researchers have begun developing integrated, multifaceted interventions that dynamically support enhanced literacy competence. The purpose of thi...

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, ethi...

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 teach...

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’ evalua...

For high school students to develop scientific understanding and reasoning, it is essential that they engage in epistemic cognition and scientific argumentation. In the current study, we used the AIR model (i.e., Aims and values, epistemic Ideals, and Reliable processes) to examine high school students’ epistemic cognition and argumentation as evid...

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...

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 lear...

Despite an increase in research on social regulation of learning, studies on socially shared metacognition are still scarce. This has led to a lack of understanding concerning how groups co-construct metacognitive knowledge, skills, and experiences. In this comparative case study, we qualitatively analyzed video recordings from the meetings of six...

Students working in small collaborative groups may experience conflicts due to emotional issues at the individual or group level. Students need to regulate these emotions to avoid or reduce negative socioemotional interactions that can interfere with group performance. In this article, we studied the socioemotional regulation strategies used by gra...

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 depend highly upon prior knowledge. Therefore, the goal of epistemic education is the cultivation of apt epistemic performance: successfully achieving va...

We report on a design-based research study that was conducted over two years. We developed, tested, and implemented Collabucate, a web-based tool for fostering social regulation of learning in collaborative learning. In this paper, we describe two cycles of a design-based research study in which Collabucate was implemented with Doctor of Pharmacy s...

Argumentation and scientific discourse are essential aspects of science education and inquiry in the 21st century. Student groups often struggle to enact these critical science skills, particularly with challenging content or tasks. Social regulation of learning research addresses the ways groups attempt to navigate such struggles by collectively p...

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 questions about how to help students to internalise complimentary self-regulatory and assessment knowledge, skills, and dispositions as well as how to prepar...

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 Univer...

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 nu...

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. Sp...

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 directly implicated teachers’ personal prior beliefs about mathematics learning and instruction—and refutational text manipulations on short and long-te...

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 per...

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 describe one theoretical-psychometric paradigm—termed dynamic measurement—designed to provide a valid representation of the way students respond to scho...

This special issue was designed to promote an integration of mobile and psychological theories of learning by inviting empirical research that draws upon both theoretical approaches to guide investigation into learning involving mobile devices. Five empirical articles illustrated how mobile devices afford resources to learners and how new channels...

Studying mobile learning – the use of personal electronic devices to engage in learning across multiple contexts via connections to media, educators, peers, experts, and the larger world – is a relatively new academic enterprise. In this special issue, we interrogated the promise and unexamined expectations of mobile learning, the theories and idea...

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 students’ (N = 28; 15 girls) written argumentation as they used a researcher-developed graphic organizer (i.e., Quality Talk graphic organizer [QTGO]). The...

Internet users encounter information from a wide array of sources with varying intents and standards of publication. The Internet, which is mostly unmoderated, has largely replaced sources curated by experts, such as books, newspapers, or broadcast news. Critiquing and using this variety of content and sources requires knowledge and skills that mus...

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 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 yea...

The scientific literacy and conceptual understanding demands of the 21st century have necessitated fundamental changes in science education, including changes from traditional lecture to more active learning pedagogies. The affordances of such pedagogies can benefit students, but only when they are able to enact effective and efficient self-regulat...

A meta-analysis examining the effects of epistemic cognition interventions on academic achievement.

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 adap...

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...

Science education in the twenty-first century must not only teach students what science is, but also how to understand and engage in scientific reasoning and argumentation. In this chapter, we review two inquiry lessons in the physical sciences, one based in chemistry and the other based in physics. These lessons demonstrate how to engage students...

Flourishing in today's global society requires citizens that are both intelligent consumers and producers of scientific understanding. Indeed, the modern world is facing ever‐more complex problems that require innovative ways of thinking about, around, and with science. As numerous educational stakeholders have suggested, such skills and abilities...

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 e...

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...

We explored the feasibility of using automated scoring to assess upper-elementary students’ reading ability through analysis of transcripts of students’ small-group discussions about texts. Participants included 35 fourth-grade students across two classrooms that engaged in a literacy intervention called Quality Talk. During the course of one schoo...

Today's students must learn to be critical consumers of the digital learning technologies that are rapidly populating their world. Digital literacy is not an innate skill, and comprises more than facility using the Internet, word processing programs, or social media. Likewise, literacy itself has been redefined as the acquisition of not just knowle...

Small-group, text-based discussions are a prominent and effective instructional practice, but the literature on the effects of different group composition methods (i.e., homogeneous vs. heterogeneous ability grouping) has been inconclusive with few direct comparisons of the two grouping methods. A yearlong classroom-based intervention was conducted...

Background: Self-regulated learning (SRL) models position metacognitive monitoring as central to SRL processing and predictive of student learning outcomes (Winne & Hadwin, 2008; Zimmerman, 2000). A body of research evidence also indicates that depth of strategy use, ranging from surface to deep processing, is predictive of learning performance....

Self-regulation in education is a familiar and important topic for all educators: professors, administrators, teachers, researchers, journalists, and scholars. As educational standards require that students take control of what and how they learn, self-regulation skills are essential to student success. Written by a leading expert on self-regulatio...

As reflected in the Next Generation Science Standards, concerns about the adequacy of education and career preparation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields have led to fundamental shifts in the focus of K-12 science education. Such shifts are also highlighted in many of the articles within this special issue, and the i...

