Fien Depaepe

• PhD
• Professor at KU Leuven

One of the most important characteristics of mathematics teachers is their knowledge enabling them to provide learning experiences that promote students’ understanding, defined as pedagogical content knowledge by Shulman in 1986. In recent decades, the number of studies on mathematics teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge has steadily increased....

This study investigates the relationship between team members' personality traits and their perceived individual and team flow in collaborative problem-solving (CPS) contexts. Flow, a state of optimal experience, enhances motivation, performance, and satisfaction, benefiting both individuals and teams. Using multilevel regression analysis, we exami...

Mastery of the cardinality principle (CP) is foundational for children’s mathematical development. Children’s age and subitizing and counting skills contribute to their CP acquisition. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of different types of instruction for supporting 3–4-year-olds’ CP development and its interplay with child charact...

The ever-evolving landscape of education is constantly intersecting with rapid advances in technology. Digital personalized learning (DPL)—learning which occurs in a digital learning environment that adapts to the individual learner—is believed to benefit both students and teachers. While DPL is believed to benefit students and teachers, there is a...

The relationship between technology and educational processes is a complex one. At this moment, increased digitization as well as efforts to limit the use of digital tools can be observed. In view of (a) deepening our understanding of the relationship between technology and educational processes and (b) strengthening the productive educational use...

The objective of this study is to explore the relationship between personality and peer-rated team role behavior on the one hand and team role behavior and verbal behavior on the other hand. To achieve this, different data types were collected in fifteen professional teams of four members (N = 60) from various private and public organizations in Fl...

This study examined the teacher–child interactions during shared book reading (SBR) in the domain of early mathematics. We investigated preschool teachers’ and children’s talk in terms of (1) communicative acts, mathematical focus, and level of abstraction (literal versus inferential), (2) the sequential relation between teacher’s talk and children...

Les dernières années ont été caractérisées par des débats postcoloniaux véhéments dans le milieu universitaire, les musées, et la société sur les héritages coloniaux dans le contexte post-colonial. S'appuyant sur les idées des spécialistes en études postcoloniales et en didactique de l’histoire, ainsi que sur la nécessité de remettre en question le...

Due to swift technological changes in society, programming tasks are proliferating in formal and informal education around the globe. However, challenges arise regarding the acquisition of programming skills. Many students are unequipped to develop programming skills due to limited instruction or background and therefore feel insecure when encounte...

High-quality instruction in preschool is important for children’s mathematical development. To date, the domain-specific elements constituting mathematics instruction quality and the factors associated with this quality are hardly studied, resulting in serious gaps in our insights into the topic. We aimed to address this gap by investigating (a) 43...

It was investigated whether test anxiety (TA), mathematics anxiety (MA), and reading anxiety (RA) can be traced back to some type of general academic anxiety or whether these are separable. A total of 776 fifth graders (Mage = 10.9 years) completed questionnaires on TA, MA, and RA, as well as a mathematics test. Also, mathematics and reading perfor...

History museums offer a wide range of possibilities to engage students in learning about the past, as well as about history. When compared to scholarly research on other types of museums, their educational promises are underexposed. Within these promises, instructional practices and instructional agents such as museum educators and history teachers...

Background Augmented reality (AR) is receiving increasing interest as a tool to create an interactive and motivating learning environment. Yet, it is unclear how instructional support affects performance in AR. Objectives This study sought to explore how varying the instructional support in AR can affect performance‐related behaviours of students...

Math anxiety (MA) is an important affective factor that contributes to individuals’ math proficiency. While self-reports are commonly used to measure MA, a number of limitations are inherently connected to this measuring method. Physiological responses are considered a promising alternative approach, but research is scarce and the empirical evidenc...

Adaptive digital games for learning have been introduced as a motivating way for children to learn as they can provide instant feedback, embed the learning content in an attractive narrative, and adapt instruction according to individual needs of students. Although studies showed benefits of using adaptive digital educational games, a framework for...

