Irene-Anna Diakidoy

Irene-Anna Diakidoy
Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Cyprus

Bio and Research Interests

Irene-Anna Diakidoy is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Cyprus, specializing in learning and cognition. She is a founding member of the interdepartmental graduate program in Cognitive Systems, which is jointly run by the departments of Psychology and Computer Science. She served an elected four-year term as Vice-Rector of Academic Affairs at the University of Cyprus. In that position, she was responsible for all matters pertaining to research, innovation, and teaching. Under her initiative, the university developed and implemented several policies for research and innovation, as well as a set of codes of ethics for research, teaching, work, and study at the University of Cyprus. As she served at a state university, she was also active in promoting the legislative amendments required by many of these initiatives for the University of Cyprus Law. She has also been an active member of the Research and Innovation Strategy Group (RISG) of the European Universities Association (EUA).

Dr Diakidoy earned her PhD at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she worked with Richard C. Anderson. She taught at the University of South Dakota as an Assistant Professor before coming to the University of Cyprus. Her primary research area is the comprehension and learning from text, including (a) the development of expository text comprehension, (b) the influence of text structure in conceptual change learning in science, and (c) the connection between text comprehension and text-based argument evaluation. This work has focused primarily on the influence of text-related factors on reading outcomes. Her more recent work connects two separate lines of research: text comprehension and critical thinking, and their contributions to belief formation/change, learning, and decision-making. Her work has been published in high-impact journals, and she has been an invited or keynote speaker at universities and conferences internationally. She has been a long-standing member of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, the International Literacy Association, and the Society for Text and Discourse, and has served on journal editorial boards and as a reviewer and organizer of national and international conferences.