SCIoI member Rebecca Lazarides named among the 50 most productive researchers in educational psychology

“For me, the classroom is a very important place to study intelligence,” says Rebecca. “It is where learning, motivation, feedback, attention, and social interaction come together in very concrete ways.”

Rebecca’s recognition in the study is also a recognition of the importance of educational psychology within an interdisciplinary science of intelligence. Learning is one of the central processes through which intelligent behavior develops. But learning never happens in a vacuum. It happens in classrooms, in families, in interaction with teachers, peers, technologies, and social expectations. Rebecca’s research makes these contexts visible and shows how strongly they matter.

A path shaped by motivation, learning, and classrooms

Rebecca’s academic path shows a researcher who has built deep expertise in educational psychology while consistently opening her work to questions from neighboring fields.  She studied educational science at Freie Universität Berlin and completed her diploma in 2008. She then worked at Technische Universität Berlin at the chair of educational psychology, where she completed her doctorate in psychology in 2013 with a dissertation on students’ interest development. The dissertation already points to a question that continues to run through her work: why do students become interested in a subject, what role does socialization play for motivation, and how can educational environments support motivation rather than undermine it?

After a research stay at Monash University in Melbourne, Rebecca returned to Berlin and served as acting professor for Educational Psychology at TU Berlin from 2014 to 2016. In 2016, she was appointed Assistant Professor for School Pedagogy with a focus on school and instructional development at the University of Potsdam. Since 2021, she holds a  Full Professorship for School Pedagogy and Empirical Classroom Research (W3) at the University of Potsdam.

Today, Rebecca’s work spans several closely connected fields: school and instructional development, teaching quality, students’ affective and motivational development, heterogeneity in classroom contexts, gender-related educational disparities, digital media in schools, teacher education, teacher motivation, and the role of school and family as learning and developmental contexts. She is also active in several scientific and advisory roles, including as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Brandenburg Ministry of Science, Research and Culture, and the Institute for School Quality of Berlin and Brandenburg. She is one of the editor-in-chiefs of Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft and on the international editorial advisory board of Learning and Instruction and Journal of Educational Psychology and serves as Third Vice President of the German Society for Empirical Educational Research (GEBF).

Learning with a good feeling

For Rebecca, learning is more than a cognitive process. It also involves confidence, interest, enjoyment and the conditions that make students want to keep going. Learners study better when they feel competent, when they understand the value of what they are doing, when they are not overwhelmed, and when learning can become meaningful to them. And motivation is one of the conditions under which learning can take place.

This shows in her work on intelligent tutoring systems and learning robots. Together with colleagues from computer science, Rebecca investigates how such systems might one day support students by responding to the motivational and emotional aspects of learning. The aim here is not to replace teachers at all. On the contrary, her work asks how technology can support teachers in dealing with the heterogeneity of real classrooms, where each student brings different interests, abilities, emotions, and needs.

In one possible future classroom, a student working on a mathematics task might receive support that takes into account whether they felt confident, frustrated, bored, or motivated. For Rebecca, this is one of her most important research question. Which phases of instruction are suitable for intelligent tutoring systems? Where do such systems help, and where are human teachers irreplaceable? How can educational technologies be designed in ways that are pedagogically meaningful rather than just technically impressive?

Intelligence in the classroom

These questions make Rebecca’s contribution to SCIoI very valuable. She brings intelligence research into one of the most consequential environments in society: the classroom. Her work connects models of learning with the lived realities of students and teachers. It asks how intelligent systems can be understood, designed, and evaluated in relation to human development, motivation, and education.

Being named among the most productive researchers in leading educational psychology journals highlights the strength and visibility of Rebecca’s research in a field that is central to understanding how people learn. It also shows how much SCIoI gains from researchers who bring intelligence science into dialogue with education, classrooms, and the social conditions of learning.

At SCIoI, Rebecca’s work shows that intelligence is about more than solving tasks. What also matters is how tasks are encountered, how feedback is received, how motivation is sustained, and how learning environments can help people develop their abilities. Her research shows that to understand intelligence, we also need to understand the conditions under which learners feel able, interested, supported, and ready to continue.