Rachel Lam

Biography

Dr Rachel Lam is currently a Senior Scientist in the Department of Learning Sciences and Higher Education at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. She earned a PhD in Educational Psychology with an emphasis in Learning and Cognition at Arizona State University in the United States. Dr Lam has conducted research in educational settings in a variety of subject areas (psychology, environmental education, physical sciences) that has focused on designing peer collaboration activities to support conceptual understanding and deep learning. She uses pre-posttest measures, discourse from student dialogues, and other student artifacts to assess student content knowledge, application of knowledge to real-world problems, and transfer to novel contexts. Dr Lam has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses on a variety of topics in educational psychology, learning theories and child development. Prior to an academic career, she worked in community and educational settings including libraries, preschools and parent support organisations.