Message from our Department Chair

A NOTE FROM THE CHAIR:  DOCTORAL EDUCATION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Welcome to the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where we pride ourselves in preparing graduate students for positions as university professors, researchers, counseling psychologists, and testing, measurement and evaluation specialists. We have a long tradition of excellence and have remained a top-ten ranked department for decades. Our faculty is a collegial, eclectic group of individuals with varied and multidisciplinary interests.  We invite you to come share in what will prove to be an interesting and exciting graduate school experience.

Graduate training in today’s educational landscape means becoming a critical thinker with the capacity to work in collaborative teams at the interface of multiple disciplines to tackle and solve complex problems. Our faculty and graduate students conduct research with faculty across the departments of psychology, computer science, linguistics, physics, chemistry, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Our faculty members are excellent collaborators and mentors, and our graduate students are self-directed, creative individuals who are very supportive of one another. Graduate students have the freedom to construct unique research projects leading to the Ph.D. with multiple advisers across multiple departments.

The Department has core strength in several areas. In Child Development, we have researchers interested in school safety and bullying, in early mathematics learning, and in the role of motivation in learning. In Cognitive Science our faculty explores learning across the lifespan and cognitive aging; cognition in patient-doctor interactions; science and math learning, problem solving and the nature of expertise in science; and language learning and comprehension. In Counseling Psychology our faculty explore a range of topics related to health and well-being across the lifespan including bullying prevention and intervention with youth, vocational interests and how they change over time, and racial and ethnic identity. In Quantitiative Methodology, Measurement and Evaluation, faculty research interests span a wide range, including developing new statistical analyses, improving educational assessments, evaluating programs and policies, and thinking philosophically about the nature of education and evaluation.

Our training combines broad methodological approaches with moral and ethical awareness. At Illinois we will stimulate your creativity and intellectual curiosity as well as challenge you to grow into the type of broadly-trained researcher who will help solve important societal problems.

Come join us in the venture. Explore what we have to offer here in the department and the college. Please contact us at edpsy@uiuc.edu to discuss your interests and how we might be the place for your graduate study.

Jose P. Mestre, Professor and Chair, Department of Educational Psychology