Associate Professor Jose Hanham

Researcher/Teacher
National School of Education, Faculty of Education and Arts

Areas of expertise: self-efficacy; student motivation; collaborative learning; cognitive load theory; artificial intelligence in education; digital literacy; mentoring; language revitalisation; experimental design; survey research

Email: [email protected]

Location: ACU Strathfield Campus

HDR Supervisor accreditation status: HDR Supervisor (Full)

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-4300-0866

ORCID link: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4300-0866

Dr José Hanham is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at Australian Catholic University and an internationally recognised researcher in educational psychology. His research focuses on cognitive load theory, self-efficacy and motivation, project-based learning, AI in education and language revitalisation. His work spans primary, secondary, higher education and community contexts, and has been published in leading international journals including the British Journal of Educational Psychology, Computers in Education, Educational Psychology Review, and Learning and Instruction.

Dr Hanham has contributed to competitively funded research projects valued at more than $4.1 million, through partnerships with the Australian Government Department of Education, the NSW Department of Education, the NSW Aboriginal Languages Trust, and Catholic school dioceses. He is a founding member of the Institute for Research on Cognitive Load Theory, an international research collaborative, and holds an active research partnership with Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta, Indonesia, supporting Indonesian research students.

An emerging strand of Dr Hanham's research focuses on artificial intelligence in education, including the use of chatbot technologies to prepare pre-service teachers for the realities of classroom practice. This work sits within a broader interest in how digital and AI-enhanced learning environments can be designed to support effective teaching and learning across educational settings.

His research has extended into Indigenous education and community-engaged scholarship, including a current project on Gumbaynggirr language revitalisation in partnership with First Nations communities in NSW. As an academic of Australian/New Zealand Māori heritage, Dr Hanham maintains a longstanding commitment to Indigenous education research and community engagement.

Dr Hanham is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) and has held senior leadership roles including Director of Academic Programs at Western Sydney University. He has supervised seven PhD students to completion and is an active mentor of early career researchers across multiple institutions.

Select publications

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Berger, D., Richards, M., Hanham, J., Muranaka-Vuletich, H., Atkinson, K., & Jones, C. (2026). Gumbaynggirr Daari 'Gumbaynggirr strong': Perspectives of students and adults in a Gumbaynggirr led school and preschool context. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics,49, 214-239 (Q1 ranked Journal) https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.25051.ber

Hanham, J. (2025). Indigenous mentor's understandings of being a mentor in higher education: Insights from a Canadian university. Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning. 33(1), 5-27. https://doi.org/10.1080/13611267.2024.2396470

Cheng, S., Milne, A. J., Dean, R. T., Hanham, J., & MacRitchie, J. (2024). Exploring the comprehensibility of ten different musical notation systems and underlying factors. Music & Science, 7. https://doi.org/10.1177/20592043241292952 (Q1 ranked Journal)

Hanham, J., & Hendry, A. (2024). Timing matters: Unpacking the dynamics of project-based learning through exploring proxy efficacy and self-efficacy. International Journal of Educational Research, 126, 102387. (Q1 ranked Journal)

Reyna, J., Hanham, J., & Orlando, J. (2024). From e-waste to eco-wonder: Resurrecting computers for a sustainable future. Sustainability, 16(8), 3363. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16083363 (Q1 ranked Journal)

Hanham, J., Castro-Alonso, J. C., & Chen, O. (2023). Integrating cognitive load theory with other theories, within and beyond educational psychology [Editorial]. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 93(3), 873-888. (Q1 ranked Journal)

Most cited BJEP article 2023 | Second most accessed article across all British Psychological Society journals

Hanham, J., Lee, C. B., & Teo, T. (2021). The influence of technology acceptance, academic self-efficacy, and gender on academic achievement through online tutoring. Computers & Education, 172, 104252. (Q1 ranked Journal)

83 citations | Field Citation Ratio: 31.71 | 99.7th percentile for topic prominence

Reyna, J., Hanham, J., Vlachopoulos, P. et al. (2021). A systematic approach to designing, implementing, and evaluating learner-generated digital media (LGDM) assignments and its effect on self-regulation in tertiary science education. Research in Science Education, 51 (6), 1501-1527 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-019-09885-x (Q1 ranked Journal)

Lee, C., Hanham, J., Kannangara, K., & Qi, J. (2021). Exploring user experience of digital pen and tablet technology for learning chemistry: applying an activity theory lens. Heliyon, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e06020 (Q1 ranked Journal)

Radley, A., Jones, C., Hanham, J., & Richards, M. B. (2021). Matjarr Djuyal: How using gesture in teaching. Gathang helps preschoolers learn nouns. Languages, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6020103 (Q1 ranked Journal)

Recent Book Chapters

Falloon, G., Adlington, R., Unsworth, L., Hanham, J., & Woo, K. (2025). Students as multimodal designers and authors. In Creative Technologies Education (1st ed). Routledge.

Maher, D., De Nobile, J., Hanham, J., & Maddox, A. (2025). Shaping the future of education: Ai-driven approaches for primary schools, in S Papadakis (Ed.), Teaching with Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Early Educators. John Wiley and Sons

ACU Researcher