Profile

Hello I’m Alex! I am 32 and I live in Coventry with my wife and 3 cats (Buu, Ziggy, and Chewwie – check out below for pictures!). I have a background in cognitive neuropsychology and a doctorate in Educational Sciences. One of my main focuses of research is exploring how our minds can comprehend numbers and sizes of things, alongside how anxiety toward maths can cause problems for the way that we think. I also do some work looking at how we interact with AI, and how our internal voice can be used to make our minds more organised and effective! I mainly teach as I really like the social interactions with students, which is probably a side effects of the fact that I can never stop talking! I’m really informal and laid back, and i’m always happy to talk about anything that gives us a chance to think about the world around us.

After a day of work I like to unwind by playing video games, listening to music, and eating junk food (probably pizza!). I have recently gotten into Warhammer, and so I am learning how to paint properly. I’m not great at it, but it’s fun to learn and try new things!

During my PhD I was looking at creating a way to help students perform math better when they struggle with anxiety. All of the treatments for math difficulties and math anxiety involve making the student just do more math, but this isn’t always available to everyone, so I wanted to make something that was always going to be available. We took some research from our lab that said that reading instructions out loud to yourself helps you to perform better on difficult tasks, and tried to see if we could get people with math anxiety to read equations out loud and then solve them. The idea was simple, but unfortunately it didn’t work!

After this we then looked at how the mind processes numbers, we used an experiment design where we  got people to judge numbers really quickly (such as if it was odd or even) and found that listening to the number being read out loud made you better at judging them compared to having to read them silently.

I have done some other work in different topics, for example I recently published a paper looking at where we can find joy in education, me and some friends talked about why we liked teaching, and some students gave us their views on what they enjoyed too. It was really fun to just explore our thoughts and write about them in an open way. Me and some of these friends have just written another paper looking at equality in education which we are hoping to publish this year!

I mainly teach psychology in my job at Coventry University. I teach on lots of different modules, including doing some statistics workshops looking at how we can explore and use data. My relationship with maths was always a bit weird, I did quite well at it in highschool, but I never really enjoyed it, even now I would say I’m not excited by the idea of math, but I also don’t dislike it. To me I always look at it like a language or a tool, it’s a way of understanding things around us and getting things done.

When I get up in the morning I have to feed my cats, after that I get ready for work and hop on the bus. My teaching schedule changes each semester, but I usually have a seminar at 9am where I run activities with students and get them to use the new knowledge they have gained from the classes they have done up to that point. After my class I need to check my emails, I have some research students who might need some advice from me about what to do with the experiment they want to run, or maybe a student from my class has a question about their essay!  It’s usually time for lunch, I tend to bring something in to work like a sandwich or some macaroni cheese. After lunch I will probably have another class, similar to the one in the morning but for a different course, so I might do a class on mental health in the morning and then a class on research methods in the afternoon. After this class it’s time to head back to the office for a couple hours. This is usually the quiet part of my day as students tend to go home early after this last class. This is when I do some preparation work for future classes, or I might design my own experiment, or whatever I fancy! At the end of the day I’ve gotta go hop on a bus home, and then it’s time to chill out