PhD Candidate Educational Sciences/Educational Psychology (1.0 FTE, 4 years)

The Department of Education at Utrecht University offers a PhD position and a Postdoc position in Educational Sciences/Educational Psychology on the NWO Vici project of prof. dr. Tamara van Gog. The project seeks to improve adolescents’ self-regulated learning, which is a crucial skill for students to develop, and important for their current academic achievement and future educational and professional success. We focus specifically on improving self-regulated learning of problem-solving tasks (which forms an important part of the STEM curricula), by training adolescents’ self-assessment and task-selection skills.

Effective self-regulated learning requires students to be ‘calibrated and in control’: able to accurately assess their performance, and decide on an appropriate next task (control/regulate studying). However, this is notoriously difficult, so they need instructional guidance to acquire those skills. We have developed a highly promising ‘social learning’ approach to train self-assessment and task-selection skills and showed it improved adolescents’ self-regulated learning of problem-solving tasks. In this Vici-project, we seek to further improve this training approach and –importantly- test its transferability and sustainability. As the transfer is necessary for successful practical implementation, but also notoriously difficult to establish, this project will yield important insights for both theory and practice. The PhD project is focused on the conditions for transfer to other types of tasks, and the Postdoc project is focused on the conditions for transfer over time and to other contexts (e.g., self-study at home). This project will be conducted in close collaboration with schools; so being able to communicate fluently in Dutch is required.

Your responsibilities are:

• conducting the research (literature research, designing the experiments, recruiting participants, pre-registering studies, collecting and analysing data, preparing and storing data packages for sharing);
• writing international scientific publications and a dissertation;
• giving presentations at (inter)national scientific conferences;
• actively engaging in outreach activities and disseminating findings to educational professionals and the general public;
• active participation in the local and (inter)national research team involved in this project and in the research team of the UU Department of Education;
• following courses/training (a.o. in the context of Research School ICO, the Interuniversity Centre for Educational Sciences and the local graduate school);
• teaching courses or supervising bachelor/master thesis projects (max. 0.1 FTE) can be part of the PhD position.