Ben Seipel, PhD
Ben completed his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities in 2011. Here at California State University- Chico, he teaches courses on Educational Psychology, Fundamental Practices of Teaching, Assessment in Special Education, and Introduction to Research Methods in Education. His research focuses on the cognitive and neurological processes of reading comprehension, vocabulary acquisition while reading, and implicit learning systems. Specifically, through the use of eye-tracking, EEG, and fMRI he has examined how people create coherent mental representations of narratives when they encounter inconsistencies in text. He is also an original author of the Multiple-choice Online Cloze Comprehension Assessment (MOCCA that diagnoses different cognitive processing issues for struggling readers in 3rd-5th. This research project is funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) through the U.S. Department of Education. He and his research team have plans to develop similar diagnostic assessments for older students as well. In the classroom Ben enjoys discussing classic and current research topics and how those topics can better inform teaching practices of educators. Prior to his career in research and high education, Ben worked as a Spanish teacher in various K-12 settings and is also licensed to teach K-12 vocal/general music.
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- Seipel, B., Carlson, S., Bianco-Simeral, S., Frigaard, M., Wolff, C., and Goto, K. (In press). The Nutritional Moral of the Story: An Examination of Storybooks used to Promote Healthy Food Choice Behavior. Psychology and Education.
- Carlson, S., Seipel, B., & McMaster, K. (2014). Development of a new reading comprehension assessment: Identifying comprehension differences among readers. Learning and Individual Differences, 32, 40-53.
- Clinton, V., Seipel, B., van den Broek, P., McMaster, K. L., Kendeou, P., Carlson, S. E. & Rapp, D. N. (2012), Gender differences in inference generation by fourth-grade students. Journal of Research in Reading. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9817.2012.01531.x
- Fehr, C. N., Davison, M. L., Graves, M. G., Sales, G. C., & Seipel, B. (2012). The effect of individualized, online vocabulary instruction on picture vocabulary scores: An efficacy study. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 25(1), 87-102.
- Seipel, B. (2014). Online Quality Assurance Program at CSU, Chico. ePortfoilo presentation at http://contentbuilder.merlot.org/toolkit/users/bseipel/chicostateonlineqasummer2014
- Seipel, B. (2014). Writing traditional assessments with QOLT in mind. Presentation given through the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT), Chico, CA, September 2, 2014.
- Carlson, S. E., Biancarosa, G., Seipel, B., & Davison, M. (2014). Refining and Validating a Measure of Individual Differences in Reading Comprehension Processes. Poster presented at the bi-annual Principal Investigators meeting for the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), Washington, D.C., September, 2014.
- Seipel, B. (2014). Panel presentations on using new technologies in the teacher preparation classroom. Panel presentation at the biannual meeting of the California Council of Teacher Education, San Jose, CA, March 2014.
- Seipel, B. (2014). Different Outcomes for an Instructional Jigsaw Activity in Live and Online Educational Psychology Sections. Poster presented at the 36th annual meeting of the National Institute on the Teaching Psychology. St. Petersburg, FL, January 3-6.
- Seipel, B. (2013). Designing Online Instruction: Addressing Learning Differences. Invited paper presentation to be given at the 19th annual Conference on Excellence in Learning and Teaching, Chico, CA, October, 2013.
- Seipel, B. (2013). The Pedagogical Difference of Cooperative Learning: Live versus Online. Paper presentation submitted to the biannual meeting of the California Council of Teacher Education, San Diego, CA, October, 2013.
- Seipel, B., Carlson, S., Bianco-Simeral, S., Frigaard, M., Wolff, C., and Goto, K. (2013). The nutritional moral of the story: Storybooks used to promote healthy food. Poster presentation given at the 2013 annual meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse. Valencia, Spain, July 16-18.
- Van Leijenhorst,L., Seipel, B., Clinton, V.E., & van den Broek. (2013). Neural correlates of discourse comprehension: Coherence monitoring in texts and sentence pairs. Poster presentation given at the 2013 annual meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse. Valencia, Spain, July 16-18.
- Seipel, B., Bianco-Simeral, S., Frigaard, M., Wolff, C., and Goto, K. (2013). The nutritional moral of the story: Storybooks used to promote healthy food. Poster presentation given at the 7th Biennial Childhood Obesity Conference.Long Beach, CA, June 18-20.
- Clinton, V., Carlson, S., & Seipel, B. (2013). Patterns of Word Use Associated with Valid Inference Generation. Paper to be presented at the 2013 annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse, Valencia, Spain, July 16-18.