About

Hi, my name is Benjamin Goecke and I am a psychologist.

I am a Junior Research Group Leader for Assessment and Development of Talent in Childhood at the Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology at the University of Tübingen. I am also part of the team that evaluates the Hector Children’s Academies in Baden-Württemberg. My work is mostly, though not only, about individual differences in cognitive abilities, including knowledge and creativity. I am interested in how these differences are structured, how they develop, and how they can be observed. Alongside that, I spend a good deal of time constructing tests and questionnaires and working on questions of psychological and educational measurement. My research covers both children and adults, although a large part of my current work concerns childhood.

In this work, I am especially interested in how stable differences between people relate to changes within the same person over time. Children make this particularly interesting: they differ substantially from one another, but the same child also performs differently across days, situations, and tasks. Some of that variation is meaningful, some of it reflects development, and some of it may simply be tied to the particular occasion on which we measure them. I want to understand these sources of variation better, especially when assessment is used to identify potential or to make educational decisions.

This has led me increasingly toward questions about creativity, talent, and their development. I am interested in how cognitive abilities, motivation, interests, self-regulation, and everyday environments come together in the development of individual strengths. Some of my current work looks at daily creative activity in children, some at the assessment of cognitive potential at school entry, and some at the identification and support of high-potential children. What connects these projects is an interest in how individual differences develop, how reliably we can observe them, and what follows from the way we assess them.

I work with a lot of people and prefer it that way. My collaborations span differential psychology, educational psychology, creativity and talent research, psychometrics, and educational measurement. I like research questions that can be approached from more than one of these perspectives and that connect substantive questions about individual differences with questions about how we measure them.

I assembled this website to keep my academic work in one place and to write occasionally about what I am reading. Outside of work I spend most of my time with my family. I take and edit photographs, travel when I can, and read more slowly than I buy books. I am also able to write German shorthand (Stenografie DEK).