His research focuses on the impact of digital technologies in educational contexts, particularly questions of equality in online learning and social-psychological barriers to success, and scalable interventions to improve educational outcomes and reduce achievement gaps. Kizilcec is known for his research on understanding and supporting learners in open-scale courses such as Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. He also works on developing methods for the design and analysis of experiments. His research has been published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Educational Psychology, Computers in Human Behavior, Computers & Education, and in the proceedings of leading human-computer interaction and education conferences; his work received multiple ACM Best Paper awards and competitive research fellowships.