Veronica Yan

Veronica Yan is an associate professor of Educational Psychology, with courtesy appointments in the Psychology and at the LBJ School. Bridging social, cognitive, and educational psychology fields, Dr. Veronica Yan’s research explores how we can empower people to become motivated and effectively self-regulated learners. Learners must have the right mindset (e.g., they must be motivated and interpret the experience of difficulty in productive ways) but they also have to know effective strategies for learning. Rather than "making learning easy", what research from cognitive psychology demonstrates is that the effective learning strategies that make learning stick are often the ones that introduce difficulties (e.g., interleaving, retrieval practice, pre-testing). Dr. Yan’s work is focused on the mechanisms underlying these "desirably difficult" strategies the motivational mindsets that encourage learners to lean into difficulties, and the environments, policies, and interventions that support effective, long-lasting learning.