Who are the CLI Fellows?

How to reduce free-riding? Creating a checklist to support the design of group projects.

Tim Benning is an economist with a MSc degree (2006) and PhD degree (2011) in Marketing from Erasmus University Rotterdam and a first grade teaching degree from VU University Amsterdam (2017). He has research and teaching experience in the areas of Business Economics (Marketing) and Health Economics. Currently, he is a teacher (of the tutor academy) at the department of applied economics of Erasmus University Rotterdam. As CLI Fellow, Tim is researching how free-riding can be reduced.

Suppose that you want to create a group project. Where do you start? In this project, Tim aims to provide course coordinators support with the creation of group projects by developing a checklist that takes into account three important criteria: (1) practicability (i.e. current rules and common practice at the EUR), (2) the likelihood of reduced free-riding, and (3) the expected acceptance by students. To complete this checklist, Tim will have interviews with programme/course coordinators and students at the EUR. Furthermore, he will perform a literature review on methods to reduce free-riding and investigate students’ preferences for different group projects by means of a discrete choice experiment. Course coordinators can use the checklist to create generally accepted group projects that minimize free riding.

The journal of Marketing Education has published an article about the research of Tim Benning and Else-Marie van den Herik.

Max Coveney is an Assistant Professor in the Applied Economics group of the Erasmus School of Economics. His research is focused primarily on education and health, and especially on the importance of peers within these domains.

Capturing and realizing the benefits of diversity at Erasmus University

Erasmus University is home to students from many different cultures, nationalities and backgrounds. Scientific research has shown that exposure to such diversity has educational benefits for all students. The aim of this project is the ensure that Erasmus University fully realizes the benefits of its diverse student body. Specifically, this project involves encouraging students to engage and interact with others from a range of different backgrounds as part of their coursework and studying the impact of these interactions on subsequent attitudes and behavior.

The work and learning results of the 'clinical challenge tool' in Medicine Bachelor 3

Jurgen Damen is a teacher clinical reasoning at the Erasmus MC. Teaching clinical skills in the Bachelor of Medicine has a prominent place. These students have limited contact with pathological sounds. This is why Erasmus MC uses the innovative Clinical challenge app. Jurgen Damen researches how the learning analytics of this app relate to the learning outcomes of the students. He investigates whether the learning analytics can help teachers to realise adaptive education. In addition, he investigates whether this educational innovation can be used as a testing instrument in the skills test. Here, students take an aptitude test before entering the clinical phase.

It takes two: the role of co-regulation in building students’ self-regulated learning skills

Léonie Ridderstap is a Learning & Innovation Consultant at the ESHCC and an educational researcher. She provides didactical expertise to ESHCC’s lecturers and school management on educational innovation, and works closely with teaching staff to design, develop and implement educational interventions. As CLI Fellow, Léonie researches the role of co-regulation in building students’ self-regulated learning skills.

Effective study behaviours are crucial to academic success but in order to become a self-regulated learner, students need support, both in the classroom and during self-study. The purpose of this research project is to investigate how students’ study behaviour can be supported. The current project investigates whether co-regulation - by offering several sources of support in the learning environment - encourages students to become self-regulated learners. Findings contribute to lecturer professionalization activities and the development of design principles for the effective instructional support of self-regulated learning.

Dr. Koen Swinnen is an associate professor of Private Law at the Erasmus School of Law (ESL), where he teaches property and insolvency law courses to both bachelor and master students. The focus of his academic research is on the private law challenges that arise from the ever-growing importance and value of data in both everyday life and the economic and financial world. The following questions are but a few of the plethora of burning questions that dr. Swinnen aims to answer in his research: Who owns or should own data? Should ownership of data be possible in the first place and to what extent should one, in answering this question, draw a distinction between different types of data? Does the current legal framework (in a satisfactory manner) allow data to be used as collateral for a loan? Can a creditor seize and foreclose on the data held by his debtor in case of in case of default? If the answers to the latter two questions are negative, should the law be altered and if so, what is the best way to proceed?

