College of Education and Human Development

Department of Educational Psychology

Jeffrey Bye

  • Pronouns: he, him, his

  • Lecturer and Learning Informatics Lab coordinator and affiliate faculty

  • Educational Psychology
    172 Education Sciences Bldg.
    56 East River Road
    Minneapolis, MN 55455

  • jbye@umn.edu
Jeffrey Bye

Areas of interest

  • Math teaching and learning
  • Mathematical cognition
  • Causal learning
  • Programming teaching and learning
  • Computational modeling
Degrees

PhD, cognitive psychology (computational cognition), UCLA, 2016
MA, cognitive psychology, UCLA, 2011
BA, cognitive science, Pomona College, 2009

Biography

My research blends cognitive science, learning science, and educational psychology approaches to understanding how students learn and think about abstract concepts in math, statistics, and programming. I am particularly interested in how students’ own intuitions help them make sense of abstraction, and how teachers can use concrete experience to help students learn abstract representations, especially in the areas of algebra notation, statistical concepts, and programming methods. I’m also interested in the dynamics of how students and teachers discuss concepts through frameworks and feedback. In another line of research, I examine how people learn and reason about causation.

Note: As a Lecturer, I am unable to accept PhD advisees.

Courses I teach

  • EPSY 5122: Programming Fundamentals for Social Science Research
     
  • EPSY 5123: Programming Workflows for Psychological Research
     
  • EPSY 8112: Seminar: Mathematical Cognition
     
  • EPSY 8114: Seminar: Computational Thinking
     
  • EPSY 8114: Seminar: Learning & Cognition Laboratory Methods

Lab

Mathematics, Abstraction, Learning, & Thinking (MALT) Lab

Publications

Bye, J. K., *Chuang, P.-J., & Cheng, P. W. (2023). How do humans want causes to combine their effects? The role of analytically-defined causal invariance for generalizable causal knowledge. Cognition, 230, 105303. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105303

Bye, J. K., *Harsch, R. M., & Varma, S. (2022). Decoding fact fluency and strategy flexibility in solving one-step algebra problems: An individual differences analysis. Journal of Numerical Cognition, 8(2), 281–294. https://doi.org/10.5964/jnc.7093.

*Rao, V. N. V., Bye, J. K., & Varma, S. (2022). Categorical perception of p-values. Topics in Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12589

Park, J., McGillivray, S., Bye, J. K., & Cheng, P. W. (2022). Causal invariance as a tacit aspiration: Analytic knowledge of invariance functions. Cognitive Psychology, 132, 101432. https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0010-0285(21)00055-4

*Marupudi, V., *Harsch, R. M., *Rao, V. N. V., Bye, J. K., *Park, J., & Varma, S. (2021). The role of clustering in the efficient solution of small Traveling Salesperson Problems. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Tessmar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1865–1871). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5q76r06x

Mazzocco, M. M. M., Chan, J.Y-C., Bye, J. K., Padrutt, R. E., Praus-Singh, T. L., Lukowski, S., Brown, E. C., & Olson, R. E. (2020) Attention to numerosity varies across Individuals and task contexts. Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 22(4), 258–280. https://doi.org/10.1080/10986065.2020.1818467

Bye, J. K., *Chuang, P.-J., *Anthony, L. E., & Cheng, P. W. (2020). Teaching the purpose and meaning of algebraic variables through systems-of-equations story problems: Multimedia approaches. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS). International Society of the Learning Sciences. https://repository.isls.org//handle/1/6449

* Student co-author

Presentations

Mazzocco, M. M. M., & Bye, J. K. (2022, June). Individual differences and contextual influences on children’s attention to numerosity. In Van Hoof, J. (Chair), The role of spontaneous mathematical focusing tendencies in early numerical development. Symposium paper presented at the 2022 Meeting of the Mathematical Cognition and Learning Society, Antwerp, Belgium.

Bye, J. K., *Harsch, R. M., & Varma, S. (2021, October). The company a number keeps: Multiplicative processing of largely composite numbers. Lightning talk presented virtually at the 4th Annual Meeting of the Mathematical Cognition and Learning Society. Video available: https://youtu.be/uoRZWoPQczo?t=1517

Bye, J. K., *Park, J., *Marupudi, V., & Varma, S. (2021, September). Erroneous estimation of the factorial function and improvement through calibration experiences. Lightning talk presented virtually at the 4th Annual Meeting of the Mathematical Cognition and Learning Society. Video available: https://youtu.be/MJF1MFWoab0?t=3106https://youtu.be/MJF1MFWoab0?t=3106

Bye, J. K., *Chuang, P.-J., & Cheng, P. W. (2021, July). When and why do reasoners generalize causal integration functions? Causal invariance as generalizable causal knowledge. Poster presented virtually at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

*Rao, V. N. V., Bye, J. K., & Varma, S. (2021, April). The psychological reality of the learned “p <0.05” barrier. Paper presented virtually at the 2021 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting.

DeLiema, D., Bye, J. K., & *Marupudi, V. (2021, April). Programming instructors and students’ active (and partial) debugging: Deviation noticing, causal modeling, and intervening. Paper presented virtually at the 2021 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting.

Bye, J. K., *Harsch, R. M., & Varma, S. (2020, November). (In)flexibility in strategy choice for solving missing-operand algebra problems. In Chan, J. Y- C. & Bye, J. K. (Co-chairs), Problem-solving strategy in algebra: From lab to practice. Symposium paper presented virtually at the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Mathematical Cognition and Learning Society. Video available: https://youtu.be/JrMsGhS8AFk?t=133

*Student co-author