Social and Ecological Processes 

In this area of research we examine the social and ecological processes that facilitate or inhibit learning and transfer. Questions include: What social and cognitive factors contribute to collaborative success and failure? Are there learning benefits to competition? How do the affordances and constraints of the environment interact with an individual to support or hinder learning and transfer? In much of this work we take a situative perspective of learning and examine the learner as a part of an interactive , dynamic system that includes other people (e.g., teachers and peers), technology, curricula, and artifacts. 

Investigating Collaborative Success and Failure

In one project, we examined how expert pilots, novice pilots, and non-pilots identified and solved novel aviation problems of varying complexity (Nokes-Malach, Meade, & Morrow, 2012). The results were consistent with our hypothesis that collaborative success is achieved when the relationship between the dyads’ prior expertise and the complexity of the transfer task creates a situation that affords constructive and interactive processes between group members. We call this the zone of proximal facilitation in which the dyads’ prior knowledge and experience enables them to benefit from both knowledge-based problem-solving processes (e.g., explanation and error-correction) as well as collaborative skills (e.g., creating common ground and maintaining joint attention).

Activity Systems

Over the past 40 years much progress has been made in understanding how student cognition and motivation affect learning and achievement outcomes (e.g., Blackwell, Trzesniewski, Dweck, 2007; Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, Willingham, 2013). However, the vast majority of this work has focused on the cognitive and motivational factors that occur at the level of the individual student, which misses the on-going social processes that may play a large role in driving both student level motivation and achievement outcomes (McCaslin, 2009). Little work has focused on measuring motivational constructs that are co-constructed through interactions in the classroom or what situative theorists have called the activity system (Greeno, 2006). We argue that understanding motivation within an activity setting framework (i.e., classroom level) is critical because many of the motivationally-relevant instructional events that happen in a classroom occur as publicly viewed student-teacher interactions and not within simplistic dyadic structures. Furthermore, most prior work has progressed as two separate strands, one focused on cognition and the other on motivation, with much less work investigating how these two constructs relate to and interact with one another to support learning. To begin to address these gaps in the literature we developed a research program to a) identify cognitive, metacognitive, competence, autonomy, social, and emotional support factors at the classroom level, and b) examine how various configurations of these factors (i.e., psychosocial support profiles) relate to student learning and achievement.

Zepeda, C. D., Hlutkowsky, C. O., U Partika, A. C., & Nokes-Malach, T. J. (2019). Identifying teachers’ supports of metacognition through classroom talk and its relation to growth in conceptual learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(3), 522-541. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/edu0000300

Nokes-Malach, T. J., Richey, J. E., & Gadgil, S. (2015). When is it better to learn together? Insights from research on collaborative learning. Educational Psychology Review, 27, 645-656. doi: 10.1007/s10648-015-9312-8

Nokes-Malach, T. J., Meade, M. L., & Morrow, D. G. (2012). The effect of expertise on collaborative problem solving. Thinking & Reasoning, 18(1), 32-58. doi: 10.1080/13546783.2011.642206

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