Emerging Research in Educational Psychology

Emerging Research in Educational Psychology is the podcast series of the American Psychological Association's Division 15. The idea is simple: take one article or practice brief and talk it through with the people who wrote it. Jeff Green hosts. He has said on air that he would rather keep the focus on his guests and their scholarship than on himself. Even so, he often opens with a short reflection of his own, and those openings are worth hearing. Some are serious, like a reminder of how much teachers must know, or the point that no method can take the human element out of human activity, quantitative research included. Others are lighter. One begins with him admitting that he loves Hawaiian pizza and expects pushback for saying so. Then the talk turns to the paper, and it stays there. With Marguerite E. Walsh, the subject is teacher learning and adaptive expertise. The discussion covers how the way a teacher frames a lesson shapes what happens in it, from open-ended questions to pressing students to explain their reasoning. Wendy Castillo and Sarah Gillborn take on quantitative methods. Their points are that people make the categories, and that defaulting to a white comparison group treats one group as the norm. The alternatives they discuss include a universal target and analyzing differences within groups. Terrell R. Morton, Whitney N. McCoy, and ReAnna S. Roby talk about BGEM, a theory about Black girls and motivation. One of its ideas, embodied decisions, holds that choosing to speak up in class, to disengage, or to persist is something lived in the body, not just reasoned out in the head. Dionne Cross Francis and Francesca López, who edited a special issue, discuss worldview and reflexivity. They explain why questions about the nature of knowledge matter to anyone doing inquiry, not only to qualitative researchers. That episode opens with Green reading from the APA's October 29, 2021 resolution, which apologized to people of color for the association's role in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism. Christina Barbieri and Jessica Rodrigues describe combining explicit modeling of problem-solving steps with worked examples, both correct and incorrect, plus immediate corrective feedback, while taking care not to overload working memory. Sara Rimm-Kaufman and Krystal Thomas discuss their 2021 practice brief, 'How White Middle-Class Teachers Can Apply Psychology to Teach Students Who Are Different from Them.' Two threads keep coming back across these conversations: what teachers need to know and do, and how race shapes both schooling and the research that studies it. The tone is collegial and exact, and guests get room to lay out their reasoning. Since the titles are just the guests' names, the easiest way in is to pick the question closest to hand, such as classroom dialogue, quantitative methods, motivation, or teaching across difference, and start with the researchers who wrote about it.