Members and associates

PERC staff

	Research interests
	Kathryn Asbury Professor Email: kathryn.asbury@york.ac.uk Kathryn explores the influence of home and school environments on children’s academic achievement, behaviour and wellbeing. She is interested in the school environments that cause differences between identical twins, and in how genes influence behaviour.
	Beth Bell Lecturer email: beth.bell@york.ac.uk My research expertise lies in youth wellbeing and mental health in the digital age. More specifically, I adopt a mixed-methods interdisciplinary approach to understanding the risks and opportunities afforded by digital media and technologies in relation to youth wellbeing and mental health, focusing on body image, self-harm, and disordered eating/exercise.
	Dusana Dorjee Senior Lecturer Email: dusana.dorjee@york.ac.uk I investigate the core neurocognitive mechanisms underlying wellbeing of children and adolescents. I examine modulations in these mechanisms by contemplative practices developing mindfulness, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude and other healthy qualities of the mind
	Erin Dysart-Stephenson Associate Lecturer/Trial Co-ordinator Email: erin.dysart@york.ac.uk
	Gill Francis Research Fellow email: gill.francis@york.ac.uk My main research investigates specific ways that play impacts developmental outcomes for children with typical and atypical development. As example, my PhD explored the link between child pretend play and counterfactual reasoning and my postdoc work uses twin modelling to explore the etiology of child play and mental health.
	Lisa Kim Lecturer Email: lisa.kim@york.ac.uk Lisa is interested in teacher non-cognitive characteristics and how they are associated with teacher and student outcomes (e.g., teacher effectiveness, teacher burnout and student academic achievement).
	Rob Klassen Professor Email: robert.klassen@york.ac.uk Rob explores human motivation and emotions in diverse contexts, with his newest work using innovative technologies to explore teachers' engagement and emotions at work.
	Dea Nielsen Research Associate Email: dea.nielsen@york.ac.uk
	Nathalie Noret Lecturer email: nathalie.noret@york.ac.uk My research interests broadly focus on understanding children and adolescents’ experiences of bullying. My current research focuses on examining the relationship between such experiences and poor mental health.
	Elpis Pavlidou Lecturer Email: elpis.pavlidou@york.ac.uk Elpida is studying reading and developmental dyslexia using both behavioural and neuroimaging methods. She is interested in both cognitive aspects of children's learning (in particular implicit statistical learning in typical and atypical populations) but also socio-emotional aspects (in particular socio-emotional resilience in dyslexia).
	Jennifer South Palomares Associate Lecturer Email: jennifer.south.palomares@york.ac.uk
	Professor of Educational Evaluation Email: carole.torgerson@york.ac.uk English and music education; research designs for educational and social policy evaluation
	Umar Toseeb Senior Lecturer Email: umar.toseeb@york.ac.uk Umar is interested in understanding mental health and wellbeing during childhood and adolescence. Specifically, he investigates individual differences in mental health and wellbeing of individuals with special educational needs using genetic and behavioural data from population-based longitudinal datasets.
	Louise Tracey Researcher Email: louise.tracey@york.ac.uk My research interests focus on early years education, literacy and research methods. I conduct large scale evaluations of programmes in schools, primarily using randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Recent projects have included an evaluation of the SPOKEs programme designed for the parents of struggling readers in Year 1, Home or care? A comparison of educational experiences and outcomes for maltreated children and an evaluation of the Success for All programme.
	Sophie von Stumm Chair, Psychology in Education Email: sophie.vonstumm@york.ac.uk Sophie studies the causes and consequences of individual differences in psychological and behavioural development across the life course. She takes an inter-disciplinary approach to observing behaviour and environments, primarily through the application of new assessment technologies that enable collecting big, high-quality data.
	Sarah Wild Teaching and Research Support Officer Email: sarah.wild@york.ac.uk

Associated members

PERC Associate Members

Our associate members are colleagues working with us on projects, or who share our goal of conducting innovative psychological research in educational settings.

