Joel P Beier

I am an educational psychologist who studies how people learn chemistry. I am a husband, father of two, and currently a doctoral student.

As a high school chemistry teacher, I used a lot of trial and error to find educational approaches that helped my students learn the subject matter. I was fortunate to have great mentors who helped find what worked for me and my students. I am very grateful for their influence on my teaching career.

At the same time, I started to recognize I had a lot of questions about why some approaches seemed to work and others didn't. I recognized that many of my decisions were based on intuition, and it was hard to find authoritative sources to help decide between approaches. Indeed, there are many sources for lesson plans that are well-intentioned but not backed by research. This led me to become very interested in developing a rigorous understanding of how people learn. My intuition was that if I had a better understanding of how people learn, I could use this knowledge to become a better teacher.

I soon learned there are entire fields of science devoted to answering this question in different ways. As I wanted to spend more time answering this question, I became attracted to the idea that I could make this my career.

Now I happily spend my helping understand how people learn chemistry. I am grateful for all my mentors who have helped me develop my knowledge of the science and methods used to understand how people learn. My aim is to share the knowledge I gain with other educators so they can make decisions based on trustworthy information. This rewarding career complements the rewards of spending my nights and weekends with my family.

April 2025