James M. (Mike) Royer is Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Mike spent his academic career at UMass Amherst, arriving in 1970 after completing his doctoral studies at the University of Illinois and retiring from active teaching in 2006. A distinguished scholar with scores of publications and millions of dollars in grant funding to his credit, Mike was the quintessential research mentor. He made sure that his students learned every aspect of the research enterprise by having them work closely with him on his research projects and then guiding them to becoming independent researchers in their own right.
Many of the doctoral students Mike mentored went on to form distinguished careers in Psychology and Education, becoming education leaders as deans and associate deans as well as endowed and named professors.
His dedication to mentoring students and developing their careers as professional researchers and educators has prompted the creation of the James M. Royer Mentoring Fund. This fund supports psychological and brain sciences students whose research examines critical issues in psychology and education, while exemplifying Mike's commitment to the advancement of learning interventions.
Awards from the endowment support research materials and travel expenses for students who have been accepted to present their research at a national meeting or conference. The focus of the awardee's research will also possess positive implications for education.
Award Recipients
2026
Yimeng Wang
The project “Physiological Measures of Engagement in Classroom Learning” will apply mobile, multimodal physiological measures, including eye-tracking glasses, a mobile EEG headband, and traditional scalp EEG, to measure engagement during learning activities in classroom settings. More specifically, the project aims to test whether the correspondence between teachers’ speech and students’ EEG signals can be used as the main features to decode students’ engagement levels and to compare the performance across different devices. The study is expected to demonstrate the feasibility of decoding student engagement in live classroom settings, establish the potential for predicting engagement during lectures, and support the development of personalized intervention strategies.
2025
Jenna Croteau
The project, "Same-kind Bias for Number Words", investigates how children learn the meaning of number words. Building on preliminary findings that children have a same-kind bias for number words, or that children preferentially interpret number words as referring to sets of objects from the same kind, this project will test whether this bias is best explained by implicit social rules that guide human communication or how children represent objects and kinds. This research will advance our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying early numerical reasoning and may inform evidence-based approaches to teaching young children about numbers.
Aanchal Setia
The project “Distancing or Alignment: The Role of Perceived Goal Relevance in Leadership Contexts” investigates how women evaluate the goal relevance of male and female leaders. Specifically, the project examines (1) whether women differ in their perceptions of the goal relevance of male versus female leaders, and (2) whether these perceptions predict self-group distancing or alignment. This work seeks to address a critical gap in the literature by uncovering the motivations underlying distancing behaviors. Understanding these motivations has important practical implications, as self-group distancing can hinder collective action, reinforce harmful stereotypes such as the "queen bee" narrative, and obscure the complex reasons why women may or may not align with one another in professional settings.
2024
Hector Sosa
Previous research shows exposure to role models or successful and inspiring individuals who share an underrepresented identity increases motivation, sense of belonging and success for students (Dasgupta, 2011; Wu et al., 2022). Hector Sosa’s research project entitled “When Do Personal Stories of Successful Individuals Inspire vs. Deflate Underrepresented Students in STEM?” looked to answer the following: What types of personal stories are received most favorably by Black and Hispanic undergraduate students who are underrepresented in STEM? Are there conditions where an outgroup member (recent White college graduate) can be a role model? I manipulated (A.) the race/ethnicity of the storyteller to make their racial/ethnic identity match vs. mismatch that of participants and (B.) the story content to either emphasize successes only vs. successes and struggles. I found that participants who read a story written by someone who shared (vs. did not share) their race/ethnicity felt more similar to the storyteller and also reported feeling more confident in graduating with their STEM major. Similarly, I found that participants who read a story that included successes and struggles (compared to successes only) felt more similar to the storyteller and also reported feeling more confident in graduating with their major.
John Vargas
The project “Less is More: Facilitating an Understanding of Probability Concepts through the Theory of Cognitive Load” focused on understanding the psychological processes responsible for the misinterpretation of probability concepts by manipulating how information is presented to users. Additionally, the project was instrumental for constructing educational interventions that could be used to teach probability concepts in an accessible and inclusive manner. The educational interventions were conceptualized and tested in collaboration with three undergraduate honors psychology students in the spirit of the Royer award's emphasis on mentoring and collaboration. All three students are scheduled to complete their honors theses this semester.