Fellowship project

The project is aimed at developing an online self-learning module to be deployed in the skills course of the first bachelor year at ESL. The overall goal of the module is to improve bachelor law students' knowledge of and insight into the role of automation and digitalization in the legal profession, with particular focus on the automation of search related legal tasks. With that goal in mind, the module will be developed to achieve learning results in fields such as: the normative framework for digitally or automatically collecting professional content (e.g. contracts, ownership of data, the filtering of illegal content), how to collect, select and order the aforementioned content, i.e. the informational background (e.g. relevancy of search terms, ordering mechanism for results), and the possibilities of using artificial intelligence for further text analysis.

The project is part of ESL's larger digital innovation plan, where the module's learning process will be continued in a similar second-year module and a third-year minor. In the latter module and minor, the students will build on the knowledge and skills acquired in the first-year module when dealing with the challenging topics of giving legal advice and decision making in a digital environment.

Communicating and improving students’ interdisciplinary engagement with social (in)justice

Addressing pressing societal problems and, specifically, contributing to a more just society are EUR priorities. Thus, various faculties offer courses dealing with social inequality. A starting point of this CLI project is that students in those courses can learn much from each other’s (and the different lecturers’) work and perspectives. By setting up a shared website about social (in)equalities in Rotterdam, the project will engage students in such a multidisciplinary discussion about real life local problems and efforts to fight them. Since the website is open to the broad community, it will also enhance students’ awareness of the potential impact of their work and of the challenges associated with communicating about this topic in effective and socially responsible ways.

Serious gaming for the development of interprofessional teamwork skills:

what is the optimal blended commitment in education?

Within medicine, attention is paid to the development of the interprofessional cooperation skill; a complex but important skill within healthcare. As an online preparation for small-scale education, we have developed a ‘serious’ game: Team Up. With this multi-player game, which is played by medical and nursing students, they can experience the pitfalls and also, contact education can become more effective. Not much is known about the most optimal blended designs of such education. How can the added value of online and contact education best come into its own and how can they optimally reinforce each other? What is the most effective blended design to train this?

An organized 'academic toolkit': creating an overview of academic skills for students and teachers

Robbert Goverts (1988) is Academic Skills Coordinator for the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is responsible for the development, coordination and teaching of academic skills of Sociology, Public Administration and MISOC bachelor students. He has a background in criminology and sociology.

Fellowship project

Through their academic careers at Erasmus University students learn multiple academic skills. These skills are usually learned and examined in isolation. Therefore, it can be hard to keep a clear overview of how these partial skills can be combined and applied for more sophisticated research purposes, for instance a bachelor thesis. The solution lies in the creation of an organized ‘academic toolkit’ for students and teachers. By creating a digital, organized, interactive and attractive overview in which the purpose of academic skills, and the relationship between skills are combined and explained, both students and teachers within a program can benefit. Students will hopefully be able to understand and apply skills better, and teachers are more familiar with the exact skills that students master during their studies.

Who is my patient? Societal involvement of medical students

Ida J. Korfage is Assistant Professor of Quality of Life at Erasmus MC – University Medical Center Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She is an economist and epidemiologist by training. Her main research topic is the assessment of health-related quality of life in oncology, e.g. in the contextr of advance care planning. She undertakes and supervises quantitative, qualitative and methodological studies, with a focus on screening settings and decision making processes. Her work was supported by various research grants including a fellowship from the Dutch Cancer Society and research visits at the University of Bristol, the University of Michigan and the University of British Columbia. She collaborates with many colleague researchers and others, and publishes peer-reviewed scientific articles in both methodological and medical journals. 

Fellowship project

Medical students and their future patients differ in age, health situation, and often in levels of education and in cultural background. To enable our new doctors to partner with their future patients they need to get to know them in settings outside the hospital. New doctors will practise in explaining what medicines do, what medicine leaflets ('bijsluiters') mean, how diets work, what lifestyle changes mean when going shopping for a healthy diet. In that process students will become in touch with a diversity of perspectives and learn about questions, doubts, and preferences that patients may have.

Supporting students to become resilient and confident learners: A blended course as a scaffolding tool to help students reach their full potential

One of the main targets of the Higher education quality agreements is to increase student wellbeing. EUR needs to find creative solutions to help students cope with stress and teach them how to deal with failure to have a happy and successful student life. At Erasmus University College, we offer a Liberal Arts and Sciences bachelor, where students are confronted with several stressful decision-making moments. The purpose of this project is to design and implement a parallel blended course that will run throughout the whole academic year, where students will work on their personal and professional development. It will be composed of different modules that will provide them through various workshops and online tools with resources to build up resilience.

