One of my primary lines of research focuses on the processes that enable the successful adjustment and socialization of organizational newcomers. To this end, in a recent paper in the Review of Educational Research, I meta-analytically reviewed the effectiveness of first-year seminars as measured by their observed effect on the one-year retention rate and the first-year grades of participants. The results indicate that the average first-year seminar has only a very small positive effect on grades (d = 0.02) and only a slightly larger positive effect on retention (d = 0.11). An examination of the significant moderators, however, suggests that the effectiveness of first-year seminars can be improved for both retention and academic performance. These findings have direct implications for the design and implementation of first-year seminars and other similar newcomer orientation practices in educational settings because they provide evidence-based guidelines for modifying existing seminars.

My other line of research mainly focuses on the processes that comprise goal setting. My dissertation examines how the different affective states that individuals experience can influence the difficulty level of their chosen goal. The adopted measurement model is based on the circumplex model of affect, which describes how the two independent dimensions of affective valence (i.e., the degree of pleasantness of an affective state) and affective arousal (i.e., the intensity of an affective state) combine to form four distinct quadrants: activated positive affect, deactivated positive affect, activated negative affect, and deactivated negative affect. This is the first study to adopt a four-quadrant perspective of affect when studying its relationship with goal level. Thus, the study can clarify some of the inconsistent findings in the literature by examining the previously unexplored relationship between deactivated affective states (e.g., feeling calm) and goal level as well as exploring affective arousal as a moderator of the affective state-goal level relationship.

Apart from my two primary research streams, I also have been involved in other projects. For example, a recent paper in Learning and Individual Differences finds that proactive personality explains incremental variance in both academic citizenship behaviors and counterproductive academic behaviors, beyond the effects of standardized test scores and high school grades. Further, proactive personality predicts more unique variance in academic citizenship behaviors than conscientiousness. A recent paper in the Journal of Career Assessment finds that social status mediates the positive relationship between social self-efficacy and job satisfaction as well as between social self-efficacy and task performance.