Her research centers on measurement of student motivation, epistemic cognition, and achievement in STEM. She also studies methodological issues with educational and psychological research, such as validity and measurement invariance of motivational measures, missing data, and measurement of treatment effects. Dr. Dai is co-Principal Investigator on funded research projects by the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Institutes of Health. Her work is published in a number of peer-reviewed journals, and she is on the editorial boards of Contemporary Educational Psychology and Journal of Experimental Education. Dr. Dai teaches courses in statistics (e.g., Structural Equation Modeling), research design, and assessment.