The Creativity, Education, Affect, & Rest Lab
The Creativity, Education, Affect, & Rest Lab
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
The CEDAR Lab conducts research on creativity, teaching and learning, emotions and affect, and the role of wakeful rest periods for creativity, learning, and student wellbeing. Our lab uses experimental methods, observational data, learning analytics, and qualitative methodologies in an effort to improve STEM education and better understand students' experiences in education.
Spring 2026
Wilson has been awarded the WPI Salisbury Prize, congratulations, Wilson!
Mikayla has been awarded the Phillip N. Clay Outstanding Service award, congratulations, Mikayla!
Wilson has been awarded the NSF GRFP, congratulations, Wilson!
Andrew has successfully defended his dissertation, which investigated 20 year trends of ADHD prevalance in higher education, finding that students who report ADHD as a main disability has increased 10X over the last twenty years, that female students now represent the dominant gender of ADHD students, and finds mixed support for a modern argument that ADHD is a reflection of heightend curiosity. Congratulations, Dr. McReynolds!
Wilson has successfully completed his Master's degree by developing Type Circuits to teach students how to learn from error messages, and he found that in a small study of 10th grade students, Type circuits sparks engagement from students. Congratulations, Wilson!
Mikayla has successfully completed her Master's degree with a study investigating the effects of wakeful rest on post-encoding memory retention (and challenging past findings), congratulations, Mikayla!
Stacy was a part of a large effort to determine the analytical robustness of social science, and the results from hundreds of coauthors has have now been published in Nature.
Fall 2025
Stacy has published an article about how to get good rest during the holidays which has now appeared on SFGate, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, MSN, Fortune, and Scientific American. View the original article on The Conversation here.
Congratulations to Andrew for passing his dissertation proposal and becoming a Ph.D. Candidate!
Stacy was interviewed for WPI's student-run mental health podcast about work-life balance.
Congratulations to Anna Mederer for winning the Physics Undergraduate Mentor of the year award!
A conference paper has been published in the 2025 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings that examines the type of representations students use when recalling learned physics concepts.
CEDAR Lab welcomes Emma Toohey as a new research assistant!
An article has been published in the Journal of College Student Development that explores undergraduate students experiences and attitudes about leisure and rest.
An online first article has been published in Scatterplot that describes how AI tools can be used in conjunction with learning science principles to facilitate teaching and learning in statistics.
A preprint has been posted describing results from 100 Likert scale items about rest.
Stacy will be co-moderating a discussion with New York Time's Bestselling Author Susan Magsamen on her book "Your Brain on Art" for WPI Arts and Science Week, Tuesday September 30th, 12-1PM.
Spring 2025
The CEDAR and VIEW lab were awarded a Dr. John F. Manning, Jr. and Catherine C. Leser WPI Arts and Sciences Faculty Research Grant to fund their work on Plotwise, a new visualization technology for statistics learning.
Wilson wins the WPI Computer Science Outstanding Junior Award!
Anna wins the 2025 WPI Teaching Assistant of the Year!
Stacy wins the Romeo L. Moruzzi Young Faculty Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Education at WPI!
McKenzie wins the WPI Salisbury Prize!
Mikayla and McKenzie win the 2025 Provost MQP Award in Psychology!
Alena successfully passed her defense, and is now Dr. Egorova!
Andrew successfully passed his competency with research on ADHD & ASD college students!
Anna presented their research on wakeful rest in physics classrooms at WPI's Day of Scholarship and Excellence!
Kaitlyn and Daisha join the CEDAR lab as undergraduate research assistants!
Wilson Gramer and Mikayla Prue join CEDAR as a masters students!
See more news here!