Matthew L Bernacki

• PhD
• 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 introducto...

In this five-year longitudinal study focused on digital support for continuing and first-generation college students, we examined how digital curricular enhancements that promoted students’ self-regulated learning skills (e.g, the Science of Learning to Learn) through trainings delivered on the university learning management system course site of a...

Algebra has been identified as a gatekeeper to careers in STEM, however little research exists on how algebra appears for practitioners in the workplace. Surveys and interviews were conducted with 77 STEM practitioners from a variety of fields, examining how they reported using algebraic functions in their work. Survey and interview reports suggest...

Research in educational psychology involves empirical investigation into the learning process with an aim to refine psychological theories of learning and their application to real-world settings where they can be used to benefit learners. Emergent methodological processes involved in learning analytics include the study of event-based data produce...

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...

Problem-posing can enhance math learning, but the effectiveness of different scaffolding approaches is not well understood. In this study, 120 College Algebra students posed problems related to their interests in popular culture (e.g., video games) or STEM careers (e.g., healthcare), using optional scaffolds (video, template, or example problem) fo...

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...

Interest theory states that triggering students' interest in a learning task can have beneficial effects for their resulting interest in a content domain, as well as their conceptual learning. In context personalization, an instructional approach that leverages interest theory, tasks are modified in educational settings to correspond to interests s...

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...

This study investigates the association between help-seeking behaviors (hints, hints per step, hints with steps requests, and hint to error), affect (boredom, confusion, frustration, happiness, and engagement), and performance in seventh and eighth-grade students using the Cognitive Tutor Bridge to Algebra as a self-regulated learning environment....

Both personalization and utility value (UV) interventions have emerged in educational psychology as ways to increase students’ interest in learning an academic subject, and potentially improve learning outcomes. However, empirical results for each approach have been mixed and these approaches have worked differently for different groups of students...

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...

Undergraduates who engage in high structure, high enrollment, active learning courses tend to perform best when they self-regulate their learning. Student self-regulated learning is encouraged by active learning designs that provide resources used to enact strategies and engage in planning, monitoring, and evaluation of one's learning processes. So...

Digital environments like learning management systems can afford opportunities for students to engage in cognitive learning strategies including preparatory reading of advance organizers including lecture outlines and self-testing using ungraded quizzes. When timed appropriately, self-testing can afford distributed practice, an optimal approach to...

Discipline‐based educational researchers and institutions that provide guidance on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics instruction have long documented the impact of active learning strategies on student learning and achievement, the lack of incorporation of active learning into undergraduate instruction, and the languishing rates of...

Mathematical problem posing, or authoring mathematical tasks, can allow students to integrate their interests and experiences into the classroom. Little research has explored different designs for scaffolding or facets of posed problem quality, particularly when problem posing is based on students’ interests. We created an environment that enabled...

Undergraduate students pursuing STEM careers have varied perceptions of how mathematics is used in their careers. A survey of community college students enrolled in College Algebra measured interest in mathematics and interest in STEM-related careers, as well as a student's perception of how mathematics was used (or not) in their chosen career. Ana...

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...

We investigated the effects of a learning analytics-driven prediction modeling platform and a brief digital self-regulated learning skill training program targeted to support undergraduate biology students identified as likely to perform poorly in the course. A prediction model comprising prior knowledge scores and learning management system log da...

Undergraduates often report problematic perceptions of low value and high cost in their initial science courses. These beliefs often predict poor performance and retention, and also strengthen over time. Few studies have examined how profiles of value and cost beliefs emerge, and fewer track students’ transitions across profiles over a course and t...

Community college students face difficulties in mathematics courses and may not understand the relevance of the topics they are learning to their intended career. When such connections are not made, mathematics courses can become barriers to pursuit of careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). In the present study, we ass...

In STEM education, a thorough understanding of the interaction of self-efficacy and metacognitive monitoring behaviors is needed to refine theories and inform the design of instructional supports for students with varying levels of motivation and self-regulation skills. We examined how students' (n = 1063) exam scores in an undergraduate life scien...