The objective of this study is to explore new ways of assessing collaborative problem solving (CPS) processes based on different modalities of audio data and their combination. The data collection took place in an educational lab setting during an experiment with adult teams from professional contexts who collaboratively solved multiple problems as...

Recent studies point to the potential of using educational technology (ET) to stimulate preschoolers’ mathematical development. Despite the potential of ET for fostering early mathematics there is still limited insight into the extent to which ET is actually used in daily classrooms. We aimed to complement current insights into early childhood educ...

Introduction Reciprocal peer tutoring is an instructional model where students take turns serving as tutor and tutee to maximize their learning (Metzler, 2017; Mosston & Ashworth, 2008). According to Metzler (2017), effective tutors identify mistakes and provide appropriate guidance for improvement. Knowing how to detect and address common errors...

This study explores the role of teachers' perceptions of digital personalised learning (DPL) tools in their intention to use and actual usage of these tools in the classroom. Utilizing the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), we address two gaps in the literature: the limited investigation of DPL in real-world settings and the reliance on self-report...

Reading is a fundamental skill to acquire during children's school career. The present meta‐analysis examined research on the effectiveness of digital technologies to foster early reading skills during Tier‐1 interventions (ie, high‐quality core reading instruction which is intended to promote learning for all children). Unlike previous meta‐analys...

Objective To investigate the role of specialised content knowledge in instructor training on the teaching and learning of basic life support (BLS) in secondary schools. Design Cluster randomised controlled trial. Setting Data were collected in three Flemish secondary schools during physical education classes. Method Three secondary schools were...

Teacher-driven personalisation can be challenging to facilitate, especially in large heterogeneous classes and during demanding courses. Because of the growing digitalisation, more possibilities arise towards technology-driven personalisation. Nonetheless, little is known about how teachers interact with or implement digital personalised learning (...

Introduction: Acquiring insights into the framework design of metal-based removable partial dentures (mRPD) is a current challenge in dental education. The aim of the present study was to explore the effectiveness of a novel 3D simulation tool to teach designing mRPD by investigating the learning gain and the acceptance and motivation towards the...

A recent curriculum reform in Flanders (Belgium) has introduced historical thinking as a central goal for history education. Historical thinking aims to introduce students to the methods of historians and disciplinary ways of thinking. It is a complex act, requiring the application of substantive and second-order knowledge, and is difficult to fost...

The awareness that many problems in our society are interdisciplinary in nature and require the integration of multiple STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) concepts to solve them has given rise to a new instructional approach, called “integrated STEM education”. Integrated STEM education aims to remove the barriers from the STEM fi...

The overall objectives of this study are to describe the state of the art and to provide an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the use of extended reality (XR) technologies in the healthcare and education sectors. The study employs a mixed-methods approach based on desk research, surveys, interviews, case studies and sectoral workshops....

Executive Summary

Multiple-documents-based (inquiry) tasks are often used to examine historical thinking, as they require students to apply discipline-specific ways of reasoning and writing. Intervention studies using such tasks have often relied on principles from cognitive apprenticeship to make these discipline-specific heuristics explicit to students. While seve...

In order to design learning environments that foster students’ research skills, one can draw on instructional design models for complex learning, such as the 4C/ID model (in: van Merriënboer and Kirschner, Ten steps to complex learning, Routledge, London, 2018). However, few attempts have been undertaken to foster students’ motivation towards learn...

Recent studies demonstrated that the adult-preschooler interaction during shared book reading (SBR) contributes to its effectiveness (Mol et al., 2008). The level of abstraction, or complexity, of the mathematical questions adults formulate during SBR serves as an indicator of the interaction quality. We aimed to investigate the chance of spontaneo...

Shared picture book reading (SPBR) refers to an activity in which the adult reads aloud a picture book to children and which often includes interactions about the picture book outside of the actual reading. In this systematic review, we analyzed the characteristics of the picture books that are used to stimulate early mathematics, and the frequency...

Digital games for learning have been introduced as a motivating way for children to learn as they can provide immediate feedback, embed the learning content in an attractive narrative, and adapt item difficulty to learners’ performance in the game. Although studies showed positive benefits of using digital educational games compared to other teachi...