Personal and Professional Development of Students: Academic and work trajectories of ACPA- and premaster students in Pedagogical Sciences

At DPECS, we offer an ACPA- and a premaster trajectory for those students who want to develop their knowledge and skills, and strengthen their position in the urban culturally diversified labor market. However, we know very little about whether our ACPA- en premaster students are able to enrich their work. Additionally, we have very limited insight into whether the urban culturally diverse educational and pedagogical work field benefits from the knowledge and skills that our ACPA- and premaster students acquire. By means of following our ACPA- and premaster students and alumni prior and during enrollment, and after graduation, we attempt to shed more light on these issues as well as create a system of continuous monitoring and evaluating the ACPA- and premaster curricula.

Coversity: Moving towards a co-creating university

Erasmus University Rotterdam strives to collaborate with students to realize better co-creation. To do so, students have many options of providing feedback, for example just after following a course. Unfortunately, many students do not use the possibility of providing such feedback, or its quality could be improved. A major reason that (detailed) observations are not made is that students are unsure if their remarks are actually used for changing and improving courses. An increase in transparency how feedback promotes educational improvements and innovations can increase the motivation to provide feedback and thereby improve co-creation. Thus, the main purpose of this CLI project is to facilitate co-creation by increasing the transparency of the usefulness student feedback.

Learning 21st-century skills requires 21st-century teaching: Advancing a horizontal learning into the skills curriculum at EUC 

Dr. Gera Noordzij is the Head of Department of Social and Behavioural Science at Erasmus University College (EUC). She is responsible for the quality of education at EUC. Before starting at EUC, she worked at the Psychology department of the Erasmus University. She is a psychologist with an interest in and doing research on motivation and self-regulation, mental health, education, and inequality. 

Fellowship project

Rapidly changing societies & labour-market demands require transferrable, soft skills of students (i.e., 21st-century skills). Education plays a vital role in developing the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that enable students to contribute to an inclusive and sustainable future. In response to these demands and the observed challenges our students at Erasmus University College encounter in applying the skills learned during the first-year curriculum to subsequent courses and projects, we propose a rethink of the skills curriculum. This rethink focuses on developing a horizontal learning pathway in the curriculum, in which the learning objectives for the skills curriculum are specified at the macro-, meso- and micro-level. By step-wise interlinking the skills courses, among themselves and to the programme’s Intended Learning Outcomes, and simultaneously integrating them to a collaborative basestone project, we aim to teach our students necessary 21st-century or soft skills for a longer-term retention to foster professional development.

Utopia for Beginners: Teaching Global Challenges through Local Cases

Prof. Dr. Gijsbert holds the endowed (Jean Monnet) chair: Europe in Globalizing World: Migration, Citizenship and Identity. This chair promotes education and research in the field of Global History, European Studies and National Identity. The Jean Monnet chairs are an initiative of the European Commission to promote education, research and reflection in the field of European integration studies at higher education institutions. Oonk is director of the Sport and Nation research program at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Oonk is also one of the academic advisers of EUROCLIO (European Association of History Educators). The chair will inspire the EUROCLIO program: Engaging History Education through memories and legacies of Europe's favorite sports.

Fellowship project

Case based learning (the case method) facilitates an active learning experience for students. By working on a case, themselves and with fellow students, students can reach a deeper understanding of the ideas, concepts and (historical) contexts under discussion than they would if they only read texts or (passively) listened to lectures. Moreover, the case method motivates students to question concepts and stimulates them to actively engage with the readings and concepts.

In the case method, students start to work on a case that is a concrete real-life history or event, often supported by moral questions. All facts are given about the case under discussion, including the results of academic researches (articles) and data. Students individually prepare the case by writing a short essay in which they formulate their own arguments and opinions regarding the moral question(s) of the case. The fundamental principles behind the case method are that the best learned lessons are the ones that you teach yourself, through your own struggles. Oonk will develop ten cases in relation to migration, citizenship and identity. Examples are:

• Who can apply for citizenship? From former slaves in the 19th century to refugees in 21th century.
• Has a conservative religious hotel owner the right to refuse a double bedroom to a married gay couple?
• Who may represent our country? Migration, Citizenship and Identity at the FIFA-World Cup 1930-2018.

