Together with Het Rijks vmbo and the University of Groningen, MemoryLab has recently embarked on a new EUR 300,000 co-creation project funded by NOLAI. The collaboration involves students in pre-vocational secondary education (vmbo).
The project focuses on two key areas: strengthening reading comprehension through a personalised skill graph and enhancing both general and subject-specific vocabulary mastery. These innovations will help students, particularly those with language challenges or language barriers, to better understand written instructions and engage more effectively in practical assignments.
For many vocational students, language barriers prevent them from fully demonstrating their practical skills. They may possess the relevant practical skills on which they are assessed, but cannot always demonstrate their abilities to the fullest, because they struggle to interpret text-based instructions correctly. At Het Rijks, this challenge is especially pronounced, as incoming students often struggle to meet target proficiency levels. By leveraging MemoryLab’s adaptive learning technology, the project will develop a system that identifies the specific words and concepts each student struggles with and tailors practice accordingly. Instead of working through static word lists, students will receive targeted, dynamic exercises that focus on their individual needs. Teachers will also receive real-time feedback on class-wide language proficiency, allowing for more effective instruction.
The co-creation project is structured into three phases. Firstly, we will use advanced modelling methods to map out the reading skills of each individual learner in a knowledge graph. This personalised approach will enable targeted practice of specific skills, such as being able to correctly parse co-referents in sentences, or understanding specific terms. Secondly, we aim to improve students’ mastery of general and domain-specific vocabulary, using MemoryLab’s adaptive learning system. Since this vocabulary set can involve hundreds or thousands of items, it requires developing a new adaptive algorithm and a new method of visualising a learner’s knowledge level. Together, these tools create insight into students’ strengths and weaknesses on specific language skills, and enable students to broaden their vocabulary in a personalised and effective way. Finally, the validation phase will include comparative research on learning outcomes and user experiences to assess the impact of these innovations.
Learn more about MemoryLab projects here.
