Science of Learning and Metacognition Lab

SLAM Lab PI: Dr. Veronica X. Yan
Associate Professor
Human Development Culture and Learning Sciences,
Department of Educational Psychology
Affiliations:  Department of Psychology; LBJ School of Public Policy
The University of Texas at Austin

Email: veronicayan[at]austin.utexas.edu

Follow me on Bluesky: @veronicayan.bksy.social

Curriculum Vita
CV of Failures

Dr. Veronica X. Yan (PhD, University of California, Los Angeles) is an educational psychologist and currently an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Her research bridges cognitive, social, and educational psychology fields to empower people to be effectively self-regulated learners—to want to not just study harder, but to study smarter. Dr. Yan’s cognitive research explores the cognitive mechanisms that support long-term learning, the strategies that foster these mechanisms (and their boundary conditions). This research reveals that many of the strategies that promote long-lasting learning are counterintuitive and increase the experience of difficulty (e.g., pretesting, interleaving, spacing, retrieval practice). Hence, drawing on metacognitive and social psychology, her work also explores the motivational important for helping learners lean into desirable difficulties in learning.

She also conducts training workshops across the US for school teachers and college instructors.

Her own educational background has spanned three continents: She studied at an international school in Hong Kong, before heading to England for undergraduate studies (experimental psychology, University of Cambridge), hopped over to California for graduate school (cognitive psychology, UCLA) and postdoc (social psychology, University of Southern California) before landing in Austin, Texas.