The effect of goal-setting and other interventions on study success: Comparing the (combined) effect of different interventions at RSM and EUR

The gender and ethnicity gap in academic achievement constitutes one of today’s key social problems. Prior research has shown that an evidence-based online goal-setting intervention can boost academic performance of students, particularly for males and ethnic minority students, decreasing the performance gap (Schippers, Scheepers, & Peterson, 2015). The current study builds on this and assesses the effects of a combination of interventions (goal setting, study choice meetings and a N=N) on the study results of subgroups of students. The idea is that academic performance of minorities and male students will most enhanced by the combination of two of these three intervention (SCM and goal-setting).

An induction programme for Early Career Academics

Given the little professional teaching preparation, the first teaching experiences of many of our Early Career Academics are daunting. Aside from the stress this may cause for ECAs, this situation may impede the quality of education. The present proposal addresses this concern by offering an induction programme. Firstly, this programme will include insights in the organizational structures. Secondly, it will offer extensive support during teaching the first course, consisting of a combination of group wise mentoring as well supervision by senior staff. Thirdly, the programme will offer additional workshops according to individual needs of participating ECAs. A qualitative study will be conducted to find out to what extent the programme impacts their experiences in a positive way.

Empowering students through interdisciplinary and intercultural education on sustainable development

The innovation project "Empowering students through interdisciplinary and intercultural education on sustainable development" is initiated by three EUR researchers and CLI fellows: Mélodine Sommier and Yijing Wang from ESHCC and Ana Vasques from EUC. This project consists of an honours course on "Communicating Sustainability in an Intercultural Context", and a research project investigating how students' knowledge, skills and attitudes develop and evolve through interdisciplinary and intercultural education on sustainable development. Combining educational innovation with societally relevant research, this project aims to advance the quality of education about sustainability, and to develop the mindset of EUR students to become culturally sensitive and forward-looking global citizens.

Adaptive Personalized Education Pilot

The aim of this project is to build the basis for data-driven, personalized adaptive education at EUR. We build on cutting edge academic research and employ newest facilitating technologies. We develop a pilot application of adaptive education and a prototype of an online platform providing learning analytics to students and teachers.

Ask me and I will learn? Effects of quizzes on student learning and self-regulated learning when studying instructional videos

Blending traditional face-to-face (F2F) learning and web-based learning has been shown to be very effective – at least if students come to F2F meetings well-prepared. However, this is not always the case mainly because students often overestimate their own learning when studying instructional videos. Consequently, students quit their learning prematurely which impacts the effectiveness of the subsequent F2F meetings. The current project investigates whether integrating quizzes with instructional videos fosters student learning from these videos, improves students’ self-regulation and affects students' learning behavior. Findings contribute to the development of design guidelines on how to implement instructional video in education.

The Art of Seeing! Does looking at art help to avoid cognitive bias in decision making?

Looking at art is considered an interesting and useful way of learning observational skills. When looking at art, we often immediately have a feeling about the artwork, but when we observe more thoroughly, there is a lot more to see than we initially thought. An excellent and fun way of obtaining observational skills! But do those skills contribute to better decision making and improved performance in other settings?

In this project we aim to address the educational challenge of teaching observational skills and determine whether observational skills learned in an art museum are transferable to students’ observational skills in the diagnostic process, making students less susceptible to cognitive biases and fostering their diagnostic performance.

Martine Baars, Ph.D., is an educational psychologist at the Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies. Her research concerns instructional strategies to improve self-monitoring and self-regulation of learning in primary, secondary and higher education. She focuses on several aspects of self-regulated learning such as self-monitoring accuracy, motivation, learning strategies and cognitive load during learning in both offline and online learning environments (e.g., MOOCs) for individuals and groups. The role of technology and how it can enhance (self-regulated) learning is part of her research interests. As a researcher Martine is active in the Centre for Education and Learning (CEL) of the Strategic Alliance of Leiden University, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and Erasmus University Rotterdam, as well as in the Community of Learning and Innovation (CLI) at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. As a teacher Martine is part of the Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies (DPECS) within the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral sciences (ESSB).

Fellowship project

Being able to regulate one’s own learning is important for academic success but was also found to be very difficult for students. In this project the effects of a mobile application (i.e., Study app) to support self-regulated learning processes of freshmen will be investigated. Martine will implement the app in the first course of the psychology curriculum and measure students’ motivation, satisfaction, SRL skills, and learning outcomes.

