Courses Offered in Winter Semester 2024-2025
How do young children learn so much about the world, so quickly? A rich body of research has demonstrated that that active engagement with the world is a crucial component of learning: As soon as they can sit or walk,
infants spontaneously grab and manipulate objects and approach or avoid people. As language develops, young children ask about the meaning of words, request the labels of objects, and inquire about the many new and puzzling phenomena they encounter. Active learning has been a topic of interest for philosophers, psychologists, cognitive and computer scientists.
What is active learning? Are children efficient active learners? Is there a developmental trajectory for active learning? Is active learning better than more passive forms of instruction? This seminar examines these questions across domains such as visual attention, hysical reasoning, causal learning, and problem solving; readings will also address issues in explanation, exploration, and other related topics. The seminar involves a mix of lectures, group readings and discussions, as well as an active learning workshop designed to offer students a hands-on experience on how questions related to active learning are investigated experimentally, from identifying the research questions and hypotheses to interpreting and presenting the results obtained.
Conducting Assesments in Different Modalities
This seminar gives an overview over different types of assessments and different assessment modalities. Students will critically discuss their advantages and shortcomings with regard to the purposes of assessments. Based on this students will choose the appropriate assessment method for their own research questions.
Differentation/adaptive teaching/self-regulated learning
The course will contain 4 seminars taking the format of interactive workshops, interleaved with asynchronous video lectures and individual assignments. The first part of the seminars will take the form of a lecture and will convey key concepts in the field of judgement and decision making, provide a brief historical overview and the present main methodologies employed. The second part of each seminar will be a highly interactive workshop and will guide students through research topics and questions in judgement and decision science, offering demonstrations (e.g. via participation in in-class experiments and surveys), and will highlight experimental findings from psychology and behavioral economics. Some of the asynchronous video lectures and workshops will include invited speakers who are experts in the topic covered. Students will be engaged in group discussions on the applied implications of the research findings.
Questions, curiosity and exploration in research
Courses Offered in Summer Semester 2024
Data Analysis with R
The course “Data Analysis in R: Advanced Applications” is part of the module “Doing Research with the Statistical Software R””. It aims to offer advanced knowledge about research methods and workflows in Teaching and Learning science through the open source statistical software R.
After successfully completing this course, students will be able to conduct complex data preparation, interpret and calculate effect sizes, and apply these skills to various real-world data sets. Specifically, the course has the following goals:
-Students are familiar with the advanced functionalities of the statistical software R as well as its integrated development environment RStudio and with R Markdown.
-Students are able to prepare and visualize data for analysis using advanced R functionalities.
-Students can conduct multiple linear and logistic regressions using R.
-Students have a basic understanding of factor analysis and structural equation modeling in R
-Students can utilize the aforementioned skills on various data sets to answer scientific questions
Developmental Psychology is more of an approach to the study of psychology than it is a topic area. Developmental psychologists examine many of the same topics studied by cognitive, social, clinical, neuro- and other types of psychologists, but they do so from a unique perspective: change over time. In this class, we will learn about milestones in human development in the areas of language, cognition, emotion, socialization, and personality. We will also examine the processes by which developmental changes occur in these areas.