about

I am an assistent professor at Utrecht University's Department of Education, where I teach in the educational sciences Bachelor and Master programme, and conduct research with prof. Tamara van Gog and prof. Liesbeth Kester. I'm interested in learning, memory, and the brain - and in ways to support learning with well-designed instruction. You can read more about my research interests here.

Bio: Bachelor‘s degree in Psychology, Research Master’s degree in Behavioural Science, specialized in educational neuroscience. Worked for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development on an international project on Innovative Learning Environments in Paris (report). PhD project at the BSI and the Donders Institute of Radboud University. OECD external consultant and member of university council. Defended my thesis in October 2017. Currently researcher and teacher at Utrecht University. Fun side projects: designing a vocabulary learning method for an international competition (1st place!), journalistic writing and making creative stuff. Passionate advocate for open access and against neuromyths. Lindy hop dancer in my free time.

News

Aug 2020 I gave a junior keynote at the Earli sig6/7 meeting. The whole conference moved completely online this year. Good that conferences become accessible for more researchers like this and that we save on emissions. But everyone missed the spontaneous chats after talks and over coffee - are there digital alternatives for these?

Jul 2020 In this new open access paper, we show that the use of keyword mediators changes after repeated retrieval, and that shifting to direct, unmediated retrieval predicts better learning oucomes. Based on work by my student Mirte Dikmans!

Mar 2020 Mooie input tijdens workshops met docenten bij scholingsdag van SVOK, Kennemerland. De sinds 1 jaar geplande lezing voor een studiedag van Nederlandse vakdidactici klassieke talen ging helaas niet door ivm. Corona.

Dec 2019 New paper out: providing hints after a failed retrieval attempt does not improve later recall on a test without hints, but takes up study time. (See Publications for pdf)

Sep 2019 Back from my research visit at UCL, where I worked with the gigantic Memprize dataset of more than 4000 language learners (this is after removing the 10000 or so incomplete datasets!). Project lead Rosalind Potts is hoping to finish our manuscript soon!

Thanks for stopping by. You can follow me on Twitter for more news!