New Educational Statistics and Research Methods Professor Studies Motivation for Academic, Vocational Choices

University Relations

Jenna Cambria

Educational psychologist Jenna Cambria wants to know why people make the decisions they make, and her research is focused on motivations for academic and vocational choices.

Cambria, an assistant professor, joined the educational statistics and research methods faculty of the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas in the beginning of the spring semester. She is teaching a graduate course titled Lifespan Human Development and will teach additional courses in educational psychology in the coming years.

Cambria earned her doctorate in human development and quantitative methodology from the University of Maryland in College Park and a bachelor's degree in psychology from Rutgers University in New Brunswick. She also earned a certificate in educational measurement and statistics from the University of Maryland and recently completed a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the Hector Research Institute for Educational Sciences and Psychology within University of Tübingen in Germany.

Her dissertation was focused on how students' motivation for reading in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) areas develops, and her postdoctoral work was focused on how males' and females' motivation for STEM vocations develops. One of her current research projects is examining why women chose mathematically intensive fields of study, which is considered a male dominated area, as many of these domains tend to have less than 30 percent participation of women.