Shared control over task selection Helping students to select their own learning tasks

A mis padres A mis hermanos A Marco 6 | | 7 Acknowledgements 'Things can change', is what my family and friends in Barcelona must have thought when I first came to the Netherlands as an Erasmus student in 2000 for a 4-months period and stayed a year longer following a master's program at the University of Twente. Things changed even more when in December 2003 I returned to the rainy Netherlands and became a PhD student at OTEC. I would never have been able to finish my dissertation without the help, support, guidance, and efforts of my supervisors Jeroen van Merriënboer and Liesbeth Kester. I thank them for their generous time and commitment whenever it was needed and for keeping their doors and inboxes always opened for me. Jeroen, thank you for the inspiring discussions, for guiding and teaching me throughout this research project, and for providing me with an excellent atmosphere for doing research. Liesbeth, thank you for your inspiring ideas, enthusiasm, and continuous support, (sometimes beyond your obligations, I will never forget our trip to Bakel!). Also thanks for all the laughter about daily issues. Het was gezellig!. It has been a true pleasure to work with both of you. Also, thank you for not sharing my worries about the planning and fully trusting that the 'end' will come to a 'good end'. I am also very grateful for having an exceptional assessment committee. Special thanks to Fred Paas for the continuous opportunities during the last months. I would also like to thank Ingrid, Audrey, Nicole, and Mieke, for their great support and assistance while completing my dissertation. I am also thankful to the coordinators and teachers who made the difficult task of finding participants for my experiments possible: Irma Rabelink (ROC Eindhoven), Joep Gulikers, Hans Collijn, Marinus Thoonsen, and Marlene Smeets (Arcus College Heerlen). Thanks to Monito, especially Bas Jansen, for the programming of all the learning environments for my experiments and the hundreds of emails we exchanged. Also thanks to Hub Kurvers and Wim Slot for their technical assistance, and to Hanneke Kester, Lily Fredrix, Joop de Kraker, and Daniel Burgos for the content-expert advice for the experiments. Thanks to the group of PhD students for the 'gezellige' atmosphere during the last years, research discussions, social events, making the conference trips worth double, improving my Dutch, and assisting me during my experiments: sharing many personal …