Dr. E.F. van Beeck is a public health physician and Associate Professor of Community Healthcare.

Fellowship project

Educating physicians with sociomedical competence

Erasmus Physician 2030
To prepare future physicians for the requirements of the profession in a rapidly changing and increasingly diverse society, the curriculum needs to be adjusted. According to the educational vision Erasmus Physician 2030, physicians need to be able to assist patients in their quest for the highest possible quality of life. During illness, but even before illness manifests, aiming at as many healthy years as possible.

Sociomedical competence
The CLI Fellowship is directed at reinforcement of the societal orientation and the strengthening of physicians’ sociomedical competence. The Fellowship builds upon new practice-based education in the first year of the Bachelor’s programme. The project lays a foundation for the rest of the curriculum, that will build upon it, and suits within the started reinforcement of educational collaboration between Erasmus MC and the City of Rotterdam. This way, students develop their sociomedical attitudes and skills in various subjects.

Attitude and skills
Currently, a pilot is going on with several study groups. Afterwards, a focus group interview will be conducted in every study group, in order to evaluate the education’s practicability and its educational value. Furthermore, a survey will be conducted among students, mapping their sociomedical attitudes. This survey will be conducted before and after the start of the pilot, both among participants and a control group.

Interprofessional education
The gained experiences with practice-based education in the city are not only important for the medicine programme. The chosen approach (creating documentaries based on interviews) can also be used for other disciplines’ issues. Furthermore, this project may serve as a first step towards interprofessional education, where even students from other EUR faculties (such as sociology, pedagogics) can participate. For example, this model will also be used for the knowledge deepening minor Healthy Big City, a collaboration with the CLI Fellow, offered by Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management, and open to students of all EUR faculties.

Dr. Delia Dumitrica is assistant professor at ESHCC’s Department of Media and Communication. Her research focuses on new media and grassroots collective action. She teaches courses on qualitative methodology and political communication, and supervises students in the master programs.

Dr. Jason Pridmore is assistant professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University. As a sociologist, he has been researching the intersection of digital technologies and everyday practices and experiences from a variety of perspectives using qualitative methods.

Fellowship project

Improving Student Knowledge and Skills in Qualitative Data Analysis via Blended Education

Undergraduate students often struggle with methodology courses. The sheer amount of information they have to assimilate over a relatively short period of time can leave them feel unprepared for the practical aspects of data analysis. To address this issue, we have developed six online modules allowing students to learn about different methods of qualitative data analysis and to apply this knowledge to analyze different types of data in the context of CM2006 – Qualitative Research Methods. In this project, we assess the integration of these blended modules in students’ own learning practices. Where most literature on blended education tends to take a quantitative approach, focused on measuring a specific type of impact, our project is more interested in capturing the integration of blended education in students’ everyday study routines. This will allow us to better guide our students in actively developing learning practices conducive to their academic and professional success.

Gijs Elshout, MD, PhD, is a general practitioner and employed as an assistant professor at the Department of General Practice at Erasmus MC. As head of student education of his department, he is responsible for all the educational programmes and internships for the medical students, as provided by his department.

Fellowship project

He received a CLI-fellowship to implement new weblectures and webinars in the Bachelor’s programme of Medicine. In these lectures, comprehensive overviews of the previous studied medical themes will be provided. In the webinars, clinical cases will be discussed with medical specialists and general practitioners in order to teach medical students the different approaches of the various doctors and their considerations in these approaches.

Dr. Aleid Fokkema is a senior lecturer at ESHCC’s department of Media and Communication.  She has been involved in the IBCoM program from the start (in 2009) coordinates two mandatory year 1 courses concerned with writing and research skills. Aleid received CLI funding for adapting a serious game in ethical decision taking and from September 2019 she chairs the Media and Communication Programme Committee.

CLI Fellowship Project

Developing a Portfolio tool for future oriented soft skills

This project is about creating a tool for an online portfolio that rubrics and presents the various so-called soft skills students develop in the course of their degree.

