Learning & Cognition
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Objective |
Research effective and efficient arrangements of education and training |
| Target users | Teachers, trainers, managers in schools, universities, training companies/departments |
| Programme director |
Research of the Learning and Cognition programme aims at promoting lifelong learners and groups of learners to transfer skills, knowledge, and attitudes to a variety of settings and to regulate and maintain their own further learning.
This is realised by uncovering the cognitive processes that underlie learning and using the resulting knowledge on cognitive processes in combination with knowledge on the learner’s cognitive system to develop theory and grounding principles to inform the design of effective and efficient learning tasks, learning environments, and learning assessments.
Themes of the programme
Three themes of the research in Learning and cognition:
Learning Tasks (theme leader: dr. Liesbeth Kester)
Learning tasks contain an assignment and offer information which can be minimal or substantial to help learners carry out the assignment. They aim at the acquisition and the transfer of knowledge, cognitive skills, self-regulation skills and attitudes. They can be presented in a single-medium, multimedia or hypermedia format. Three topics are distinguished that summarize the research efforts within this theme: design guidelines for prior-knowledge-activation strategies, support and guidance and feedback. The development and valorisation activities of this theme are directly related to these research interests. Prototypes of independent instruments, tools and techniques will be developed that are based on the guidelines that will be derived from the research on learning tasks. Customized solutions with regard to the design of learning tasks (e.g., the use of multimedia or hypermedia) will be made available to external parties.
Learning Environments (theme leader: dr. Saskia Brand)
This theme employs research on instructional design for learning cognitive complex tasks and to develop training models to sustain expertise development. The research questions that are characteristic to this line of research relate to finding orders of learning tasks that maximise learning effectiveness. For instance questions concerning whole-task approaches, variability of practice, high contextual interference, and distributed (as opposed to massed) practice will be studied. The environments to study these aspects can either be fixed or adaptive. Whereas fixed environments consist of a predefined sequence of learning tasks, in adaptive environments the sequence and type of tasks are adapted to the learning needs of an individual or group of learners (sensitivity). In any case, the goal of an environment, ultimately, is to enable learners to gain flexible expertise in the domain as well as the skills to regulate their own learning (sustainability). So, research concerning instructional design of learning environments focuses on how instructional interventions can contribute to the development of domain expertise and self-regulated learning skills.
Learning Assessments (theme leader: dr. Tamara van Gog)
This theme focuses on assessment of performance and learning in educational contexts and in research contexts. Within the educational context, the focus is on the effectiveness of different modes of assessment (what is assessed, how, and when), responsibility for assessment (who assesses), support for assessment, and assessment for adaptive task selection. Research on (accuracy of and support for) self-assessment plays a very pronounced role in this theme, because it is a crucial component of self-regulated learning. Within the research context, the focus lies on assessment of cognitive structures (incl. expertise and expert performance), and assessment of cognitive processes and processing demands evoked by instruction. This theme therefore results in input and output that can be used in further research within the first and second theme of the program, as well as in development and valorisation activities.
