Who are the CLI Fellows?

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.

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.

Floor van Rosse studied Biomedical sciences at Utrecht University. During her BSc she learned that her future ambition wasn’t working in a lab, so she chose a MSc in Epidemiology and graduated in 2009 in clinical epidemiology as well as in infectious disease- and pharmaco-epidemiology. From 2009-2014, Floor was a PhD candidate at the AMC department of Public Health in collaboration with the department of Public and Occupational health of EMGO+ Institute/VUmc. She studied ethnic inequalities in patient safety in Dutch hospital care, and conducted quantitative as well as qualitative research. During her PhD-period she found out that she liked teaching and educational development a lot. Since September 2014 she is working in the pharmacy department at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam as a teacher and educational coordinator. Since 2017 she is appointed as assistant professor and is currently developing a research line on pharmacotherapy education.

Fellowship project

Recently our department started a project called “this week’s medicine”: A series of short video lectures about individual medicines. We developed these lectures to offer attractive and manageable pieces of knowledge, aiming to eventually improve medication-knowledge among medical students. Both students and lecturers are enthusiastic about the video lectures, but we actually do not know how they can best be placed in the curriculum and studied by students to have an optimal knowledge transfer; neither do we know whether they lead to improved knowledge and prescribing skills. This CLI research project will start with an explorative and partly qualitative study investigating study-strategies that students use, and finding out which strategies seem most effective by observing correlations between strategies and outcomes like test results and prescribing skills. With the most effective study-strategies we will perform an experimental study where outcomes like test-results will be compared between intervention and control students.

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.

My PhD thesis research started in 2009 and concerned instructional strategies to improve self-monitoring and regulation of learning to solve problems in primary and secondary education. I investigated how generation tasks such as practice problems, training of monitoring skills and feedback could improve the accuracy of self-monitoring judgments and regulation choices. After obtaining my PhD in 2014, I focused on the process of self-regulated learning taking into account self-monitoring accuracy, motivation, affect and cognitive load during learning. I investigate self-regulated learning in primary, secondary and higher education. I look at both offline and online learning environments (e.g., MOOCs) as well as individual learning and collaborative learning. The role of technology and how it can enhance (self-regulated) learning is part of my research interests.

As a researcher I am 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 I am part of the Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies (DPECS) within the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral sciences (ESSB). For more info please visit my LinkedIn and Google Scholar. 

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. We will implement the app in the first course of the psychology curriculum and measure students’ motivation, satisfaction, SRL skills, and learning outcomes.

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.