The trend is that the future employment market will be looking for a number of ‘soft skills’ that are not mentioned in the standard overview of courses in a Bachelor’s degree. Future oriented soft skills include, for example: communication skills (this figures high on any list of future employability skills), leadership, critical thinking, creativity, team collaboration, strategic thinking, flexibility, giving and receiving feedback, dealing with failure, planning, and project management, all with their respective social, ethical, and intercultural dimensions.

These skills form part of the educational approach and assessment in many mandatory and non-mandatory courses in the IBCoM program. Apart from communication skills, however, they often do not explicitly form part of the courses’ end products, therefore remaining somewhat intangible. This means that students are not really aware of the sellable abilities they have developed in the course of a few years. Yet, IBCoM students score invariably high in evaluation reports issued by company coaches after completing their mandatory internship. They excel in team collaboration, their capacity to adapt to the company culture, taking initiative, and organising their work. These are the kind of skills employers are looking for in an increasingly flexible and generalized labour market.

A digital portfolio for these ‘soft skills’ meets the problem of their intangibility in the curriculum and lack of awareness on the part of students. The portfolio will reinforce our students’ position in the work field of the future. The fellowship project will cover the following steps:

1. Defining future oriented soft skills
2. Determining which of our courses contribute to these skills
3. Including additional online modules
4. Developing the digital portfolio proper

Dr. Joep Hofhuis is assistant professor at ESHCC’s Department of Media and Communication, where he specializes in intercultural and organizational communication. He was awarded a PhD in social and organizational psychology (University of Groningen, 2012), based on his research on cultural diversity in the workplace. Since then he has studied how individuals communicate across cultures in a variety of settings. One of his main research questions is how intercultural competences help individuals to effectively negotiate complex international environments.

Joep is a founding member of the working group of Intercultural Communication and Diversity (ICD) of the Netherlands Flanders Communication Association (NeFCA). Furthermore, he is a member of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) and the International Academy for Intercultural Research (IAIR).

Fellowship project

Measuring and Improving Students’ Intercultural Competences

Our university aims to equip students with the knowledge, insight and skills needed to communicate and interact successfully with others with different cultural backgrounds. Many of our study programs include international viewpoints and/or intercultural communication in their curriculum, but it remains unclear whether the programs are successful at teaching intercultural competences, and which teaching methods work best. In this CLI research project, I aim to shed new light on this issue. I will develop a way to measure the development of students’ intercultural competences over time, and provide advice on improving curricula and professionalization of lecturers with respect to internationalization and intercultural communication.

Marieke Meeuwisse (Ph.D.) is psychologist and sociologist with a Ph.D. in Educational Sciences. Her main research theme is (ethnic) diversity in higher education, with a special interest in the learning environment, student-teacher interaction and sense of belonging. She has extensive experience in course design and development and in teaching at the (under) graduate level. Marieke is appointed by the Ministry of Education as a Comenius Teaching Fellow in the field of equal opportunities for HE students. She is the project leader of the EU funded Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership on diversity and inclusion in higher education (#IBelong). Marieke is a recent research fellow of the Community for Learning and Innovation (CLI) with a project on the academic trajectories of diverse students at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Fellowship project

In the research project funded by CLI Marieke will investigate the interplay between students and the curricula of the course programmes in which they are enrolled. As such, she will learn more about the way in which the student-curriculum interplay affects academic trajectories of diverse students. She will use existing longitudinal student data from the university-wide database Erasmus Education Research, in combination with data from various curricula (i.e., curriculum scan) which need to be collected. Combining data on students’ academic trajectories and curriculum data will give an insight in possible turning points in diverse students’ academic trajectories throughout course programmes, which is an important step in explaining similarities and differences in academic outcomes of diverse students.

David Pols is a general practitioner in Rotterdam. In 2011 he finished his GP training and started as a GP in Nieuw Beijerland. In November 2012, together with a colleague, he started a GP-practice in Rotterdam Charlois. His PhD was finished at Erasmus MC in 2017. This PhD project focused on the epidemiology of atopic disorders in children. Currently he is working at the department of general practice. He coordinates the ‘clinical reasoning’ program for bachelor students. Furthermore, as chairman of one of the education committees, he is involved in developing in implementing a new course concerning ‘Diversity and Inclusiveness’.