Epistemic cognition is the thinking that people do about what and how they know. Education has long been concerned with promoting reflection on knowledge and processes of knowing, but research into epistemic cognition began really in the past half century, with a tremendous expansion in the past 20 years. This review summarizes the broad range of p...

Proliferating information and viewpoints in the 21st century require an educated citizenry with the ability to think critically about complex, controversial issues. Critical thinking requires epistemic cognition: the ability to construct, evaluate, and use knowledge. Epistemic dispositions and beliefs predict many academic outcomes, as well as whet...

The proliferation of online information has not come with a commensurate growth in students’ ability to learn from that information. Today’s students may be digitally native online communicators, but many lack the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate, find, and integrate online information into coherent understanding. Students who are able to...

The purpose of this pilot study was to predict resolution of suicidal ideation and risk over the course of therapy among suicidal outpatients (N = 144) using a novel method for analyzing Self- verses Relationally-oriented qualitative written responses to the Suicide Status Form (SSF). A content analysis software program was used to extract word cou...

As computer-based learning environments grow in prominence, so do the demands placed upon students to learn with these tools. Empirical research has shown that students who are effective at self-regulating their learning are more likely to acquire deep conceptual understanding while using these environments. However, there is a noticeable lack of r...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been heralded as an education revolution, but they suffer from low retention, calling into question their viability as a means of promoting education for all. In addition, numerous gaps remain in the research literature, particularly concerning predictors of retention and achievement. In this study, we used...

The articles in this special issue illustrate the challenges of implementing interventions in school contexts, as well as the lessons that can be learned from such work. Being responsive to the challenges and affordances of educational contexts requires studying not just the treatment, but also what happens before, during, and after implementation....

The growing prominence of the Internet, and other digital environments, as educational tools requires research regarding learners’ digital literacy. We argue that two critical aspects of digital literacy are the ability to effectively plan and monitor the efficacy of strategies used to search and manage the wealth of information available online, a...

Studies have shown that, to achieve a conceptual understanding of complex science topics, learners need to use self-regulated learning (SRL) skills, particularly when learning with Hypermedia Learning Environments (HLEs). Winne and Hadwin (2008) claimed that metacognition is a key aspect of SRL, particularly metacognitive monitoring and control. Th...

Since Perry first proposed that students’ beliefs about knowledge and knowing were an important aspect of learning, there has been a proliferation of models of epistemic cognition, and empirical studies of how epistemic cognition relates to learning. Unfortunately, the dominant means of measuring epistemic cognition, self-report instruments, have n...

The research shows that the lack of instructional scaffolding and high degree of user control inherent to most HLEs make them difficult learning environments for learners who lack the ability to appropriately self-regulate their learning. Therefore, developers of HLEs must construct these environments in ways that not only promote knowledge acquisi...

Winne and Hadwin (2008) identified four phases of self-regulated learning (SRL) including defining the task, setting goals and making plans, studying (i.e., learning), and adaptation. The vast majority of SRL research has focused on processing during the third phase, studying. In this study, we developed coding rubrics that allowed us to examine ho...

Researchers often use measures of the frequency of self-regulated learning (SRL; Zimmerman, American Educational Research Journal, 45(1), 166–183, 2000) processing as a predictor of learning gains. These frequency data, which are really counts of SRL processing events, are often non-normally distributed, and the accurate analysis of these data requ...

Recently, research on the role of epistemic beliefs in conceptual change has increased dramatically. The focus of that research has largely been on students’ beliefs about knowledge and knowing; that is, how one understands what it means to know. In this article, we consider the characteristics of knowledge and knowing (i.e., epistemic frames) mani...

This chapter explores the role of self-regulation in learning with computer-based learning environments, and how it can be assessed and fostered.

In this mixed-method study, we converged product and process data to examine the effectiveness of three human scaffolding conditions in facilitating students’ learning about the circulatory system and the deployment of key self-regulatory processes during a 40-minute hypermedia learning task. Undergraduate students (N = 123) were randomly assigned...

Researchers and educators continue to explore how to assist students in the acquisition of conceptual understanding of complex science topics. While hypermedia learning environments (HLEs) afford unique opportunities to display multiple representations of these often abstract topics, students who do not engage in self-regulated learning (SRL) with...

Users benefit most from computer-based learning environments (CBLEs) when they are adept at self-regulated learning (SRL). Learner characteristics, such as epistemic beliefs, influence SRL processing. Therefore, research into learning with CBLEs must account for interactions between epistemic beliefs and SRL. In this article we integrate epistemic...

Models of personal epistemology have not been sufficiently integrated despite conceptual similarities. We attempted to model both dimensional and positional aspects of personal epistemology, as well as examine the domain specificity of these phenomena. The conceptual framework for this study was a new model of epistemic and ontological cognitive de...

In this study, we examined how high-school students utilized a hypermedia learning environment (HLE) to acquire declarative knowledge of a historical topic, as well as historical thinking skills. In particular, we were interested in whether self-regulated learning (SRL; Winne & Hadwin, 1998; Zimmerman, 2000) processing was related to the acquisitio...

The allure of personal epistemology research is the implicit assumption that in some cases students’ poor academic performance may not be due to any deficiency in skill or ability, but rather due to their naïve beliefs about knowledge and knowing (Hofer and Pintrich, 1997). Numerous researchers have asserted that naïve or less sophisticated beliefs...