Xiaodong Lin-Siegler Named Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Cognitive Science in Education
Xiaodong Lin-Siegler, Founding Director of the Education for Persistence and Innovation Center (EPIC), has been named Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Cognitive Science in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, effective Sept. 1.
Lin-Siegler joined TC in 2002 as Associate Professor of Cognitive Science and Education. She studies how to motivate people to succeed even after encountering failures in both work and personal life. A central theme in her work is understanding how learning from failure can lead to greater wisdom and knowledge. Her groundbreaking 2016 study, “Even Einstein Struggled,” published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, found that exposing students to the personal and intellectual struggles of great scientists, like Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, significantly improved the students’ performance on challenging STEM tasks. Learning about the setbacks and failures of famous figures helped students better manage their own challenges.
