dr. H.W. (Henderien) Steenbeek

In 2006 I defended my PhD-thesis about the role of sociometric statuses of children in play behavior, and the surplus value of modeling dyadic play interaction by means of an agent model. I currently works as associate professor at the department of Developmental Psychology at the university of Groningen. In addition, I work as a professor at Teacher college at the University of Applied Studies in Groningen. My research focuses on child-adult and child-child interaction in educational and play- settings, using a complexity approach.

Main research themes are:

- Socially situated dynamics of learning in classrooms, especially teacher-student interaction;

- children’s learning processes in primary education, especially those of children with special educational needs and excellent performing children;

- young children’s talented reasoning, acting and exploring in classrooms;

- teachers’ skills to stimulate students’ talented reasoning via interaction;

- the use of process studies to examine the effectiveness of educational interventions, such as video feedback coaching;

-motivation and study success of student teachers in teachers college;

-interaction dynamics (e.g. gender differences) in children’s play.

Most studies entail the observation of interaction behavior in naturalistic circumstances, and the monitoring of change processes over time. In collaboration with Jaap Bos I developed the digital videocoding program Medicaoder to code interaction data. Since 2007 I mainly work within the Groningen Curious Minds project (www.talentenkrachtgroningen.nl, www.talentenkracht.nl ) as daily coordinator; since 2014 in the role of coordinator.  My teaching is in the Bachelor program of Psychology, the master program Talent Development and Creativity, and the Research master program Education and Development.