Sarah Bichler
University of Passau
Collaborator
Sarah Bichler was a Post-Doctoral Scholar with the WISE group in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley from 2020-2022 and was a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. She is currently a Professor of Psychology with a focus on teaching and learning with digital media at the University of Passau.
Sarah is interested in designing powerful learning technologies to support students and teachers in the classroom and during professional development. She designs interactive science curriculum for middle and high school students to explore complex topics such as Global Climate Change, the Physics of Sound Waves, Genetics, Natural Selection and Evolution, and Thermodynamics in the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment. She develops adaptive and individualized guidance using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to support students in revising their explanations and gaining integrated knowledge. Sarah uses classroom learning analytics to design a teacher dashboard that helps teachers build on their students’ ideas during instruction and when customizing science curriculum. She designs and facilitates professional development for middle and high school teachers in collaboration with the WISE team.
Sarah’s research examines the impact of these innovative technologies on student learning, teacher-student interaction, and teacher learning.
Prior to her post-doctoral work at UC Berkeley, Sarah earned a Bachelor’s degree in Educational Sciences, a Master’s degree in Psychology, and a PhD in Psychology and Learning Sciences at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. Guided by aptitude theory and instructional design theories, Sarah’s research examined how the effectiveness of instructional support is impacted by learners’ prior knowledge and cognitive aptitudes such as intelligence or executive functions. Sarah also taught research methods and statistics at the undergraduate and graduate level, offered several project-based courses on designing educational technologies, and advised 10+ Bachelor’s and Master’s students writing their theses.