Hi! I’m Xiaoxue Leng (冷晓雪). Xiaoxue can be interpreted as “Snow in the morning” or “We know snow is coming”❄️ in Chinese, and Leng means “Cold”🥶.

❄️I am open to collaborations. If you share similar research interests, I would be happy to connect and explore potential opportunities to work together. If you just want to connect, happy to talk via emails or zoom!❄️

Background

I received my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Psychology from Central China Normal University. From 2020 to 2024, I worked in the Learning and Child Development Lab with Dr. Fuxing Wang, where I explored how to support learning in technology-based environments and examined the cognitive and metacognitive processes underlying learning. Much of my work involved conducting experiments using methods such as eye-tracking and fNIRS.

I am currently a first-year Ph.D. student in Education (Learning Sciences and Psychological Studies) at UNC Chapel Hill. I work as a research assistant under the supervision of Dr. Matt Bernacki. My research focuses on understanding students’ self-regulated learning behaviors and developing, testing, and implementing effective interventions to support self-regulated learning in real classroom settings.

In addition, I collaborate with Dr. Ziyi Kuang to investigate how generative learning activities can support student learning, and with other colleagues to examine the impact of GenAI on students’ learning and behaviors.

Research Interests

How to help students learn more effectively? This question drives my research.

Early in my work, I believed the answer lay in improving instructional design, identifying effective learning strategies, and training students to use these strategies. Through a series of controlled experiments, I found that students could benefit from applying these strategies in the laboratory. But a recurring pattern troubled me: students often reported being unwilling to use these strategies in their everyday learning. Effective strategies existed, yet students rarely applied them outside the lab.

This gap between knowing and doing became the central puzzle of my research. It pushed me to ask harder questions: What holds students back from applying what they have learned? How do cognitive, motivational, and contextual factors shape whether students choose to regulate their own learning in authentic settings? And how can we design interventions that are not just effective in controlled conditions, but sustainable in real educational environments?

These questions brought me to UNC Chapel Hill, where my work has shifted from the controlled environment of the laboratory to the complexity of real classrooms. I now study how students engage with learning strategies in authentic educational contexts, using multi-wave field studies, learning management system data, and digital trace data to understand how learning unfolds over time. I am particularly interested in self-regulated learning: how students plan, monitor, and adapt their approaches to learning, and what supports or undermines these processes in practice.

A growing focus of my work is how students learn with AI. As generative AI tools become embedded in academic workflows, new questions have emerged about how students interact with these tools, when AI use supports learning and when it substitutes for it, and how we can help students develop the metacognitive skills to use AI strategically rather than dependently. I am currently involved in research and grant development aimed at advancing the science of learning to learn with AI.

Ultimately, my goal is to generate insights that bridge theory and practice, contributing to learning sciences research while providing evidence-based guidance for educators navigating an increasingly AI-rich world.

This section was drafted by me and polished with the assistance of Claude (Sonnet 4.6).

🔥 News

2026.03: 🎉🎉 New publication alert. Our team investigated how contextual factors influenced people’s perception towards AI-created paintings. Click link to have a look!
2025.04: 🎉🎉 A new paper has published in Learning and Instruction!! In this paper, we focused on the effect of instructor presence and student presence in synchronous online classes on learning. Click link to have a look!

📝 Publications

Note: Only published journal articles (in English) here. For other papers, conferences, and presentations, please see my cv.

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles (N = 8)

8️⃣ Beauty lost in AI: Diminished aesthetic judgments of AI paintings among Chinese viewers Lin, H., Leng, X., (co-first author) Li, Y., & Wang, Y. (2026) International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction

7️⃣ No need for webcams with synchronous online learning Zhu, W., Leng, X., Mayer, R. E., & Wang, F. (2025) Learning and Instruction

6️⃣ Eye movement modelling examples as cues to guide attention and improve learning in short or long animations Wang, F., Leng, X., Kuang, Z., & Zhao, T. (2024) Journal of Computer Assisted Learning

5️⃣ The viewing perspective effect in learning from instructional videos: A replication and neuroimaging extension Leng, X., Zhu, W., Mayer, R. E., & Wang, F. (2024) Learning and Instruction

4️⃣ Role of gesturing onscreen instructors in video lectures: A set of three-level meta-analyses on the embodiment effect Li, W., Kuang, Z., Leng, X., Mayer, R. E., & Wang, F. (2024) Educational Psychology Review

3️⃣ How to train students to engage in text-picture integration for multimedia lessons Leng, X., Wang, F., Mayer, R. E., & Zhao, T. (2024) British Journal of Educational Technology

2️⃣ The effect of different question types on vicarious learning Kuang, Z., Jiang, X., Shubeck, K., Leng, X., Li, Y., Zhang, R., Wang, Z., Peng, S., & Hu, X. (2024) Educational Psychology

1️⃣ Is student learning from a video lecture affected by whether the instructor wears a mask? Leng, X., Wang, F., & Mayer, R. E. (2024) Applied Cognitive Psychology

📑 Projects

1️⃣ How Does Gesture Mimicry Improve Children’s Memory on Spatial Information?

Explored the impact of gesture mimicry on children’s memory on spatial information.
Investigated the Representational Mapping Hypothesis, examining how different types of gestures facilitate recall of location and route information among young children.
Conducted two experiments with a total of 168 4- and 5-year-old children and analyzed data.
Findings showed that producing gestures improved children’s memory, with pointing gestures enhancing location memory and directional and tracing gestures boosting route memory.
Currently drafting a manuscript for publication.

2️⃣ Understanding and Supporting Self-Regulated Learning

Exploring self-regulated learning (SRL) behaviors through digital trace data.
Investigating behavioral patterns and learning strategies to identify indicators of effective SRL.
Developing intervention strategies to support students’ self-regulation.
Currently collecting and analyzing data from multiple courses.

3️⃣ Contextual Influences on AI Perception and Usage Patterns in Educational Settings

Investigating how contextual factors shape students’ and teachers’ perceptions and usage of AI tools in educational environments.
Exploring how students’ attitudes and behaviors toward AI vary across different educational scenarios and contexts.
Conducting mixed-methods research across diverse educational settings.
Exploring barriers and facilitators to meaningful AI implementation in teaching and learning.
Currently in data collection and analysis phase.

🎖 Honors and Awards

Please see my cv.

📖 Educations

2025 - 2030 Ph.D. in Education, Unversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
2021 - 2024 M.Ed. in Psychology, Central China Normal University.
2017 - 2021 B.S. in Psychology, Central China Normal University.

💬 Invited Talks

Not yet.