Unfolding potential

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An assessment approach that tailors to children’s instructional needs

Vandaag de dag liggen statistische methodes aan de grondslag van beslissingen in allerlei facetten van het leven, van de gezondheidszorg en agricultuur tot de financiële sector en marketing.

In this thesis, dynamic testing principles were applied to examine young children's potential for learning. Our studies focused on the role of cognitive flexibility, to further increase our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in children's ability to learn from instruction and feedback,…

Within Leiden University, we sometimes conduct research with laboratory animals. We only do this when when we cannot answer the research question in any other way.

If gifted children are experts in using strategies, why do they experience problems with learning? Why do they underachieve?

Can dynamic testing provide us with insight in children’s potential for learning?

Read all the study choice tips and take the tests to get to know more about yourself. These tests can give you insight into your interests, competences, values and personality. That can help you make your study choice.

What is the relationship between outcomes of dynamic testing and cognitive flexibility in young children?

Children with a specific phobia are excessively afraid of certain objects, animals or situations. Specific phobias are common in children, but they can make the child’s life at home, school and outside quite difficult. Together with a large international team, we developed the KibA-program to help children…

New book on Dutch mayors governing local order and public safety.

Can cognitive decline in people with Parkinson’s disease be measured using digital tests at home? According to an interdisciplinary team of researchers, the answer is yes. They investigated this with a Kiem grant from Leiden University.

Jaroslaw Kantorowicz, assistant professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, isolated the reaction of the public to the potential breach of constitutional fiscal rules from the reaction of other players, such as the opposition, media and civil society organizations.

Statistical considerations guide the design and implementation of the experiments that scientists perform. For instance, in a clinical trial about a the efficacy of a treatment, its effect in a certain minimum amount of patients has to be observed in order to make confident assertions about the efficacy…

Subproject of the NWO Smart Culture Grant research project 'The Critical Visitor'.

What is the effect of a dynamic training in children’s inductive reasoning skills and how is it related to children’s school performances and language development.

Can process-oriented dynamic testing be applied to everyday educational practice?

Promotor: Prof.dr. B. van de Water, Co-promotores: L.T.M. van der Ven, A.S. Kienhuis

PhD defence

This thesis investigates durational aspects of the Italian mobile diphthongs with respect to other rising diphthongs and monophthongs and it shows to what extent the monophthong/diphthong alternation still occurs in contemporary Italian.

Uncovering task solving processes in dynamic testing

The quality of vaccines is still often tested by using laboratory animals. That has to change, according to researchers from Leiden University and the vaccinological institute Intravacc. Together they went searching for a test method that makes animal testing unnecessary. The first promising results…

Traditional hypothesis testing requires researchers to set a fixed sample size in advance. After collecting data, the test determines whether to reject the null hypothesis.

What is the best method and time to test the effectiveness of medicines? PhD student Rob van Wijk of the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR) discovered zebrafish larvae are best used in drug research when they are five days old. His findings were published on 15 February in the journal…

Testing chemical substances without using animals. It seems a utopia, but a European team is going to develop a way to make this a reality. The RISK-HUNT3R project, led by Leiden professor Bob van de Water, received 23 million euros from the European Commission for this purpose. The project was launched…

Thanks in part to the persistence of a Leiden research group, cancer could be detected in the near future with just a single drop of blood. Not only can the diagnosis be determined at an earlier stage, but the blood test is also cheap, fast and patient friendly. The first results of this method seem…

A meeting place for singing parrots. That is one of the ambitions of Michelle Spierings’ new project. With her awarded NWO XS grant, she wants to test the parrots’ hearing ability. ‘I am curious to see how they can recognise and imitate changing melodies. And it would be amazing to test that with a…

In the second semester of this academic year (February 2025), the Faculty of the Humanities will switch to Ans for digital exams. Several lecturers have already gained experience with the new platform through pilot exams. Two lecturers from Dutch Studies, Liesbet Winkelmolen and Myra Arends, share their…

Songbirds apparently use mnemonics rather than more complex grammatical rules to recognise structures in which they have been trained. Leiden behavioural biologist Caroline van Heijningen published an article on this subject on Tuesday 17 November in PNAS.

The Bolivian people will make their opinion known on a change to the constitution in a referendum on 21 February. Leiden University organised a symposium on the referendum on 11 February. The aim of the change is to allow President Evo Morales to remain in power until 2025.

Bioprinters that enable scientists to engineer complex tissues and organs. It sounds like science-fiction, but not for the scientists of the Alireza Mashaghi lab at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research. The lab has recently been equipped with two state-of-the-art bioprinters: BioX and LumenX+.…

Pushing the limits and trying things out. The academic year of the Honours Academy started on 10 October and all the speakers encouraged students to jump in at the deep end.

Researching as a student how you can make your own student house free of natural gas. That is now possible because of a new collaboration between Leiden University and the municipality of Leiden and The Hague.

Traditional school tests, like the Dutch CITO, largely reflect students' existing knowledge and abilities. However, dynamic testing sheds light on students' learning potential, discovered Mirjam de Vreeze in her PhD research. This approach is especially promising for children with learning challenges,…

Researchers from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) are working on the first diagnostic test for leprosy that can be used outside a laboratory. This will not only reliably diagnose leprosy, but also be cheap and easy to use. Leprosy mainly occurs in low-income countries. A double challenge…

The physical origin of the dozens of stellar-mass binaries, the mergers of which have been detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration via gravitational waves, is still unknown.

Nonadiabatic energy transfer from the translational motion (T) of a molecule impinging on metal surface to the metal’s electrons may determine whether the molecule can lose enough energy to adsorb or react.

Researchers at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and Radboud university medical center have been given the green light to deliberately infect volunteers with malaria in order to test a highly promising vaccine on them.

To check whether the classroom scanners are secure, a ‘pen test’ was performed in the Lipsius building on Monday 28 March. This involved switching on the person counters for a day so that ethical hackers could try to gain access to the system.

Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) has spent the past five years coordinating an international study of genetic mutations and breast cancer risks. The results will make it easier to determine which genes increase the risk of breast cancer and to what extent. The researchers published their results…

Toxys, Leiden University and Leiden University Medical Center have agreed immediately to commercialise and also develop further the ToxProfiler technology invented at the two institutions. ToxProfiler allows for rapid toxicity hazard identification of novel and existing drugs, chemicals, and other substances.…

How would you convert Egyptian hieroglyphs into Latin script? And what is actually the correct translation of dishes on a Vietnamese menu? On Saturday 28 January, high school students from all over the Netherlands will come to Leiden to ponder a series of language-related puzzles. Their goal? To win…

When an employee returns from an area considered to be a corona risk, can their employer require them to have a corona test? This is a complicated issue if you consider labour law and legislation in relation to privacy of employees. However in some cases Barend Barentsen, Professor of Labour Law, believes…

Unfortunately, Covid-19 won’t be the last infectious disease to sweep across the world. To nip such diseases in the bud, a team of Leiden students is developing a test kit that will be able to detect infectious diseases at an early stage. With this idea, they won the Grand Prize of the international…

Mini organs-on-chips allow us to study how diseases develop and how drugs work. Although the technology is not new, it is becoming increasingly advanced. PhD candidate Bart Kramer hopes it will eliminate animal testing in the future.