We’re excited to share our new article, now published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, on how science teachers’ cultural engagement and autonomy-supportive practices relate to students’ psychological need satisfaction and engagement in high school chemistry and physics. Drawing on longitudinal survey data from diverse urban high school students during COVID-19, we found that these two sets of practices are closely linked, and that their associations with student outc

We’re excited to share that Erika Patall was named the 2025 recipient of the Educational Psychologist “Article of the Year” award for her article titled, “A meta-analysis of teachers’ provision of structure in the classroom and students’ academic competence beliefs, engagement, and achievement“. Congratulations to Erika and the team on this achievement!

Take a look at our group’s latest paper published in Contemporary Educational Psychology! Across three studies, we validated a measure of Race-Reimaged Autonomy Supportive Instruction (RR-ASI), which showed an association with students’ autonomy and emotional engagement beyond SDT-defined autonomy support.

Check out our research group’s latest paper published in Educational Psychology Review! This meta-analysis reports on the relationships between autonomy need satisfaction and well(ill)-being for K-12 youth.

Check out our research group’s latest paper published in Educational Psychologist report a set of meta-analyses on the relationship between classroom structure and students’ competence beliefs, engagement, and achievement. Click here to read now!

Check out our research group’s latest paper published in Journal of Experimental Education on agentic engagement from the perspectives of urban high school science teachers. Click here to read now!

Check out the latest papers from our research group on agentic engagement and promoting students’ agentic orientation: Patall, E. A., Zambrano, J., Kennedy, A. A. U., Yates, N., & Vallín, J. A. (2022). Promoting an agentic orientation: An intervention in university psychology and physical science courses. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(2), 368–392. Zambrano, J., Kennedy, A. A. U., Aguilera, C., Yates, N., & Patall, E. A. (2021). Students’ beliefs about agentic engagem

In collaboration with GoGuardian and USC Rossier Center EDGE, MERG is excited to share The 2022-2023 State of Engagement Report: Teachers’ Practices of Engaging Students. In this research, we surveyed over 1,400 teachers from all across the U.S. to examine the how frequently U.S. teachers use motivating instructional practices that support engagement, their beliefs about what practices are most important, why they use some more practices then others, and their perceptions of

Click here to read Erika’s interview for U.S. News and World Report on how to boost student motivation and engagement!

Erika’s paper, Implications of the open science era for educational psychology research syntheses, published in Educational Psychologist was selected as the “2021 Best Article” from Division 15 (Educational Psychology) of the American Psychological Association. Click here to check out her paper — Congratulations Erika!

Come join us at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting to hear about all the exciting projects that we’ve been working on! See below for this year’s paper/poster presentations from our research group members: SIG – Motivation in Education Virtual Paper Session Room. Thu, April 21, 2:30 to 4:00pm PDT. Supporting Student Curiosity: Classroom-Based Research and Implications for Practice. Discussant: Erika Patall AERA Poster Session 3: Friday, April 22, 8-9:

Check out Erika’s recent talk on the Implications of Open Science for Research Syntheses in Education for the AERA Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis SIG. Link here: https://www.srmasig.org/seminar/

Check out Nicole and Erika’s new paper published in Motivation and Emotion on the relationship between Black students’ external regulation and intrinsic motivation. Their findings highlight the need to incorporate race into motivation theory in order to better support Black student’s success. Check the paper out here!

Check out Erika’s recent paper on the implications of open science for research syntheses, published online this month in a special issue of Educational Psychologist focused on Educational Psychology in the Open Science Era. In this paper, Erika talks about what happens to research syntheses if they are built on illusory results, and how open science practices can improve research syntheses in educational psychology. See the whole special issue here.

Register for the event and RSVP for Erika’s session at https://edtechweek.com.

Come join us virtually at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting to hear about all the exciting projects that we’ve been working on! See below for this year’s paper/poster presentations from our research group members: April 9th, 2021 from 10:40am-12:10pm ET Paper presentation for the symposium on Qualitative and Mixed-Methods Approaches to Studying Motivation: Zambrano, J., Kennedy, A., Aguilera, C., Yates, N. M., & Patall, E.A. (2021, April). Student b

You’re going to want to check out Jin and Erika’s latest meta-analysis in collaboration with Annie Jung, Marlone Henderson, and Eunjoo Han, published online this month in Psychological Bulletin. In this meta-analysis, we synthesized research testing the effect of exposure to prosocial modeling on helping behavior. See it here.

In “Feeling proud today may lead people to coast tomorrow” published in Emotion this month, Jin and Erika examined daily associations between students’ emotions and the effort they put into academic goal striving. The title gives you a clue about what they found. You can see the paper here.

See this review paper on teacher autonomy support that was recently published in Policy Insights from the Brain and Behavioral Science by Erika and Jeanette here.

Here’s Erika receiving the 2018 Richard E. Snow award for early contributions (Division 15 — Educational Psychology) from her friend and colleague Gale Sinatra at the American Psychological Association Annual Convention in Chicago in August 2019. Along with the award presentation, Erika had the opportunity to share her story about how she came to study motivating classroom practices and what she has learned. So honored! A video of Erika’s APA talk can be found here.