Educational Psychology and Research Program Faculty
Faculty in the Educational Psychology and Research programs have received grant funding
from many federal and state agencies including the Institute of Education Sciences,
the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute
of Justice and the South Carolina Department of Education and Commission on Higher
Education.
Educational Psychology Faculty
Molly Dawes, Ph.D.
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interests: Bullying and victimization; physical and social aggression; social goals (e.g., popularity
goal); peer social dynamics (e.g., popularity status, peer groups); peer social norms;
teacher attunement to aggressors; teacher management of peer social dynamics.
Melissa Duffy, Ph.D.
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interests: Motivation and emotion in learning and performance; self-regulated learning and emotion
regulation; learning and instruction in higher education and professional contexts
(e.g., medical education); simulation training and immersive learning environments.
Matthew Irvin, Ph.D.
Position: Associate Professor
Research Interests: Academic, social, and behavioral development of adolescents from rural communities;
students’ risk and resilience; motivation and engagement; learning in online courses;
youth with disabilities; peer social dynamics.
Robbie Ross, Ph.D.
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interests: Factors that influence the link between cognitive control skills and learning (e.g.,
peer effects, teaching practices, and children’s self-perceptions of skill); development
of early childhood self-regulation skills.
Gregory Trevors, Ph.D.
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interests: Learning about controversial socio-scientific issues (e.g., vaccines); individual
characteristics that predict learning success or failure; beliefs, identity, cognitive
and emotional processes during learning; how individuals revise misconceptions.
Educational Research
Christine DiStefano, Ph.D.
Position: Professor
Research Interests: Structural equation modeling; survey design; latent class cluster analysis; application
of advanced statistics and measurements methods to issues rated to school psychology.
Xiaofeng S. Liu, Ph.D.
Position: Professor
Research Interests: Statistical power analysis; hierarchical linear modeling; statistical programming;
educational policy studies; applied statistics.
Jin Liu, Ph.D.
Position: Clinical Assistant Professor
Research Interests: Ethics issues in assessment; peer assessment in online courses; applied research in
public health; psychometric studies for scales measuring young children's behavioral
and emotional problems; applied structural equation modeling.
Michael Seaman, Ph.D.
Position: Associate Professor
Research Interests: Nonparametric statistics for behavioral/ social research, R applications development,
statistics education, multiple comparison procedures.