Teachers, schools, districts, states, and technology developers endeavor to personalize learning experiences for students, but definitions of personalized learning (PL) vary and designs often span multiple components. Variability in definition and implementation complicate the study of PL and the ways that designs can leverage student characteristi...

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...

The COVID-19 disruption presented considerable challenges for university students, requiring the sudden need for increased engagement in remote learning environments and the ability to cope with academic and familial demands. To examine how students self-regulated their learning during the disruption, we surveyed undergraduates (n = 226) enrolled i...

The present study examined the effects of a classroom intervention on students’ metacognitive monitoring of retrieval practice performance feedback and metacognitive control of future study decisions. A true experimental design was used to randomly assign 103 undergraduate students from an education course to trained (n = 49) and control (n = 54) c...

Prediction models that underlie “early warning systems” need improvement. Some predict outcomes using entrenched, unchangeable characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic status) and others rely on performance on early assignments to predict the final grades to which they contribute. Behavioral predictors of learning outcomes often accrue slowly, to the p...

Many science, engineering, technology, and math (STEM) majors fail to complete their degrees, and those who leave report they lack learning skills required for STEM coursework. In 2 studies, we examined the effects on students’ exam performances when they were assigned to complete a brief digital learning skills training program we embedded into th...

This article introduces a special issue comprising research on efforts to personalize learning in different academic subjects. We first consider the emergence of personalized learning (PL) and the myriad of definitions that describe its essential features. Thereafter, we introduce the articles in the special issue by examining their alignment to ex...

Expectancy-value researchers have described the components of subjective task value in multiple ways, leading to multiple competing structural representations of subjective task value data. The purpose of this study was to examine these competing multidimensional factor structures by comparing correlated factor, hierarchical, and bifactor represent...

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...

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...

Students who drop out of their science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors commonly report that they lack skills critical to STEM learning and career pursuits. Many training programs exist to develop students’ learning skills and they typically achieve small to medium effects on behaviors and performance. However, these programs requir...

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...

The ability to self-regulate learning (SRL) is a skill theorized to transfer across learning environments. Students with this ability can consider a learning task, identify a goal, develop a plan to achieve it, execute that plan, and monitor and adapt learning until the goal is met. This paper examines the educational implications of developing the...

We investigated whether retrieval practice would interact with prior topic knowledge to influence chapter exam performances and confidence judgments of 41 undergraduates enrolled in an educational psychology class. As hypothesized, retrieval practice eliminated differences in exam performance as a function of prior topic knowledge. For practice-tes...

Students are involved in mathematics they pursue their individual interests in areas like sports or video games. The present study explores how connecting to students’ individual interests can be used to personalize learning using an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for algebra. We examine the idea that the effects of personalization may be modera...

Students’ perception of the costs of engaging in learning has only recently been the focus of empirical study. Perceived costs include effort cost, opportunity cost, and psychological cost. This study focuses on the implications of psychological cost – the perceived negative psychological consequence of participating in a learning task –for learnin...

Students’ perceptions of competence and relatedness are known to influence learning processes and achievement, and may have particular import for underrepresented science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learners. Sources of social support that contribute to undergraduate life science learners’ perceived competence and relatedness we...

Context personalization – the incorporation of students’ out of school interests into learning tasks – has recently been shown to positively affect students’ situational interest and their performance and learning in mathematics. However, few studies have shown effects on both interest and achievement, drawing into question whether context personal...

Models of achievement goals suggest that different tasks and contexts influence the goals students adopt at a given time. However, many studies of achievement goals rely on measures assessed at the class level, analyze results with a variable-centered approach, and employ self-report questionnaires, which may reduce understanding of the contextual...

Background: The demand for doctorally prepared nurses worldwide is higher than ever. Universities have responded with increased numbers of DNP and Ph.D. in Nursing programs. There are more doctoral nursing students than ever before yet they remain one of the least studied student populations. This is concerning given the high attrition rates repor...

