Cassandra Paul earned her PhD in Physics from the University of California Davis with an emphasis in Physics Education Research. There she studied the interactions between instructors and students in an interactive introductory physics course called Collaborative Learning through active Sense-making in Physics (CLASP). She was a part of a team of researchers who developed the Real-time Instructor Observing Tool (RIOT) an observation protocol that allows an observer to broadly categorize actions that take place between instructors and students in real-time.

More recently Cassandra has been working with colleagues to develop the Student Participation Observation Tool (SPOT), a sister to the RIOT but with more emphasis on categorizing classroom opportunities for student voice, and better suited for classroom environments that are not quite as reformed as the CLASP curriculum.

Currently, Cassandra's main research interests involve how instructors implement interactive engagement and active learning pedagogies, professional development activities that support these efforts, and the institutional reward systems in place for instructor implementation of these techniques.

Cassandra is also very interested in better understanding the intricacies of the relationships between instructor learning goals, student assessments, instructor feedback, student self-regulation, grading policies, how these factors determine student performance and success in the classroom, and what implications this has for student equity.