Learning analytics tracks students’ online learning activities in order to support their learning. But what if most of their learning takes place offline, out of sight of digital eyes?

What physics controls the properties of quantum matter, such as how electrons flow inside high-temperature superconductors? This question has captivated the physics community and industry for decades, in part due to the great technological potential such materials have, but also because they have resisted…

Welcome to the Hensen Lab! We are a young dynamic experimental research group starting at the Leiden Institute of Physics. Our lab addresses one of the key challenges of modern physics: understanding the interface between quantum mechanics and general relativity.

In design optimization problems, engineers typically handcraft design representations based on personal expertise, which leaves a fingerprint of the user experience in the optimization data. Thus, learning this notion of experience as transferrable design features has potential to improve the performance…

In this article, Wout Broekema, Wouter Jong, and Sara Perlstein explore the design and assessment of crisis inquiries from a learning perspective.

You can ask virtual assistant Siri about the weather, but you can’t have a real conversation with it yet. You can’t refer to anything that’s been said before, or ask the system why it says what it says. Stephan Raaijmakers, Professor by Special Appointment from TNO, hopes to change this.

The literature indicates that teacher professional development and learning may be improved by using formative assessment procedures. This thesis focuses on a specific form of formative assessment, negotiated assessment, which is characterised by the exchange of views between assessor and assessee and…

Human language is constantly evolving with its linguistic structure being shaped by language users at both individual and population levels. Focusing on the interplay between processes of language acquisition and communicative need in shaping human languages, this thesis introduces a novel computational…

Biodiversity in the Netherlands is having a tough time. Professor of Natural Capital Koos Biesmeijer combines research with practical advice: from the greening of industrial parks to solutions inspired by hi-tech nature. Inaugural lecture 9 March.

Recently, the booklet 'Blended Learning, het versterken van het onderwijs op de Universiteit Leiden' has been launched. Sonja Wagenaar, educational adviser at ICLON, was project manager of the three-year Blended Learning Program in which blended learning training was implemented in the studies Psychology,…

What is students’ engagement in problem-based learning (PBL) and case-based learning (CBL) in teacher certification programs?

If an algorithm has to learn to understand language, simply having a lot of data doesn’t help much. Like us, a computer has to learn the language in interaction with others. Tessa Verhoef is fascinated by how this interaction works.

Improvements of weak gravitational lensing shape measurements are presented and some used for data analysis.

Galikyan’s dissertation examines how the multidimensionality of learner­learner interaction data and the multifacetedness of learner-learner interaction itself impact the measurement of learner-learner interaction in digital learning environments.

With the emergence of online social networks (OSNs), the way people create and share information has changed, which becomes faster and broader than traditional social media.

The topic of this study is the portfolio that is being used in a teacher education institute as an instrument for stimulating reflection on their development as teachers by student teachers.

Green infrastrucuture (GI) like urban farm and green roofs could provide many beneficial functions in cities. These include for example food production, flood prevention or increasing biodiversity. MultiGreen project aims at developing an integrated modelling tool to support…

Exploring the application of data-driven AI optimizations, this work leverages past software performance to reduce the carbon footprint and energy consumption of powerful computing applications.

Astronomers led by Simon Portegies Zwart used simulations to reconstruct how three stars were ejected from the star cluster R136, 60,000 years ago. The analysis reveals that five stars were involved in the event in the Tarantula Nebula.

This thesis is dedicated to the exploration of the primordial dark ages: unknown physics during the earliest stages of the Universe’s expansion that have not yet been directly probed by observations. Cosmic inflation is a burst of exponential expansion of space after the “Big Bang”.

This thesis focuses on data found in the field of computational drug discovery. New insight can be obtained by applying machine learning in various ways and in a variety of domains. Two studies delved into the application of proteochemometrics (PCM), a machine learning technique that can be used to…

This PhD project investigates specific types of allusions used by Russian native speakers, namely references to classical Russian literature. The research includes the analysis of 1) how native speakers use allusions, 2) what type of discourse allusions are frequently used, and 3) how we can implement…

In this research project characteristics of effective instructional development were identified that are appealing to medical teachers and relevant for medical education.

How can challenge-based learning in higher education contribute to sustainable urban waste management and support The Hague’s transition to a zero-waste city by 2050?

What are best practices for teaching students to engage with 'wicked' problems?

Do you want to know more about Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology and what it is like to study in Leiden? Come to our online or on campus information events.

This study explores public leaders’ organizational learning orientation in the wake of a crisis. More precisely, we study the association between public leaders’ public service motivation and their learning orientation (instrumental versus political).

Why are professors still warning their students against dogmatism, prejudice, pedantry, and other centuries-old vices? What explains the persistence of these scholarly vices across the ages?

Serge Rombouts is a physicist whose PhD thesis was about functional MRI (fMRI). This visualises activity in regions of the brain. The appealing images of glowing brain regions that emerge from the computer are the result of calculations. According to Rombouts, this isn’t proper artificial intelligence.…

Leiden Observatory is going to use a new technique to carry out calculations on gravitational lensing measurements. They will do this is the context of research into the formation of elliptical galaxies. Alessandro Sonnenfeld (University of Tokyo) who developed this technique joined the research team…

The aim of this project is to develop accurate but interpretable ensemble learning methods for high-dimensional multi-domain data.

We are cosmologists, in other words we use physics to study the Universe, how it started and evolved into the structure that we observe around us.

This PhD project investigates how language models can be used to extract structured knowledge from text in a way that is accurate, robust, and applicable to real-world use cases.