LSPS at a Glance
Doctor of Philosophy in Education
4-6 years
58 (minimum)
No
Many students receive full funding packages in exchange for working as a Research Assistant on a professor’s funded research grant for 20 hours each week. Some students receive full funding packages in exchange for serving as a Teaching Assistant for one course each semester.
Learning Sciences and Psychological Studies (LSPS)
Dede Addy, Ph.D. '14I was drawn to the UNC School of Education by its strong faculty, whose expertise spans a range of research areas, many of which align with my own interests. The program here also stands out for its interdisciplinary nature and the flexibility it offers students in designing highly individualized studies.

Harnessing technology and data to advance classrooms and learning

Matthew L. Bernacki, Ph.D. – a leading scholar in learning sciences and learning analytics, and associate professor and the Kinnard White Faculty Scholar of Education at the UNC School of Education – served as guest editor of a January 2025 special issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology titled “Leveraging Learning Theory and Analytics to…

When Ha Nguyen arrived at Duke University for her first year of college, she struggled at first to find her voice. She was an international student acclimating to a new place, but she was also getting used to a new way of learning. In Vietnam, instruction had been teacher-centered, but, in her new classes, learning…

UNC-Chapel Hill researchers will seek to develop new ways to measure and assess self-regulated learning in a project funded by a new grant from the National Science Foundation. The $708,000 grant builds on NSF-funded work by a team of Carolina researchers that has been studying university students’ interactions with digital instructional resources used in face-to-face…

Keith Sawyer, Ph.D., Morgan Distinguished Professor of Educational Innovations at the UNC School of Education and a leading researcher focused on creativity, has synthesized more than a decade of research for a new, first-of-its-kind book that explores the creative and teaching practices used by faculty members within art and design programs. "Learning to See: Inside…