The Journal of Experimental Education

How do I Choose: Innovations in Understanding Academic Decision-Making Processes

The Journal of Experimental Education invites submissions for a special issue focused around the process of making academic decisions. Students constantly make decisions that shape learning outcomes and access to educational opportunities, ranging from everyday in-class choices (Should I finish this assignment?) to big-picture choices (Is this major right for me?). Making these academic decisions is highly complex. Students must integrate multifaceted cognitive and motivational beliefs in their minds, while responding to contexts that afford limited knowledge of choice options available and which cue certain sociocultural factors to be salient. Further, many decisions that appear “suboptimal” from the outside are in fact adaptive responses to the information students have available or protective responses to historical, cultural, or institutional inequities that inform decision appraisals. The complexities of decisions are often overlooked in educational psychology research, which typically measures academic decisions as outcomes to be predicted by static individual beliefs or traits, rather than processes that unfold in complex learning contexts. This special issue will highlight academic decision-making processes, unfolding in context, as a key psychological area of inquiry.

JXE requests proposals for empirical papers, from varied disciplinary silos of psychology and/or education, that advance our understanding of how academic decisions unfold in students’ minds and/or how distinct contexts inform decision-making processes.

We particularly welcome studies examining:

• Cognitive or motivational processes that underlie academic decisions (e.g., searching for information, comparing alternatives, managing uncertainty, weighing motivational beliefs)
• Heuristics and biases that shape choice processes in educational contexts (e.g., loss aversion, framing effects)
• Methodological and analytical innovations for capturing unfolding decision processes (e.g., intensive longitudinal designs, process data, log/clickstream data, eye-tracking)
• Interactions among motivation, cognition, affect, and context during real-time decisions
• Decision-making in response to sociocultural and structural constraints that influence the choice options students view as viable, risky, or certain
• How sociocultural or racialized cues in learning contexts (including digital learning contexts) shape perceived options during academic decisions
• Comparative studies of decision stakes and time scales (e.g., high stakes versus low stakes decisions, momentary versus long-term decisions)
• Responses to technology- or AI-mediated decision contexts (e.g., automated feedback) that shape unfolding decisions
• Intervention or design studies that alter decision contexts or reframe decision stakes