Lisa Bardach
Lisa Bardach is a senior researcher and junior research group leader at the Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology. Her research program centers on understanding and promoting students’ adaptive development, particularly in the motivational domain, but also regarding cognitive, socio-emotional and personality aspects, and (self-regulated) learning strategies. A further major emphasis of her research program focuses on the role of teachers and teaching quality in fostering adaptive student outcomes. In addition, she is interested in cognitive and non-cognitive characteristics and competences of effective teachers and does research on teacher selection, recruitment, and professional development.

Benedetta Bassetti
(University of Warwick) Benedetta is working on the psychology of bilingualism and biliteracy, in both adults and children, especially involving the Chinese, English and Italian languages.

Lia Daniels
(University of Alberta) Lia Daniels conducts research on motivation and discrete emotions in education settings. In particular, she is interested in how pre-service teachers' ideas about motivation and emotions change during the transition into a teaching position.

Anne Frenzel
(University of Munich) Anne Frenzel explores human emotions and related motivational variables in learning contexts, with an emphasis on the emotional experiences of teachers and how they relate to classroom processes.

Silke Fricke
(University of Sheffield) Silke Fricke’s principal research interest lies in the link between language and literacy development in monolingual and multilingual children, as well as the evaluation of intervention approaches.

Chris Kyriacou
(University of York) Chris is particularly interested in researching aspects of effective teaching, the experience of being a teacher, pupil learning and pupil motivation.

Lars-Erik Malmberg
(Oxford University) Lars-Erik Malmberg is quantitatively oriented educational researcher interested in students’ learning and beliefs about learning, teacher development, and effective teaching. I am currently analysing intensive longitudinal data using structural equation and multilevel modelling.

Nora McIntyre
(University of Cambridge) Nora investigates gaze patterns and their correlates in real-world classroom environments. She has particularly focused on teacher gaze and how this varies with teachers' interpersonal behaviour, expertise and culture. Nora is now interested in comparing gaze patterns among both teacher and students across student populations such as students with autism or depression. For example, do teachers look at students differently if they are diagnosed with autism compared with their typically developing counterparts?

Nancy Perry
(University of British Columbia) Nancy Perry studies (a) how children develop attitudes and actions associated with self-regulated forms of learning (SRL); and (b) how teachers design activities and interactions with students to promote SRL.

Ellen Usher
(University of Kentucky) Ellen L. Usher is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Kentucky where she directs the P20 Motivation and Learning Lab. Her research focuses on the sources and effects of beliefs of personal efficacy from the perspective of social cognitive theory.

Barry Wright
(Hull York Medical School) Barry is a child psychiatrist who is a clinician with the local York NHS (and Clinical Lead of the National Deaf CAMHS and a teacher with Hull York Medical School. He has a small portfolio of research that is centred around improving emotional outcomes for children and young people.

Postgraduate Students

Tracy Durksen
(University of Alberta) Tracy’s research interests include teacher efficacy, collective efficacy, and engagement in teaching and learning. She is also exploring behavioural indicators of expert and novice teachers' visual attention and engagement in the classroom.

Virginia Tze
(University of Manitoba) Virginia Tze studies emotions and motivation along with teaching effectiveness and student academic performances. Additionally, she is interested in examining coping strategies used by teachers and students to manage negative emotions and student-teacher engagement in academic contexts.

Sundus Yerdelen
(Kafkas University) Science teachers’ occupational wellbeing, self-efficacy and self regulation, and their effects on students' achievement and self-efficacy.

Sophie Cave
Sophie's interests lie in Educational Psychology. her previous role as a research project coordinator explored socioeconomic status, academic achievement and cognitive development through secondary data analysis of cohort studies. She is currently undertaking a doctorate in Educational Psychology at Nottingham University. sophie.cave@nottingham.ac.uk

Research Groups

Listed below are a few of the research groups with whom we are working with:

Alberta Consortium for Motivation and Emotions (Canada)

Centre for Reading and Language (University of York)

Twins' Early Development Study (King’s College, London)