Members
Photo: Tammy Brice
How can we help people achieve their full potential through learning, and how can we use that to help people build healthy, meaningful connections with other people and cultures?
These are the two burning questions I pursue every day in my work as an educational psychologist.
I tend to work eclectically and am interested in theory development, practical application and the methods we use to study these. I deliberately draw from multiple fields to cast new light on what we know about learning. Also, my interests are grounded both within and beyond the classroom — more often beyond. My research therefore tends to focus on:
- Conceptual meeting points among cognition, emotion and motivation (most recently focusing on interest, adventure, courage, information literacy and procrastination)
- Language (written, visual, NL/FL)
- Space, place, culture and travel
I also have an adjunct position with the Concordia Language Villages (CLV) whose mission is to inspire courageous global citizens. The work I do at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and CLV are mutually informative and central to the nature of my research pursuits.
Why do some people like this and other like that? I like terribly bad movies that make me feel embarrassed for the people involved. I like learning boring music theory to develop skills in playing instruments. I like exhausting hikes for peace of mind and a sense of belonging. These and other things define who I am, and I find it really interesting how these interests came to be.
My research mainly focuses on how an interest develops and is maintained, and how one can trigger interest in others. I’m also interested in the social cognition of bullying.
I administer the Bachelor and Master program in psychology and I’m a member of the programs committee.
How do we come to believe something? What should we consider trustworthy? While my interests are far ranging (probably too far), they all have to do with the use and misuse of information, with statistical literacy and information literacy. Lately, my research interests include
- teaching and learning
- information literacy
- research synthesis
- scientific integrity
Anett Ragó — Joining us August 1, 2021!
We can learn something new only if we fail to predict, states Roger Schank, an influential cognitive researcher. I am interested in what these predictions look like and whether we can design an optimal learning situation where abstract information and specific experience are similarly present.
I investigate knowledge representation: what we store in our mind about the world around us, how our categories emerge, and how this knowledge influences perception and memory retrieval.
This is related to everyday experiences of working search engines (and their behind-the-scenes databases), education, problem-solving, expertise, learning strategies, long-term memory for visual events, and the form of the emerging conceptual representation. I investigate these topics with participants of all ages — especially preschoolers, adults, and the elderly.
My current research interests relate to procrastination – why we delay things despite expecting to be worse off because of the delay. I find that this phenomenon addresses most of the topics I have been interested in throughout my career, including
- Behavior and learning (e.g., implicit learning and rule-following, avoidance learning, extinction)
- Cognitive and verbal control of behavior
- Social competence training (including academic competence training)
- Rationality (and irrationality)
- Counterfactual thinking
- Scale development and assessment
- Evaluation
Please take a look at our homepage for the procrastination project here: www.procrastination.no
I want to contribute to enabling students to become competent candidates in their future workplace and in society.
My research interests include:
- teaching methods
- learning processes
- student graduation and dropout
I teach and supervise at all levels from BA to PhD, but my main focus is on first-year students. I am also currently vice head of department, with responsibility for education, and a member of several national committees related to psychology education.
Research Fellows and Post-Doctoral Fellows
I am a post-doctoral researcher working on a variety of projects that focus on procrastination among students. My research interests also include measuring and valuing health-related quality of life.
I am a research fellow, and “Study skills: An integrative approach to efficient student learning” is my current academic passion.
Why do people do what they do? Why do we sometimes behave and act in ways that would never lead to something good? These two questions represent my main research interests. I am interested and aim to contribute our understanding of students’ irrational behavior.
My research therefore tends to focus on:
- Procrastination.
- Academic attrition
- Behavioral intentions
Keywords: attrition, drop-out, transfer out, procrastination, intentions.
I am a research fellow, and information literacy is my passion.
My research focuses on student learning:
- developing tools for measuring levels of information literacy
- understanding the role of interest in learning
- thinking critically about information sources
- citing sources – why and how
- searching for and finding reliable sources
- integrating information literacy in teaching
I have worked as a university librarian for many years and enjoy teaching information literacy.
Blog: Becoming a researcher: Life as a PhD student
Affiliates
Isabel Kreis (affiliate)
Photo: Audun Hetland
I am a cognitive psychologist with a strong affinity for neuroscience. I am currently investigating decision-making under uncertainty in schizophrenia and autism. I want to understand what basic mechanisms potentially contribute to formation and maintenance of various symptoms in patients as well as in people without any psychiatric diagnosis. To this end, I am combining behavioural measures with pupillometry and computational modelling to study concepts such as belief formation, processing of uncertainty, metacognition, effort investment, and working memory.
My primary research interests concern the interplay between feelings and cognition. Examples of questions I have addressed in my research are: How do intuitive, “gut” feelings arise from implicit learning? To what extent does our current mood influence how much we learn and our awareness of what we have learned? Do we feel more confident when our decisions are accurate than when they are not? Which factors influence how quickly time seems to fly? How and why does psychological distance influence humor?
My research focuses on:
- Metacognition
- Intuition
- Consciousness
- Implicit learning
- Affect and cognition
- Psychological distance
My primary position is at the University of Bergen. I have a secondary position (20%) at UiT where my teaching responsibilities are in the BA and MA programs, where I teach courses in affect and cognition.
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