Project: Implicit personality and work behavior

Principal Investigator: Assistant Prof. Zvonimir Galić, PhD

Project: Integration processes of majority and minority in ethnically mixed communities: The role of interethnic contact, perceived threat and social norms (IntegraNorm)

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dinka Čorkalo Biruški, PhD

Project: Determinants of individual differences and intraindividual changes in emotional ability measures and similar personality attribute measures

Principal Investigator: Prof. Vesna Buško, PhD

Project: Determinants of students' engagement in learning mathematics and science

Principal Investigator: Prof. Vesna Vlahović-Štetić, PhD

Summary: The aim of this project is to examine the role of students' engagement in the process of learning math and science and to determine which characteristics and beliefs contribute to students' engagement. Engagement is defined as a complex construct that consists of behavioral, emotional and cognitive dimension (Fredericks et al., 2004). We will examine how relevant characteristics (personality traits, regulatory styles, achievement goals and epistemic beliefs) are associated with different forms of students’ engagement. We will also examine how engagement is related with the use of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies. Studies will be conducted at the level of students’ approach to particular subject, as well as at the specific level of students’ approach to solving individual problems.

Projekt: Writing a text – computerized training of children with dyslexia in Sweden and Croatia

Main project coordinator: Psykologiska Institutionen – Göteborgs Universitet, Sverige
Partner in Coratia: Department of psychology, Faculty of humanities and social sciences, University of Zagreb

Principal Investigators: prof. dr. sc. Tomas Tjus i prof. dr. sc. Erland Hjelmquist
Principal Investigators for Croatia: Prof. Gordana Keresteš, PhD & Assistant Prof. Irma Brković, PhD

Financial support: Sten A. Olssons Stiftelse för Vetenskap och Kultur (project number 1051-13)

Summary: Interventions aimed at facilitating reading and writing skills in dyslexic children are mostly focused on phonological or bottom-up training. However, some children do not improve as expected from a strict bottom-up strategy. Therefore, the intervention that will be carried out in this project is instead based on orthographic or top-down training with sentence writing and reading comprehension as the primary goal. Top-down training is based on theorizing and research findings indicating that reading disability is caused not only by deficits in phonological processing, but also in other linguistic and cognitive processes such as orthographic decoding and semantic processing. In this project we are interested in investigating whether poor readers speaking and reading two very different languages according to grapheme-phoneme correspondence and syntactic and orthographic structure will benefit from using a computer based orthographic/semantic training strategy. In addition to its possible benefits for children with reading and writing problems, the project will enable to test a theoretical model designed to explain reading and writing acquisition in different languages (Siegel & Smythe 2005). The aim of the project is to examine the effects of a computerized training program targeted at the word and sentence levels of written language, i.e. top-down processing on reading and writing skills of children who are poor readers in two different languages, Croatian and Swedish. The project will be carried out in several phases during the school years 2014/15 and 2015/16. In the first phase, screening encompassing about 600 second and third grade pupils in each country will be performed. A simple but reliable and valid screening procedure using a single word recognition task, a reading comprehension task and a spelling task will be applied. Approximately 10% of children with the lowest screening results (40 to 60 children in each country) will be selected to participate in the second phase of the project, in which a six-week training intervention will be provided. Each child will receive 24 individual training sessions, based on using Omega-Interactive Sentences (Omega-IS) computer program. Training will take place in children’s regular school settings with the assistance of educational specialists. Poor readers will be randomly divided into two groups, Group A and Group B, with a cross-over design with switching replications. Group A will receive the training intervention first, with Group B as comparison group. When training is completed with Group A, Group B will receive the training and Group A will be the comparison group. To measure the effects of intervention, a comprehensive test battery will be administered for all participants at four different occasions – at start of treatment for Group A, at end of treatment for Group A/start of treatment for Group B, at end of treatment for Group B, and 6 months after the treatment for each group. The project will offer unique possibilities to learn more about how to adapt interventions to reading disabled children’s varying needs in two languages with different syntactic structures and depth of orthographic structures.

Project: Development of a new model of communication in close relation conflicts

Principal Investigator: Tina Krznarić

Project: Reading and writing skills development in early school age

Principal Investigator: Assistant Prof. Irma Brković, PhD

Project: The role of autobiographical memory as a funcion of age

Principal Investigator: Assistant Prof. Andrea Vranić, PhD