Math anxiety (MA; i.e., feelings of anxiety experienced when being confronted with mathematics) can have negative implications on the mental health and well-being of individuals and is moderately negatively correlated with math achievement. Nevertheless, ambiguity about some aspects related to MA may prevent a fathomed understanding of this systema...

Although digital personalized learning (DPL) is assumed to be beneficial for the student as well as the teacher, the implementation process of DPL tools can be challenging. Therefore, the aim of our study is to scrutinize teachers’ perceptions towards the implementation of DPL in the classroom. A total of 370 teachers from primary and secondary edu...

Historical thinking has gradually become a central goal for history education. Its complexity, however, makes it difficult to foster among students and little is known about the role of students’ epistemological beliefs. At the same time, several history education scholars have argued that historical thinking may not only contribute to disciplinary...

Research Findings: Shared-picture book reading can stimulate children’s mathematical development. Evidence of learning-supportive characteristics in picture books is limited in this domain. A first step is systematically analyzing the occurrence of domain-specific features in publicly available picture books. We analyzed the occurrence of general b...

History teachers’ epistemological beliefs are considered to be greatly influential on their instructional practice and a necessary requirement to foster their students’ historical thinking skills. In examining this relationship, two issues arise. First, adequately capturing teachers’ epistemological beliefs remains a challenge as existing instrumen...

Background/Purpose: Reciprocal Peer Learning is an instructional model characterized by students working in pairs exchanging roles of tutor and tutee (Mosston & Ashworth, 2008). This model has proven to be effective for teaching Basic Life Support (BLS) (Madou & Iserbyt, 2020). Effective student tutoring requires different types of content knowledg...

The home learning environment (HLE) has been considered to contribute to children’s early math and reading development. Previous studies examined the HLE by examining the influence of parent-child math and reading activities on math and reading outcomes, however also parents’ own perceptions of math and reading and their math anxiety (MA) and readi...

Cognitive load plays an important role during learning and working, as it has been linked to well-functioning cognitive processes, performance, burnout and depression. Nonetheless, attempts to assess cognitive load in real-time by means of physiological data have been proven difficult, and interpreting these data remains challenging. The aim of thi...

Due to the increasing digitisation, interest in digital personalised learning (DPL) continues to grow. Many empirical studies on the effect of adaptive tools have used a wide variety of conceptualisations and operationalisations of DPL. This systematic review aims to address the lack of consensus by presenting an analysis of empirical studies on te...

During the last decade, many governments and ed‐tech companies have demonstrated an increased interest in digital personalised learning, which resulted in a variety of often game‐like adaptive learning environments. However, there has been limited attention for the impact of these personalised learning technologies on children's learning efficiency...

Despite the general agreement regarding the importance of stimulating young children’s early mathematical skills, mathematical learning opportunities in preschool are limited. Educational technology (ET) may be an effective tool to address this problem. Taking into account the weaknesses of previous reviews, we conducted a systematic and comprehens...

Computer vision has shown great accomplishments in a wide variety of classification, segmentation and object recognition tasks, but tends to encounter more difficulties when tasks require more contextual assessment. Measuring the engagement of students is an example of such a complex task, as it requires a strong interpretative component. This rese...

Math is fundamental to many situations in everyday life such as managing money, preparing food, or making music. Therefore education aims to learn children and adolescents number and math concepts, to enhance math fluency, and to obtain more advanced mathematics. However, a lot of learners have problems with reaching these goals, or even worse, the...

In today’s complex world, the acquisition of research skills is considered an important goal in education. Consequently, there is a growing body of literature that recognizes the value of well-designed learning environments for effectively supporting the development of this complex set of skills. However, a clear consensus on how these research ski...

More and more higher educational institutions invest in technology-enhanced learning spaces, which raises the question of how these environments can be shaped to be as effective as possible. A specific new learning space is the synchronous hybrid or blended learning environment in which both on-site and remote students can simultaneously attend lea...

