Chris Hulleman is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Foundations in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. He is also a Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Co-Director of the Motivation Research Institute, and an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Graduate Psychology at James Madison University. After receiving his Ph.D. in Experimental Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007, Dr. Hulleman spent two years as an Institute for Education Sciences Research Fellow in the Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University. From 2009-2012 Hulleman served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Graduate Psychology and an assistant assessment specialist at James Madison University. He began at the University of Virginia in 2012. During 2014-15, Dr. Hulleman was residential Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Dr. Hulleman conducts research on interventions grounded in theories of social and personality psychology, motivation, and human development. Much of his work has focused on examining the extent to which helping students find relevance in their coursework for their lives increases learning and interest. Dr. Hulleman has worked with high school science students and remedial math students in community college to develop and test interventions that promote motivation and learning. In an intervention directed at parents of high school students, Dr. Hulleman and colleagues found that providing information to parents about the relevance of math and science classes to their teenager’s life increased the number of elective math and science courses taken in high school. During 2014-15, he helped launch a national network of researcher-practitioner partnerships focused on improving student motivation and learning coordinated by the Carnegie Foundation. Foundational to his research is developing measures that efficiently and validly measure student motivation and linking them to learning outcomes. Dr. Hulleman also conducts research on methods of evaluating the extent to which educational interventions were implemented as designed. Recently, his research on fidelity has focused on preschool science classrooms, parents of high school students, and on the contribution of the Responsive Classroom Approach to children’s social and academic growth. He teaches workshops on intervention fidelity for local and national audiences. His research on motivation and fidelity has been published in journals such as Science, Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Science, Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and American Journal of Evaluation.

Associated Publications