Applicant: Ambra Brizi (Psychology)

In the Organisational Management course, students work in groups to solve an organisational problem using the provided literature. Brizi will develop a chatbot that generates an answer to the same organisational problem based on the same literature. Students will then compare the chatbot's solution with their own and reflect on the differences. This approach will enhance students' awareness of how AI can be used, as well as its limitations.

Applicants: Marit Guda, Kim Stroet & Tirza Smits (Education and Child Studies)

Students are increasingly asked to work in groups on assignments. This requires skills that not all students have mastered. To support students in this, Guda, Stroet and Smits have developed and piloted an online collaboration tool, in which students are asked during the collaboration how the collaboration is going and to reflect on it. With the help of the Grassroots, they want to conduct further literature research and focus groups to further develop the tool and make it more widely applicable within the institute and beyond.

Applicant: Sander Hölsgens (Cultural Antropology and Development Sociology)

Hölsgens observed that several of his students find it challenging to connect social theory with experiences from their everyday lives. He also sees a growing need for professional development at an earlier stage of their studies. With Grassroots, he aims to create a more explicit link between theory and practice, using podcasts in which guest speakers share how they apply specific theories in their practice. These podcasts coincide with formative assignments, in which learning objectives (and adjacent cross-curricular skills) are explicitly discussed and provided with feedback.

Applicants: Joram van Ketel, Jacqueline Zadelaar, Bunga Pratiwi & Juan Claramunt Gonzalez (Psychology)

The teachers of the Psychometrics course want to redesign their practicals to give students a deeper understanding and more independent skill in working with R as static software. They want to develop and implement a work format in which students are challenged to learn more independently, compared to a work format in which the teacher demonstrates more and gives more guidance.

Applicants: Joanne Mouthaan, Anna Hudson & Maartje Schoorl (Psychology)

In their course Clinical Interviewing and Assessment, Mouthaan, Hudson and Schoorl want to test whether they can use an AI Chatbot to assess students' suicide prevention skills before and after taking the e-learning Suicide Prevention for Psychologists in Training. This will not only allow the lecturers to monitor the effectiveness of the e-learning, it will also allow them to objectively assess students' skills and enable students to practice these skills more efficiently and safely.

Applicants: Laura Nawijn, Anne van Giezen & Joanne Mouthaan (Psychology)

Within the Department of Clinical Psychology, 150 thesis students are supervised every year. Since 2024, this supervision has been done through GroupWise Thesis Supervision. With the Grassroots grant, Nawijn, Van Giezen and Mouthaan want to improve GroupWise thesis supervision by developing an e-learning in Brightspace. This will allow students to consult information and exercises independently at the right moment in their thesis process (self-paced learning), including in case of possible delays. Here, there is a strong focus on innovative self-assessment modules in e-learning, to strengthen students' self-regulatory capacity and sense of ownership. In addition, moving general information and exercises to the e-learning, creates more space for substantive guidance from the individual thesis supervisors.

Applicant: Franz Wurm (Psychology)

In the course Innovations in Clinical Neuropsychology, students are asked to identify a gap in the market and develop a tool for it. This requires specific knowledge and skills that fall outside the standard academic curriculum. To support students in this, Wurm plans to integrate an Entrepreneurial Skills workshop into his course in this Grassroots in collaboration with colleagues from startup support at PLNT.

Applicants: Rachel Plak & Karlijn Pieterse (Education and Child Studies)

In the master's specialisation course Autism Diagnostics and Treatment, students currently answer a practice-oriented question about autism in the form of a scientific paper. While this traditional form of work is valuable for developing writing skills, it does not align as well with students' need for more practice-oriented assignments that match the skills they need in their future profession. In addition, grading these papers imposes a considerable workload on lecturers.

To design the final assignment more efficiently and to meet students' needs, Plak and Pieterse will develop a new final assignment in the form of a vodcast of a (multi)disciplinary consultation, a form of consultation frequently used in practice. In this new assignment, students work from the perspective of a professional and thus put what they have learned into practice, basing their opinions on scientific knowledge. For lecturers, this form of assignment means that they can use a rubric to carry out assessments more quickly and efficiently.

Applicants: Kelly Ziemer (Psychology)

This Grass Shoots is a continuation of the project Ziemer started last year in her Grassroots. With this continuation she wants to deepen the students’ understanding of the need for self-care as a professional and learn more strategies for self-care and well-being. She aims to achieve these goals by letting them learn from professionals through a series of podcasts and by attending a live panel where experts will discuss their lived experience with caring for themselves as they care for others. The guests for the podcasts and the panel will be drawn from Ziemer’s faculty and non-faculty network of clinicians and experts.