Sarah Grünthal

External LIFE Fellow since 2023, Universität Potsdam

I am a doctoral student in Educational Science at the University of Potsdam. Since April 2022, I have been working as a teaching and research assistant at Martin Brunner’s chair for Quantitive Methods in Educational Science and started work on my PhD under his and Hanna Dumont’s supervision. My doctoral research focuses on the question of the origins of educational inequalities. In my dissertation I am currently examining the relation between students‘ socioeconomic status (SES) and their academic motivation meta-analytically using Integrative Data Analysis. I also plan to investigate the stability of SES effects on students’ academic motivation over the course of educational trajectories and the extent to which their SES equally affects high-achieving and low-achieving students. The results of these analyses will provide important insights and may point to specific mechanisms by which social inequalities are related to inequalities in students’ academic motivation. While working as an educator from 2013 to 2016, I realized that I wanted to change and develop professionally. With the goal of working in social sciences in the future, I began my bachelor’s degree in Educational Science and Sociology at the University of Potsdam in 2016. I completed my master’s degree in Educational Science at the University of Potsdam in 2022.

Dissertation project:
Context matters: How students' socioeconomic background is associated with academic motivation