Michelle G. Everson

I completed a bachelor’s degree in industrial psychology from California State University, Hayward and a master’s degree in experimental psychology from San Jose State University before coming to the U of M to pursue a Ph.D. in educational psychology. My emphasis was in learning and cognition, and I was involved in research on text comprehension. Specifically, my research focused on understanding the processes readers use to comprehend content-area texts. My background in statistics led to several opportunities to teach both undergraduate- and graduate-level introductory statistics courses within the department, and I enjoy introducing students to the wonders of statistics and showing them that statistics can in fact be fun. I played a large role in developing online versions of two of our introductory statistics courses and our intermediate statistics course, and I currently teach these courses. Recently, I have begun to explore how to best structure the online statistics course. In particular, I am interested in ways in which active learning can be fostered in the online environment.  I am the recipient of the College of Education and Human Development’s 2009 Distinguished Teaching Award and the 2011 recipient of the American Statistical Association (ASA) Waller Education Award .

Courses I teach
(all EPSY courses)

Publications

1. Everson, M. (2006, April). Group discussion in online statistics courses. eLearn Magazine, http://www.elearnmag.org/.

2. van den Broek, P., Virtue, S., Everson, M. G., Tzeng, Y., & Sung, Y. (2002). Comprehension and memory of science texts: Inferential processes and the construction of a mental representation. In J. Otero, J. A. Leon, & A. C. Graesser (Eds.), The psychology of science text comprehension (pp. 131-154). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

3. Gaddy, M., Sung, Y., & van den Broek, P. (2001). The influence of text cues on the allocation of attention during reading. In T. Sanders, J. Schilperoord & W. Spooren (Eds.), Cognitive approaches to text coherence (pp. 89-110). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

4. Linderholm, T., Everson, M. G., van den Broek, P., Mischinski, M., Crittenden, A., & Samuels, J. (2000). Effects of causal text revisions on more- and less-skilled readers’ comprehension of easy and difficult narrative texts. Cognition and Instruction, 18, 525-556.