To know or to Teach

CALERO, CI

Berlin

Seminario; Seminario Institucional del Max Planck Institute for Human Development; 2018

Max Planck Institute for Human Development. iSearch Laboratory

The internet has made learning new contents easier than ever: You just google your questions, in natural language, as you would ask them to your mum, teacher or best nerd friend, and you would be able to get reliable answers. Medical diagnoses represent a similar case: The latest advances in technology allow doctors to run very detailed analyses of body fluids, test tissue samples through biopsies, perform complex genetic tests, and get a complete picture of people's bodies and brains at almost any level. However, having potential access to any time of content or result does not make information search or medical diagnosis necessarily simpler.Indeed, to acquire new information efficiently, learn and make decisions based on the information acquired, one has to know what kind of questions to ask, how to do that effectively and reliably, be able to filter and interpret the results, know when to stop querying and select the most informative answer or solution. From this perspective, the learning process nowadays relies more on the ability to make effective and appropriate inquires, rather than on the availability of the answer. In this sense, it becomes crucial to be able to measure the efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility of active learnings' strategies, trace their emergence and developmental trajectory, as well as to identify the individual factors impacting and contributing to their success. For these reasons, the proposed investigation project will build on prior work, will examine systematically the cognitive, social, motivational, and socio-economic factors impacting and contributing to the active learning performance, to identify the sources of the developmental change and interpret the individual differences observed among individuals.