Members

Calliste Scheibling-Sève

PhD

Courriel :  calliste.scheibling-seve(at)unige.ch

Scientific interests
Categorization Critical thinking Psychology of school learning Learning transfer Misconceptions Conceptual change Cognitive Flexibility

PRÉSENTATION

Her post-doctoral work focuses on the development of online courses (MOOC on Coursera, SPOC, Module UNITICE) in order to increase critical thinking skills in the context of massive diffusion of information on the Internet: knowing its cognitive biases, distinguishing correlation and causality, developing cognitive flexibility, adopting a scientific method are some of the targeted skills.
In addition, she designs a problem-solving program aimed at not reinforcing and going beyond the various misconceptions associated with mathematical operations. This program will be integrated into the educational application Adaptiv'Math (IA Innovation Partnership, French Education Ministery), based on an artificial intelligence algorithm (INRIA).

  

Her PhD research was at the intersection between fundamental and applied research in cognitive psychology. The aim is to operationalize the notion of critical thinking. To do so, Calliste analyzes the contribution of the polycategorization mechanism in the development of critical thinking in children. Polycategorization is the ability to classify the same object in different categories according to the situation, and to choose the most appropriate one, even if it is not the most intuitive. Her studies focus on developing a learning method (9 - 12 years old) around the reasoning of proportionality in mathematics and causality in science at primary school. In addition to teaching method, she seeks to identify criteria for evaluating critical thinking through an analysis of standardized tests.The experiment was carried out in an ecological environment, in classes of 4th and 5th grades, during 1 school year in different types of establishments (from priority education to privileged environment). The results showed that students in the experimental group developed their proportional and causal reasoning skills more expertly than students in the control group. Fourth graders in the experimental group even reached (for proportional reasoning) or exceeded (for causal reasoning) the level of fourth graders in the control group.