David Yeager is a third-year William T. Grant Scholar. As a fifth-year assistant professor, he supervises a diverse group of graduate students. David has primarily mentored undergraduate students and is currently mentoring three doctoral students. He identifies three goals for the award: 1) to reorganize his lab staffing and support resources to free up more time for mentoring, 2) to pursue training and ongoing support from faculty leaders of campus diversity initiatives at University of Texas at Austin on mentoring across difference, and 3) to pare down project commitments to create more time for supporting graduate student projects. The award will support his mentee, Melanie Netter, an African American second year doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin. Netter’s research interests focus on what motivates young people, especially as they face difficult life circumstances or academic challenges. She aims to understand whether parents and teachers contribute to educational inequalities by encouraging students from different socioeconomic backgrounds to learn in ways that differentially impact their academic motivation. She has four goals for this award: 1) to design and carry out a sequence of studies that constitute a theoretical advance on the effect of teachers’ practices on the achievement gap along socio-economic lines; 2) to publish several first-author publications in flagship journals in psychology and education; 3) to gain proficiency with the day-to-day aspects of being an independent researcher; and 4) to create a set of connections that will facilitate post-Ph.D. job opportunities.
Yeager aims to reorganize his lab to allow more time for mentoring and to learn more about mentoring across difference from faculty leaders of campus diversity initiatives at University of Texas at Austin.
