David Yeager is an Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD in Developmental and Psychological Science from the Stanford University School of Education in 2011. Prior to beginning his career as a researcher, he was a middle school teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Dr. Yeager also holds an M.Ed. in Secondary English and a B.A. in the Program of Liberal Studies from the University of Notre Dame, as well as an MA in Psychology from Stanford University. He has appointments at the UT Dana Center, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the University of Texas Population Research Center, and is a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group and the New Paths to Purpose network, both at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Yeager’s work sits at the intersection of developmental, social, personality and educational psychology. He is interested in understanding the processes shaping adolescent development, especially how differences in adolescents’ social cognitions–their interpretations of social events and the beliefs that underlie these–can contribute to positive or negative trajectories for youth. He focuses on the life experiences and environments that give rise to social cognitive tendencies, on the interaction between social cognitions and the home or school environment, and on opportunities for redirecting social cognitions during developmental transitions. He is also deeply interested in problems of scaling innovations in the social sciences.

The second half of Dr. Yeager’s research is methodological. He studies the psychology of asking and answering questions as well as the implications of these insights for optimizing self-reports. In addition, he studies the differences in accuracy in national samples collected through probability methods as opposed to non-probability methods. He is interested in educational measurement and in methods to create and broadly apply measures of psychological factors affecting student outcomes.

Visit our library to view David Yeager's papers related to learning mindsets.