Research
Our group dealt with the teaching and learning of mathematical and scientific content from a cognitive psychology perspective.
As these are a challenge for all age groups, we conducted studies with pre-school, primary and secondary school students, as well as high school and university students. We wanted to understand how the mental foundations that humans are equipped with – including working memory functions, language, spatial-visual imagination and the ability to reason-reasoning – are used to build knowledge in mathematics and science when cognitively activating learning opportunities are provided. What the latter can look like has been shown in experimentally designed intervention studies. In addition to completed work from dissertations, results from larger longitudinal studies are published on an ongoing basis in collaboration with researchers at ETH (see links).
Since our group was responsible for the pedagogical-psychological part of teacher training from 2006-2025, we were able to make scientific findings usable for the school. According to the motto "If you want to teach successfully, you have to understand learning", we have integrated findings from research on learning and cognition into our courses.