Simone Volet

Biography

Simone Volet is Professor of Educational Psychology in the School of Education at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. She has been engaged in research on learning, motivation and cultural issues in higher education since the early 1990s and has been the Chief Investigator of many major projects funded by the Australian Research Council (Discovery, Linkage, and Large grants schemes) and the Australian National Training Authority. Most of her research is collaborative in nature, some projects with well known scholars in Finland, US and Germany, and others with Australian peers, postdoctoral fellows, and colleagues from other disciplines, including social psychology, sociology, information technology, computer science and veterinary sciences. Simone has extensive experience of supervising doctoral students and mentoring junior researchers locally and internationally, with a number of invitations to contribute to summer schools for junior researchers in Europe. A number of her doctoral students have completed their thesis by publication, under an apprenticeship model that involves joint publications, and guidance into the multi-faceted aspects of research and academic publishing. Simone also has an on-going funded Visiting Professorship at the University of Turku in Finland since 2011, which includes extended visits every year for intensive collaborative work. She was born and educated in Switzerland, completed a Licence ès sciences de l’éducation at the University of Geneva and a PhD at Murdoch University. Simone was Dean of the School of Education from 2000 to 2003.

Research Interest

Cognitive, motivational, emotional and social aspects of learning at university Metacognitive, process-oriented pedagogical practices that foster the development of conceptual understanding and the integration of theory and practice, Self and social regulatory processes in productive learning with and from peers in academic, professional and clinical learning settings, Cultural transitions, two-way sociocultural adaptation and transformation by teachers and learners in culturally diverse environments, opportunities for enriched curricula and for the development of reciprocal understanding and intercultural identities, Internationalisation of higher education, social cohesion, and the significance of individual and contextual dimensions in students’ productive engagement in intercultural interactions and culturally mixed groups