Digital personalised learning is on the agenda in national educational policy programmes across the world. In Flanders, (Belgium), it is the central goal of the i-Learn programme. One of the educational challenges of this form of learning is to develop pupils with a sense of ownership over their learning. As part of the i-Learn programme, a user-fr...

Children differ in various aspects such as prior knowledge, learning pace, socio-economic status, interests etc. It has been argued that when we take these differences into account when we develop learning environments, children will benefit from it in terms of learning outcomes, learning experience, and attitudes towards particular subjects. The e...

Adaptive educational games provide new opportunities to train early numerical skills. However, empirical evidence for the effectiveness of adaptive educational games is scarce. This study investigated the effectiveness of an adaptive game compared to a nonadaptive game in terms of cognitive, noncognitive and efficiency outcomes. In total, 84 childr...

To have insight into cognitive load (CL) during online complex problem solving, this study aimed at measuring CL through physiological data. This study experimentally manipulated intrinsic and extraneous load of exercises in the domain of statistics, resulting in four conditions: high complex with hints, low complex with hints, high complex without...

This paper provides a survey of the research on the relationship between teachers’ professional knowledge and their instructional quality in the domain of mathematics education. First, an overview is provided of the way in which mathematics professional knowledge has been conceptualized. Second, the relation between mathematics teachers’ profession...

The acquisition of research skills is an important goal of secondary education. Still, insights on what learner characteristics stimulate and hamper research skills are lacking. Therefore, this study investigates the relationship between students’ research skills (assessed by means of the Leuven Research Skills Test (LRST) and students’ gender, edu...

This study investigates technology acceptance over time of two specific technologies in a university setting, namely interactive quizzes and screen sharing. This topic is investigated in the framework of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) that includes the perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and behavioural intention as main concepts. Th...

For the training of academic skills, digital educational games with integrated adaptivity are promising. Adaptive games are considered superior to non‐adaptive games, because they constantly assess children's performance, and accordingly adapt the difficulty of the tasks corresponding to the children's individual level. However, empirical evidence...

Agency is considered a key concept in historical thinking. Understood in a sociological way, it addresses the question of who has the individual or social potential to act purposefully and to effectuate change in society. Teaching about agency is also assumed to influence civic behaviour, as reflection on the various agents in the past and how they...

Indicate your track Academic research: comprehensive evaluations of recent innovations in learning and student analytics approaches. 1 Purpose Increasing numbers of universities provide videos to their students. Analyzing video watching patterns provides an unique opportunity to understand how students learn with multimedia. Prior studies have indi...

This article encompasses a systematic review of the research on ICT-based learning environments for metacognitively oriented K-12 mathematics education. This review begins with a brief overview of the research on metacognition and mathematics education and on ICT and mathematics education. Based on a systematic screening of the databases Web of Sci...

Teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) importantly contributes to instructional quality and student outcomes. We aimed to complement the limited insights into preservice preschool teachers’ PCK, and its association with opportunities to learn (OTL), during teacher training. We offered 162 first-to-final-year preservice preschool teachers fro...

To deal with the current need for flexible learning trajectories giving access to a more diverse group of learners, synchronous hybrid virtual classrooms have been designed to connect both on-site students and remote students during synchronous teaching. Given synchronous blended learning is relatively new, there are only few studies that have inve...

Research presented at the 2019 AIESEP conference in New York, USA. The presentation showcases observational research on teaching behavior and student learning following a blended professional development workshop on the topic 'Basic Life Support'.

In today’s complex world, the acquisition of research skills is considered an important goal in (upper secondary) education. Consequently, there is a growing body of literature that recognises the value of well-designed (online) learning environments for effectively supporting the development of this complex set of skills. However, a clear consensu...

Based on current societal transitions and in the context of lifelong learning, both upper secondary education, higher education and vocational training are invited to think about how to enable people, at any stage of their life, to take part in stimulating learning experiences. The expectancy to be present at one core location is getting more and m...