Fellowship project

A dramatic increase in the demand for general practice services is expected. To encourage medical students to pursue general practice, Erasmus MC is integrating courses in its master curriculum that will expose students to general practice in their education. We will evaluate the impact of a two-week-long intensive course in general practice on fifth-year medical students’ attitudes toward general practice. We will use a 25-item survey to assess medical students’ knowledge, perception, and attitudes about general practice; the survey will be administered before and after the course. Furthermore, structural interviews will be used to study the experiences of the teachers that actually teach the students during their internships in the general practices. The objective of this study is to determine fifth-year medical students’ attitudes toward general practice before and after an intensive general practice course, as well as comparing their attitudes to medical students that didn’t follow such an intensive training at all. This will be a one-year project.

Karen Stegers-Jager (Ph.D.) studied Educational Science and Technology (University of Twente, cum laude) and received her PhD in Medical Education from the Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2012. Currently, she is  assistant professor at the Institute of Medical Education Research Rotterdam (iMERR). Her research focuses on selection, assessment and diversity in medical education. She aims to contribute to the creation of a level playing field for all future health professionals, regardless of their cultural or socio-economic backgrounds. In 2017 she received an NWO Veni grant to study the role of first impressions in rater-based assessments. Since 2017 she is coordinator of the local selection procedure at Erasmus MC. In 2019 she was the chair of the annual conference of the NVMO (Dutch organisation for Medical Education) which was dedicated to diversity and inclusion in medical education.

Fellowship project

Selection for medical school: more than just excellence

Selection for medical school
In the Netherlands, since 2000 until very recently, students were selected for medical school either on the basis of a national lottery system that was weighted for pre-university grades or on medical school-specific selection procedures. In 2017 the national lottery system was abolished and completely replaced by school-specific procedures. So far, research on selection has been mainly focused on the question whether selection leads to “better” students. However, the focus on selecting for excellence has two shortcomings:1) it fails to select for the different types of doctors that our society needs, 2) it might reduce the diversity of our student population.

Diverse student population
Previous research has revealed that a more diverse student population increases the educational quality of medical schools. In her CLI Fellowship, Karen focuses on the question: which measures before the start of medical school increase the diversity of the student population? Put differently, how do we ensure that we attract and select students with a variety of interests and backgrounds so that we can deliver the diversity of physicians that society needs.

Selecting for diversity to reach excellence
The overarching aim of this research project is to develop a selection procedure that leads to a diverse group of medical students who can optimally learn from each other in order to promote the quality of education. This goal is clearly in line with the vision of the EUR, which focuses on diversity and inclusivity, and is therefore also directly relevant for other EUR courses. The results of this research will be published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at (inter) national conferences and meetings on medical education and educational psychology. Knowledge distribution at EUR and Leiden-Delft-EUR (LDE) level is made possible through active participation (presentations, meetings) within CLI and LDE-CEL.

Andrea Woltman studied Biomedical Sciences (cum laude) and also received her PhD cum laude at the University of Leiden. She lead a research group within the Erasmus MC for 12 years, published many immunological research papers and received several prestigious research grants, awards and honors rewarding her scientific research and her qualities as educator of young scientists. Currently, she is associate professor and Director of the Bachelor Medicine (Erasmus MC) and completely focusses on education. She performs educational research and is chair of the Advisory Board of the institute of Medical Education Research Rotterdam (iMERR–Erasmus MC). She is especially interested in student selection, student performance and student well-being. As a former chair and member of the Young Erasmus Academy, she committed herself to strengthen interdisciplinary research within the EUR. Not surprisingly, she currently performs research in a multidisciplinary team combining sociology, psychology, and biomedical and educational sciences.

Fellowship project

Influence of admission and assessment policy on academic performance and well-being of students; Identification of impeding and stimulating student factors

Medical schools are challenged to create academic environments that stimulate students to maintain satisfactory progress, while maintaining their health. Many universities use an academic dismissal policy to promote student performance. Evidence that this measure indeed promotes study progress is scarce; it appears to be dependent on the student population and -demonstrated in our pilot study-increases the feeling of stress in a subpopulation of students. Additionally, medical schools’ admission policies may influence the characteristics of their student population. Whether admission policies influence the extent to which the student population can meet higher performance requirements without reducing their well-being, is not known. The project focuses on the effect of admission and assessment (BSa) policies on student performance and psychological and biological stress in medical students, and the possible differences for different subgroups. Student characteristics and factors of selection and BSa policies that correlate with academic outcome and student well-being will be identified.