Instruction can be made relevant to students when it draws upon and utilizes their interests, experiences, and “funds of knowledge” in productive ways to support classroom learning. This approach has been referred to as “context personalization.” In this paper, we discuss the cognitive basis of personalization interventions, including theories rela...

Learning management systems log users' behaviors, which can be used to predict achievement in a course. This paper examines the implications of data representations (e.g., dichotomous vs. count vs. principled, per learning theory) and applies forward selection algorithms to predict achievement in a biology course. Accuracy is compared across models...

Algebra is an important subject for students’ educational and economic futures; however student interest in mathematics declines over adolescence. Bringing together research on personalizing learning to students’ interests and research on student problem-posing offers a potentially important approach to enhancing algebraic understanding. We engaged...

Full text at https://dgmg81phhvh63.cloudfront.net/content/user-photos/Publications/Archives/Peer-Review/PR_WISP16_Vol18No1-2.pdf

IntroductionThe conceptualization of self-regulated learning (SRL) has been profoundly articulated in recent special issues focused on the similarities and distinctions between SRL and related phenomena like self-regulation, metacognition, and motivation as well as the development of new environments and methods that improve SRL research (Alexander...

Self-regulated learning (SRL) theorists propose that learners' motivations and cognitive and metacognitive processes interact dynamically during learning, yet researchers typically measure motivational constructs as stable factors. In this study, self-efficacy was assessed frequently to observe its variability during learning and how learners' effi...

This study investigated the hypothesis that prompting students to self-assess their interest and understanding of science concepts and activities would increase their motivation in science classes. Students were randomly assigned to an experimental condition that wrote self-assessments of their competence and interest in science lessons or a contro...

As educators seek ways to enhance student motivation and improve achievement, promising advances are being made in the adaptive approaches to instruction. Learning technologies are emerging that promote a high level of personalization of the learning experience. One type of personalization is context personalization, in which instruction is present...

Achievement goals are a powerful construct for understanding students' classroom experiences and performance, yet most work examining achievement goals relies on self-report measures gathered through questionnaires. The current work aims to assess achievement goals using a task choice embedded within a typical classroom activity. Results show the b...

Personalization of learning environments to the background characteristics of learners, including non-cognitive factors, has become increasingly popular with the rise of advanced technology systems. We discuss an intervention within the Cognitive Tutor ITS where mathematics problems were personalized to the out-of-school interests of students in to...

To access data, visit: https://pslcdatashop.web.cmu.edu/ Please cite as: M. Bernacki and S. Ritter. Motivation for learning HS Geometry 2012 (geo-pa). Dataset 748 in DataShop. Retrieved from https://pslcdatashop.web.cmu.edu/ DatasetInfo?datasetId=748, 2014.

Models of self-regulated learning (SRL) describe the complex and dynamic interplay of learners’ cognitions, motivations, and behaviors when engaged in a learning activity. Recently, researchers have begun to use fine-grained behavioral data such as think aloud protocols and log-file data from educational software to test hypotheses regarding the co...

Studies examining students’ achievement goals, cognitive engagement strategies and performance have found that achievement goals tend to predict classes of cognitive strategy use which predict performance on measures of learning. These studies have led to deeper theoretical understanding, but their reliance on self-report data limit the conclusions...

This study's goal was to quantify the effects pre-lecture online quizzes and student-initiated inquiries to the instructor, either virtually or in person, had on students' achievement. Pre- and post-course tests were also implemented to an experimental and a comparison section of the same course. The number of electronic administrative contacts was...

Recent research suggests that technologically enhanced learning environments (TELEs) represent an opportunity for students to build their ability to self-regulate, and for some, leverage their ability to apply self-regulated learning (SRL) to acquire knowledge. This chapter reviews 55 empirical studies and interprets their findings to answer the fo...

This study examined the impact of first-year service-learning and community service involvements on academic and civic engagement over four years. Students completed yearly questionnaires and interviews which measured students' attitudes, prosocial behaviors and tendency toward leadership. Analyses of variance indicated that students enrolled in fi...

Thesis (M.S.)--St. Joseph's University, 2003. Includes bibliographical references.