Student Spotlight: Grace Murray Willer

Image
Student Spotlight: Grace Murray Willer

Grace Murray Willer, M.Ed., a doctoral candidate in Kent State’s interdisciplinary doctoral program in educational psychology and psychological sciences, hopes to become a faculty member at a university to pursue her interests in teaching, research and mentoring. Grace has excelled in her program at Kent State with a first author publication, submitting a first author manuscript, a grant and maintaining two lines of research.

In her first line of research, she investigates how children interact with digital assistants such as Alexa or Siri – specifically investigating how the digital assistants’ answers influence children's assessments of their trustworthiness. She recently submitted a review paper summarizing current research on this topic and outlining a promising direction for the future of the field.

Additionally, she submitted her first grant proposal that will compare young children's questions and evaluations of responses to both their parents as well as to digital assistants with two very clever experiments that she designed, which will likely provide significant contributions to the field.

Her second line of research investigates why misconceptions arise from comparing the competition between our explicit beliefs (what we are aware that we know) and our implicit beliefs (beliefs or knowledge of which we are not consciously aware). She uses a combination of instruments in her experiments – including mouse tracking to measure implicit responses – and recently published a first-author paper regarding this research: Murray, G., Roche, J, Arner, T., & Morris, B. J. (2020). Using Neuromyths to Explore Educator Cognition: A Mouse-Tracking Paradigm. In Proceedings of the 41 annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

In addition to these research achievements, Grace has been an outstanding instructor who consistently receives positive evaluations from students. She has been described as a truly exceptional graduate student who represents the very best of Kent State University.

In her free time, Grace likes to stay active. She enjoys hiking local metro parks with her dog, Stella and attending Lagree fitness classes.

For more Kent State University student and alumni spotlights, follow the Division of Graduate Studies on FacebookTwitter and Instagram or visit our website for information on graduate student services, awards and virtual events.