Alison Koenka

Dr. Alison Koenka is an Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Oklahoma. After pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree in Honors Psychology at McGill University, she earned a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at Duke University and completed postdoctoral training in Educational Psychology at The Ohio State University. Since then, she has built a research program that explores students’ motivation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) across elementary school, secondary school, and higher education settings. Dr. Koenka’s lab pursues these interests through two interrelated lines of inquiry. First, she and her students investigate the motivational consequences of academic feedback. In doing so, they explore feedback in many forms, including spontaneous interactions occurring between teachers and students, grades and written feedback, and implicit, enduring feedback that often occurs at curriculum and/or policy levels (e.g., mathematics tracking). Second, her lab conducts work that centers the motivational experiences of youth from understudied populations. This research has been funded by the William T. Grant Foundation, the American Educational Research Association, and the American Psychological Association.

Dr. Koenka teaches undergraduate and graduate-level courses in human development and motivation. In addition, Dr. Koenka was ranked as a top-producing early-career scholar in educational psychology journals from 2015-2021; she was also identified in 2024 as a Top-Cited Global Researcher by the Stanford University and Elsevier Repository. Dr. Koenka is also the 2024 recipient of the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education Pre-Tenure Faculty Award.