Faculty Directory
Gabe Avakian Orona
Assistant Professor
Gabe Avakian Orona
Ph.D.
Education
- Ph.D., University of California, Irvine
- M.P.H., California State University, Fullerton
- B.S., California State University Fullerton
Research Interests
Epistemic Cognition, Virtue; Judgement and Decision-Making; Reasoning; Measurement; Bayesian Statistics
Expertise
- Cognitive and Social Development
- Formative and Whole Person Education
- Research Methods, Evaluation & Psychometrics
Department
Profile
Dr. Gabe Avakian Orona is an interdisciplinary researcher who investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying thinking and reasoning in college-age learners. His work centers on how humane, liberal arts educational experiences support the development of epistemic cognition—the set of mental processes by which individuals construct, evaluate, and revise their beliefs about knowledge, truth, justification, and evidence. He examines how learners form assumptions about the nature and limits of knowledge, how they reason under conditions of uncertainty, and how such epistemic practices relate to intellectual virtues and the broader aims of human flourishing. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Formative Education at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development. Dr. Orona serves as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on several current grant-funded projects, including:
- A longitudinal study of the long-term effects of liberal arts education a decade after graduation, using a nationally representative dataset (Arthur Vining Davis Foundations);
- An intervention study on epistemic virtue and the development of curiosity (University of Tübingen);
- A project examining how to cultivate and characterize intellectually virtuous engagement with AI (John Templeton Foundation).
Honors & Awards
2025
Arthur Vining Davis Foundations/ACLS Fellowships for Research on the Liberal Arts, Examining the Impact of Public Liberal Arts Education on Cultivating Civic and Democratic Citizenship: Causes and Results, $45,000
2024
Cultivating Intellectual Character in the AI Age, $470,442
2024
Visiting Scholar, State-to-State Program Baden-Württemberg/North Carolina –Faculty Mobility Program, Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of Baden-Württemberg. 1,200 euro.
2021
Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) Scholar, $8,000 Funding provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Project: Aligning skills, competency frameworks, and learning outcomes
2021
David P. Gardner Research Seminar Fellowship on Higher Education, Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley
2020
Educational Testing Service (ETS) Intern, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
Grants & Fellowships
2025, Arthur Vining Davis Foundations/ACLS Fellowships for Research on the Liberal Arts, Examining the Impact of Public Liberal Arts Education on Cultivating Civic and Democratic Citizenship: Causes and Results, $45,000
2024, Cultivating Intellectual Character in the AI Age, $470,442
2024, Visiting Scholar, State-to-State Program Baden-Württemberg/North Carolina –Faculty Mobility Program, Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of Baden-Württemberg. 1,200 euro.
Select Publications
Orona, G. A., Eccles, J. S., Solanki, S., Copp, D. A., Dang, Q. V., & Arum, R. (2025). The structure of adult thinking: A network approach to (meta) cognitive processing. Learning and Individual Differences, 117, 102584. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2024.102584
Orona, G. A., & Trautwein, U. (2024). Thinking disposition education improves cognitive reflection: Experimental results from an intervention study. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 101569. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2024.101569
Orona, G. A., Eccles, J. S., Zitzmann, S., Fischer, C., & Arum, R. (2023). Cognitive development in undergraduate emerging adults: How course-taking breadth supports skill formation. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 74, 102206. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2023.102206