Vici grant for research on improving self-regulated learning

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has awarded a Vici grant of €1.5 million to Tamara van Gog, professor of Educational Sciences. This prestigious grant will enable Van Gog to further develop her research group over the next five years. Van Gog and her team will focus on improving self-regulated learning.

To be effective self-regulated learners, students need to be able to accurately assess what they do and do not know, and use that to decide on an appropriate next study activity. Van Gog: “This is notoriously difficult.” In this Vici project, Van Gog and her team will use innovative techniques to investigate why that is. Van Gog: “And we will test how we can help students make better choices. We will focus specifically on self-regulated learning of problem-solving tasks in STEM-domains.”

Very relevant for educational practice

Of course Van Gog is “overjoyed” to be able to start this project. “Nowadays I hardly need to explain the importance of the central question in this project anymore, because the COVID crisis has made it painfully clear over the course of the past year how incredibly important and how incredibly difficult it is for students to regulate their own learning process. So there is an urgent need to identify effective methods for improving self-regulated learning: What works, and what doesn’t, why, and for whom? This is not only a highly challenging research question, but the outcomes are also very relevant for educational practice.”