02.10.2025

"Bridge the gap between the promise of innovation and classroom realities"

Prof. Dr. Yizhen Huang begins as a new Junior Professor of Education Sciences and Psychology

In October 2025, Prof. Dr. Yizhen Huang started in her new position as Junior Professor at the Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology, University of Tübingen. Her focus is on the intersection of education sciences, psychology, and technology. In a short interview with Science Communicator Rebecca Beiter, Huang introduces her area of expertise and her motivation.

Beiter: How would you explain your field to someone who has never heard of it?
Huang: Teaching is, at its core, a profoundly cognitively demanding activity. Teachers must monitor multiple streams of information at once, interpret students’ responses in real time, and adjust instruction to maintain engagement and understanding. But this complexity is not only about teaching — it is equally about learning. Students learn within rich cognitive, motivational, and emotional contexts, and their experiences are deeply shaped by how instruction is structured and how classrooms function as social and technological environments.

As classrooms undergo digital transformations—where learning occurs across diverse modalities, times, and spaces—to understand the interplay between teaching and learning processes becomes even more critical. Yet our scientific understanding of how these processes unfold in authentic situations, and how best to design interventions that improve such processes, is still limited. This challenge has shaped the core of my research since my Ph.D. days.

Beiter: You also use VR and machine learning in your research – how exactly does that work?
Huang: To investigate these questions, I use immersive virtual reality (VR) simulations with genAI-powered students to replicate complex classroom situations while allowing precise control and measurement. I integrate multimodal data from both simulations and real classrooms—capturing cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions of learning—and analyze them with machine learning (ML) approaches. This allows me to build models of professional teaching expertise as well as models of how students engage, persist, and learn in diverse instructional settings.

Ultimately, my research sits at the intersection of education, psychology, and technology. By examining both sides of the instructional equation—teachers’ professional decision-making and students’ learning processes—I aim to advance a science of classroom practice that can inform teacher training, improve learning outcomes, and guide the effective use of AI and other advanced technologies in education.

Beiter: What motivates you personally?
Huang: I was raised in a culture that placed immense value on education, but in a rather one-dimensional, product-oriented manner, especially prioritizing singular outcomes over the deeper processes of teaching and learning. While I am a product of that culture, I also rebelled against it. A pivotal moment was the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies during my formative years, which broadened access to diverse perspectives, flattened the world, and revealed alternative learning approaches – manga, video games, and hacker news, to be more precise.

My belief in the value of education is self-evident, but my academic and professional journey has taught me that teaching and learning are not linear, if-then processes, and that instructional technologies don't automatically improve outcomes. Both are complex, situated processes that unfold in real-time, shaped by cognitive, emotional, and social dynamics. However, significant gaps remain—in our scientific understanding of these processes, in teacher preparation, and in the design of technologies that genuinely support learners.

This tension motivates me. I aspire to bridge the gap between research and practice, between the promise of innovation and classroom realities. What drives me personally is the opportunity to contribute knowledge that acknowledges the complexity of teaching and learning processes while creating practical solutions—protocols, tools, and insights—that empower both teachers and learners.

Beiter: If someone wants to get a good overview of your work, which publications of yours do you recommend?
Huang: I would recommend a study I particularly enjoyed working on:

• _{Huang, Y., Richter, E., Kleickmann, T., Scheiter, K., & Richter, D. (2023). Body in motion, attention in focus: A virtual reality study on teachers’ movement patterns and noticing. Computers & Education, 206, 104912. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2023.104912} 

This paper integrates several of my core methodology interests—movement tracking, eye tracking, VR and ML—and offers a novel finding: it provides empirical evidence on how teachers can break the “action zone” (the T-shaped, front-and-center area of the classroom where teachers most often engage students).

If you are interested in the practical implications of this work, I would also point you to a follow-up study where we developed a feedback protocol to help preservice teachers improve their noticing and movement patterns:

• _{Huang, Y., Hansen, M., Richter, E., Kleickmann, T., Scheiter, K., & Richter, D. (2025). Enhancing preservice teachers’ noticing via adaptive feedback in a virtual reality classroom. Learning and Instruction, 95, 102053. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2024.102053} 
   

To Prof. Dr. Yizhen Huang website