On April 30, 2015, after a wonderful career, Paul van Geert, professor in Developmental Psychology, bid farewell to the University of Groningen. This blog post gives an image of his farewell speech.
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The origins of talent and excellence have been debated since the end of the 19th century. Why are individuals such as Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Epke Zonderland able to demonstrate exceptional levels of performance in their domain? Our Psychology students may help crack the secrets of talent and excellence in the years to come…
As all university students and teachers will have noticed by now, the Dutch government aims to reduce the student drop out in higher education. In this blog post, it is argued that blocking the possibility to change majors in university is detrimental for individual’s identity development, and in the long run for society as well.
Children’s development is mostly seen as gradual and increasing. However, when the development of individual children is observed more closely, you see many sudden improvements, but also fallbacks and regression. This variability turns out to be a crucial part of human development.
Searching for the brain parts for specific cognitive capacities is a hot topic. But how much will this tell us about cognition? The key to cognition lies in the interaction between various processes rather than in a specific component for each function.
Psychological traits such as self-esteem explain how people differ from each other, but what explains the psychological traits and their development? Psychologists tend to explain individual differences and developmental trajectories of traits based on variables that are separate from the traits themselves. I argue that individual differences and developmental changes can also be explained by looking at the changes in the observable traits, looking within the trait and not outside of the trait.
While it is a good idea to track children’s academic development, there are some serious disadvantages to the use of standardized tests. Both the usage of tests and characteristics of the tests themselves could obstruct primary school students’ learning process, if we’re not careful.