University of Gothenburg
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  4. Irma Brkovic

Irma Brkovic

Senior Lecturer

Unit for General Didactics and Pedagogic Work
Telephone
+46 31-786 49 61
+46 766-18 49 61
Mail
irma.brkovic@gu.se
Visiting address
Läroverksgatan 15
41120 Göteborg
Room number
B3 312b
Postal address
Box 300
40530 Göteborg

About Irma Brkovic

I received a degree in psychology from the University of Zagreb (Croatia) in 2003. I received a Master of Science in health psychology from Leiden University (the Netherlands) in 2006, and defended my doctoral thesis in developmental psychology at the University of Zagreb in 2010. I have attended numerous methodological and statistical seminars and workshops, for example at A European Data Laboratory for Comparative Social Research in Cologne (2007, 2008) and Manheim (2010).

Before starting my academic career, I worked as survey specialist in institutional and social assessment, on projects financed by, for example, the World Bank, the International Red Cross, and IBRD. At the University of Zagreb, I worked as an assistant professor at the Department of Psychology, teaching and researching mostly in the area of developmental psychology and educational psychology. I also taught developmental psychology at the Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences and the Faculty of Teacher Education. I have been working as a senior lecturer at IDPP since 2016.

I currently teach research methodology in courses at undergraduate level in teacher education programmes, in the research master’s programmes Master i Didaktik, International Master’s Programme in Educational Research, and Education for Sustainable Development, as well as in the Doctoral Degree Programme in Psychology. In addition, I teach topics in pedagogical work and developmental science in courses for international students at GU as well as at the Center for Educational Science and Teacher Research (CUL).

When teaching and supervising, I implement experience from over 20 years of research in the social sciences. In my research I have implemented cross-sectional (1, 2, 3, 4), longitudinal (5), cohort-sequential (6, 7) and school-based (quasi)experimental (8, 9, 10, 11, 26) research designs. I have always been passionate about methodological and psychometric challenges related to studying different age groups of children and adults. I have worked with these challenges when studying groups of lower (8, 9, 10, 11) and upper (5, 23, 24, 25) primary school children, upper secondary school children (12), young adults (13, 14, 15), adults (17, 18) and the elderly (19). I also worked with family (16, 17) and medical (20, 21, 22) studies.

As a part of various research collaborations, I have focused on developing methodological and analytical approaches to studying child development and parent-child relationships, reading and writing during early and late schooling, children’s early understanding of numbers, and student teachers’ conceptions of didactics and plant awareness. I am currently working in projects studying mentor teachers’ professional development, teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs, the role of mobility in student teachers’ professional development as well as the role of teacher education in developing student research competencies.