People
Dr. Stacy Shaw, Principal Investigator
Dr. Stacy Shaw is an Assistant Professor in Learning Science and Technology and Psychological Science at WPI. Her research focuses on understanding creative thinking in mathematics, how anxiety and other threat experiences affect mathematical cognition and reasoning, as well as how classroom experiences can affect performance and learning in STEM. More recently, she has become interested in the role of wakeful rest periods for learning and wellbeing.
Dr. Shaw is currently not accepting graduate students.
Current Graduate Students
Alena Egorova
Alena is a PhD student in the Learning Sciences & Technologies program. She earned her Psychology MA from Moscow State University, where she investigated how emotional burnout develops in teachers. After graduation, Alena studied how people interact with digital tools, working as a researcher and designer in tech projects for over 7 years. She came to WPI to learn the ways new technologies and data could be used to improve education. Her current research interests include (1) the interplay of anxiety and cognition in learning and (2) how it unfolds in the context of educational technologies.
Andrew McReynolds
Andrew McReynolds is a third-year PhD student in the Learning Sciences & Technologies program at WPI. He was an undergraduate researcher in the psychology department at the University of San Francisco (USF) while completing his bachelor’s degree in psychology (December 2020). During his time at USF, Andrew was a teaching assistant for courses such as abnormal psychology, child maltreatment, and advanced research topics, and examined the impact of COVID-19 on his peers educational experience. His research interests include equity in education, teacher-student interaction, and improving accessibility to educational materials in developing countries.
Personal Website - www.amcreynolds.com
Affiliated Graduate Students
Kirk Vanacore
Kirk Vanacore is a Ph.D. student in Learning Sciences and Technologies at WPI. He earned his Masters at Tuft University from the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study Human and Development. At Tufts, he worked as a graduate research assistant at the Center for Reading and Language Research studying and implementing effective pedagogy for dyslexic students. Kirk worked as a Senior Analyst at Lexia Learning, where he used data science to inform the development and improvement of educational technologies. Kirk's research interests include learning analytics, education data mining, causal inference in big data analysis, and effective pedagogies for neurodiverse populations.
Anna Mederer
Anna is a Ph.D. student in Physics at WPI who is interested in Physics education and a new affiliated graduate student in the CEDAR lab. They earned their bachelors in Robotics Engineering and Mechanical engineering at WPI, and currently teach physics labs and conduct research on how students learn in the physics classroom.
Lab Manager
Mikayla Prue, Research Assistant
Mikayla is a current sophomore undergraduate at WPI. She is studying Biomedical Engineering and Psychological Science. She is interested in studying educational and behavior psychology. Currently she is working on a study with Dr. Shaw on wakeful rest and its effects on learning.
Collaborators
Danny Rahal, Ph.D.
Danny Rahal, is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Together, him and Stacy Shaw have conducted work on the affective experiences of students in statistics classroom. Rahal's own research focuses on how social marginalization, with respect to low objective and subjective status and being treated as low status, can compromise health and well-being among adolescents from racial and ethnic minority and low-income backgrounds. He investigates how everyday discrimination and status relate to different aspects of health including daily stress processes, emotional well-being, mental health, substance use, and physiological systems including immune, autonomic, and hormonal processes.
Aaron Haim
I am currently a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). I work with Professor Neil Heffernan in the ASSISTments Lab, which develops features and conducts research for the ASSISTments platform. My work specifically involves improving student learning on-demand through content generated by teachers. In addition, I research, collect, and disseminate Open Science and Reproducibility information such that researchers have a better understanding on how to implement these practices themselves.
Personal Website: https://ahaim.ashwork.net/
CEDAR Lab Alumni
Vy Ngo
Vy Ngo graduated with her Master's degree in learning science at WPI in 2022 studying how teachers' perceptions affect students' math performance and attitudes towards math, and how instructional technologies affect these relationships. Her goal is to promote equity and reduce gender gaps in education and work environments.
Personal Website - https://sites.google.com/view/vyngo/home
Chayanne Sandoval-Williams, Lab Manager
Chayanne graduated with her bachelor's in computer science in 2023! As the inaugural lab manager of CEDAR for two years, Chayanne conducted research on how students view mistake messages in math, organized studies around creativity and rest, and did an excellent job at keeping our lab up and running. We miss you already, Chayanne!
Paul Pacheco
Paul is a recent graduate of the Psychological and Cognitive Science program at WPI with a concentration in psychobiology. Paul is also a first-generation student who completed WPI's Teacher Preparation Program to become a licensed high school biology teacher, and now is teaching high school biology!