Students will understand and apply concepts and theories of cognitive psychology to how individuals remember, reason, judge and are creative. Students are encouraged to apply their knowledge to their own experiences and environment, and to derive research questions from their observations. Students will be guided to manage their own learning process, with a special emphasis on feedback-seeking.

Understanding how people learn is so important for society, Organisations and individuals, that research on this topic goes back to philosophers in Ancient Greece. Learning helps you to make sense of the world, to perform well in it and to create new knowledge and insight, be creative and help others to learn and develop.

In this course, we will explore how individuals learn, how we reason and make decisions, why we are creative, how we learn from failure and how people become the ultimate masters of learning – experts. With its broad set-up and the ability to follow your own interests within this course, it is a good basis for courses in many different domains, such as Organisation, finance, marketing and (behavioural) economics.

You will follow two tracks within this course:
1. PBL Track: in tutorial groups you will explore the topics of this course and you will be responsible for guiding your own and others’ learning process. You will finish this track with your own blog describing your understanding and interest in the topics.
2. Research Track: each week we will ask you to formulate a research question and conceptual model based on the week’s topic, which will be graded and on which you will receive feedback.

A reader has been compiled of introductory book chapters in cognitive psychology, academic articles and non-fiction book chapters.

Exchange students need to be interested in issues of Cognition, Learning behaviour, Education, and Training.
An advanced level of English