Prof. Christa Asterhan

I am an associate professor at the School of Education. I am currently the Director of the Center for Research on Teacher Training and Learning (CTL) and lead the Learning & Interaction Lab.

Together with students and colleagues, I explore the cognitive and social dimensions of learning through human interaction. I am a strong proponent of a multidisciplinary, multi-method approach to the study of learning through interaction. In my own research, I combine controlled experiments, detailed dialogue analyses and self-report data collection methods and am informed by theories from cognitive science, social psychology, communication, and developmental psychology. Topic-wise, my research interests are in group learning, argumentation, teacher support of learning dialogues, conceptual change, teacher pedagogical reasoning, computer-mediated communication and teacher learning in school-based communities.