Sharon Y. Tettegah

Sharon Tettegah spent almost a decade in the very real world of a school classroom. Today, as a Beckman Institute faculty member, she spends much of her time in virtual worlds doing trailblazing research in the field of educational psychology.   

Tettegah is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Illinois and a member of Beckman’s Cognitive Neuroscience group. After working as a classroom teacher for nine years, Tettegah entered academia, earning a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of California with a research focus in the area of pre-service teacher education. While her research relies on scientific measures and advanced technology, Tettegah’s motivation comes from the heart.  

“My research is about improving school environments,” she said. “What drives it is passion. I’m a former teacher. I taught in K-12 schools for nine years and I saw the things that were happening with children and I also saw the things that happened with teachers and their students.

“I think not enough is talked about in those areas and we have to make some changes in schools. Promoting teaching and learning is a passion that has been driving me now for 20 years.”

In order to fulfill her ultimate research goals, Tettegah said, it was necessary to come to the University of Illinois and eventually a faculty position at the Beckman Institute.

“I moved because my background was in educational psychology and it was a switch from classroom teaching and learning to math, science, and technology,” she said. “I got very involved with the technology aspect.”

Tettegah’s switch from doing traditional educational research to incorporating digital technologies as both research tools and for integration into the classroom experience has created a unique niche for her in the field of educational psychology. Throughout her journey the research has had an overarching theme: empathy.

“My interest is in how much empathy do teachers have, and do we have certain types of individuals who go into the profession who have high or low empathy,” Tettegah said. “That’s what I wanted to measure and if it’s low then we need to think about providing them with tools where they could be more empathic.”

Tettegah’s work involving empathy is unique for a couple of reasons. She said that while there have been studies involving social emotional intelligence and learning, no one has been measuring empathy in the classroom or using social simulations as a measuring tool.

Gaining insight into the empathic aspect of the teacher-student relationship and developing new methods like simulations for promoting better understanding of students by their teachers has been a constant of Tettegah’s work from graduate school to the present. It has led her to stake out her own place in the emerging field education and cognitive neuroscience.

Tettegah’s use of technology in her work is wide-ranging. Every spring she teaches an undergraduate course about virtual technologies – also using them in innovative educational research and training projects – and she is starting a project involving Beckman’s Integrated Systems Laboratory (ISL) and Biomedical Imaging Center (BIC) for subject experiments measuring empathy. She began using ISL’s CAVE^TM virtual reality system several years ago and has continued to expand her research with Beckman’s facilities after joining the Institute four years ago.

Tettegah has been working closely with ISL Director Hank Kaczmarksi on past and current projects using ISL’s virtual reality environments, the CAVE and the immersive, six-sided Cube. Both Kaczmarski and Tettegah say it is the first time any researcher has tried to measure the concept of empathy in this way. Tettegah said this type of innovative research could only be done at Beckman.

“Hank has been very instrumental every step of the way in everything I’ve done at Beckman,” Tettegah said. “(Beckman is) helping to push my research agenda. Ultimately the plan is to have a center for empathy training and we couldn’t do it without Beckman.”