Online courses are becoming ubiquitous and increasingly tend to use authentic learning tasks as the driving force for teaching and learning. Nevertheless, designing online courses that incorporate real– world tasks is more challenging as these problems require more cognitive processes (van Merriënboer Sluijsmans, 2009). This phenomenon can be expla...

Cognitive load theory is one of the most influential theoretical explanations of cognitive processing during learning. Despite its success, attempts to assess cognitive load during learning have proven difficult. Therefore, in the current study, students’ self-reported cognitive load after the problem- solving process has been combined with measure...

This exploratory study challenges the current practices in cognitive load measurement by using multichannel data to investigate cognitive load affordances during online complex problem solving. Moreover, it is an attempt to investigate how cognitive load is related to strategy use. Accordingly, in the current study a well- and an ill-structured pro...

It is increasingly relevant that online learning environments reflect the complexity of the real life and deal with authentic, complex tasks. Carrying out complex learning tasks requires students to actively engage in different problem-solving skills. Therefore, it is important that learning environments are designed in a way that complex learning...

According to (inter)national policy and curriculum documents, the acquisition of research skills is an important objective of secondary education. However, the conceptualization and hence the operationalization of this concept seems ambiguous. Furthermore, no test exists to assess students’ proficiency in (a broad range of) research skills in a 11t...

German pre-service teacher education aims to foster the concurrent formation of content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge. Accordingly, the coordination, sequencing, and prioritization of learning opportunities for the three areas of professional knowledge represent vital issues of the organization of teacher educa...

Equipping students with scientific reasoning skills (SRS) is an important mission of twenty-first-century education and part of the national curriculum in Flemish secondary schools. Therefore, we need to gain a better understanding of ways in which the development of these skills can be promoted. To date, empirical research on learning environments...

The transition from natural to rational numbers is difficult for most elementary school children. A major cause for these difficulties is assumed to be the “conceptual change” they need to undergo in order to see that several natural number properties do not apply to rational numbers. To appropriately handle pupils’ difficulties, teachers need well...

The study investigates the explicit and integrated presentation of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), pedagogical knowledge (PK), and content knowledge (CK) in teacher education. We compare learning environments to study whether only presenting PK and CK is sufficient for PCK development, whether only presenting PCK is sufficient for PK and CK de...

Integrated Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education is an emerging approach to improve students’ achievement and interest in STEM disciplines. However, the implementation of integrated STEM education depends strongly on teachers’ competence, which entails, among others, teachers’ attitudes. Nonetheless, not much is known ab...

Given the growing use of online learning environments in higher education, it is important to further unravel how students’ use is influenced by their perceptions towards these learning environments. This study includes the perceived quality of the instructional design based on the First Principles of Instruction of Merrill and students’ acceptance...

More and more universities invest in technology-enhanced learning which raises the question of how these environments need to be shaped. A specific type are synchronous hybrid learning environments in which face-to-face and remote students receive simultaneous and synchronous instruction. These new settings ask for a redefinition of the instruction...

The Need for STEM Professionals We are increasingly exposed to complex societal and technological problems. Qualified Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) professionals are needed to solve these problems and cope with contemporary demands such as sustainable energy and efficient healthcare [1]. It is not surprising then that the...

A promising approach to increase students’ motivation for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is integrated STEM education (iSTEM). This is an instructional approach that emphasizes the deeper connections between the STEM disciplines by involving students in design challenges centered around real-world problems. However, the su...

The shortage of graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), has led to numerous attempts to increase students’ interest in STEM. One emerging approach that has the potential to improve students’ motivation for STEM is integrated STEM education. Nonetheless, the implementation of this new instructional strategy is not strai...

This paper uses structural equation modelling (SEM) to examine the influence of teachers' attitudes and school context on reported instructional practices in integrated STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Instead of using an overall measure for integrated STEM, five specific characteristics (integration, problem-centered, inqui...

Research has revealed that the design of online learning environments can influence students’ use and performance. In this study, an online learning environment for learning French as a foreign language was developed in line with the four component instructional design (4C/ID) model. While the 4C/ID-model is a well-established instructional design...