Anna-Katharina Praetorius

Anna-Katharina Praetorius is Professor of Research on Learning, Instruction and Didactics at the University of Zurich's Department of Educational Science within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her research focuses on conceptual and methodological questions of teaching quality, teacher professionalism, and international comparative educational research. With a distinguished academic career spanning over a decade, she has established herself as a leading researcher in educational psychology and teaching quality assessment.

Her research interests center on understanding and measuring teaching quality through multiple perspectives, with particular emphasis on cognitive activation in teaching, the Three Basic Dimensions model, diagnostic competence of teachers, and international comparative studies of instructional quality. She has pioneered work examining contextual factors in teaching quality research and has critically analyzed methodological approaches in the field.

Praetorius has published extensively in top educational research journals, with recent work focusing on statistical decisions in teaching quality modeling, context in teaching quality research, and cognitive activation frameworks. Her research shows a clear trajectory toward more nuanced understandings of teaching quality that consider subject-specific, contextual, and methodological complexities.

Among her notable recognitions are the 2015 Publication Award in the PostDoc category from the Society for Empirical Educational Research, the 2013 Dissertation Award from the German Psychological Society, and the 2012 Ernst Meumann Prize for outstanding research in empirical educational research.

As an active contributor to the academic community, Praetorius serves as an ad-hoc reviewer for research proposals for the German Research Foundation and Swiss National Science Foundation, and reviews for numerous prestigious educational journals including Educational Psychology, Learning and Instruction, and Teaching and Teacher Education. She is a member of several expert associations including the German Psychological Society, European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, and Society for Empirical Educational Research.