Alison Koenka

Dr. Alison Koenka is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma in the Science of Psychology, Data, and Research in Education program. 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 secondary school and higher education settings.

Dr. Koenka’s lab pursues these interests through two interrelated lines of inquiry. First, they 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 and/or historically marginalized populations. In doing so, Dr. Koenka and her colleagues aim to promote more equitable experiences and outcomes for these youth. 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. She is currently serving as the Program Chair for the AERA Motivation in Education Special Interest Group. In addition, Dr. Koenka was ranked as a top-producing early-career scholar in educational psychology journals from 2015-2021, received the Distinguished Junior Faculty Award from the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2021, and received the Paul R. Pintrich Outstanding Dissertation Award from APA Division 15 (Educational Psychology) in 2017.