He received his Bachelors degree from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Post-doctoral training at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on human learning, problem solving, and knowledge transfer, and most recently on the interactive effects of motivation and social interaction on those processes. His work has been supported with grants from the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences.