Practical: Cognition and Culture
Full course description
This practical gives students an opportunity to experience working in distributed multi-cultural teams. In their future career, students will probably encounter many opportunities to collaborate with co-workers online. By developing uncertainty management (i.e., knowledge on how insecurity and unfamiliarity can influence communication and interpersonal relations and how these can be influenced) and perspective taking skills, students may be better prepared for such types of work and thus enhance their employability.
A group assignment challenges students to identify and tackle an educational problem: how to design a teaching and learning activity that aligns with one of the so-called Inner Development Goals, which prioritize transformational skills for sustainable development. Finding a topic and co-creating a group product invites reflection on intercultural differences and collaboration in (virtual) teams. The assignment will result in a joint group product.
The final assessment for this course is pass or fail - and not a numerical grade between 0,0 and 10,0.
Course objectives
Students are able:
- to design an evidence-informed intervention for boosting a self-selected cognitive competency in a culturally different educational context;
- to collaborate online in culturally diverse groups and improve collaborative problem solving skills, like creating a shared understanding of a problem, taking appropriate action to complete an assignment, and establishing and maintaining team organization;
- to analyze intercultural differences in communication and cognition;
- to understand how challenges to virtual team work in culturally diverse groups can be overcome.