Small Grant Scheme of the GPP

As of the year 2022, the GPP offered a Small Grant Scheme, an opportunity for the participating doctoral researchers to apply for financial support of

  1. small research projects that they wanted to conduct in the framework of the GPP, or of
  2. research visits in other (national or international) institutions.

The aim of the Small Grant Scheme was to foster the development of the skills necessary to independently plan a research activity and to convince a scientific audience of its merit. Therefore, the scheme did not support activities that are integral parts of the doctoral researchers' genuine PhD projects, but did support additional research activities by one or more doctoral researchers that were planned relatively independently from their PhD supervisors.

Please find below the past calls for proposals:

Recipients of the Small Grant Scheme

Julia Meßmer

Within the first call for proposals of the GPP's Small Grant Scheme, the doctoral researcher Julia Meßmer from the Experimental Neuropsychology Unit was the successful applicant.

"Thank you very much for this opportunity! I am very pleased to have the chance to realize my project about schema-based learning and consolidation of novel meaningful associations. Schema-based learning of associations has become of interest for neuroscience recently. The reason for this is that it seems to rely less on the hippocampus, thus challenging the traditional view of associative memory. In my project, I would like to test this hypothesis by investigating if schema-based associative learning benefits less from consolidation during sleep, a process which is thought to rely on the hippocampus."

 

Kristin Altmeyer

Within the third call for proposals of the GPP's Small Grant Scheme, the doctoral researcher Kristin Altmeyer from the Department of Education was a successful applicant. 

“I am profoundly grateful for the GPP supporting my research visit at the MINT-Learning Center at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. The MINT-Learning Center aims to enhance MINT (mathematics, informatics, natural sciences, and technics) education at schools based on current empirical research on effective learning and instruction. Throughout my visit, I had the privilege to learn from and network with interdisciplinary experts in the field of cognitively activating learning methods. I investigated a technology-enhanced physics learning environment in a Swiss school and could expand my theoretical and methodological scientific knowledge. All in all, the visit shaped my research identity as an educational psychologist, fostering both personal and professional growth.”

 

Ann-Sophie Grub & Tom Selisko

Within the second call for proposals of the GPP's Small Grant Scheme, the doctoral researchers Ann-Sophie Grub and Tom Selisko were the successful applicants.

"We would like to thank you for the opportunity to set up a joint, cross-department research project that combines our main PhD research areas and can thus deliver synergetic research results. Competent teacher action and thus dealing with heterogeneous students as well as inclusive teaching aspects are a challenge in every teacher's life. Therefore, the aim of this study is to shed light on the professional vision of prospective teachers with regard to inclusive aspects and to uncover a possible interaction between gaze behavior and the attitudinal characteristics beliefs and knowledge about inclusion.

With the help of GPP funding, we therefore aim to investigate prospective teachers' professional perceptions of inclusive aspects of teaching using a quasi-experimental mixed methods experiment. To this end, both eye-tracking data and post hoc think-aloud verbalizations will be combined to examine perceptions of inclusive aspects of teaching (i.e., differentiated instruction) at both the perceptual and reasoning levels."

 

Marcel Weber

Within the fifth call for proposals of the GPP's Small Grant Scheme, the doctoral researcher Marcel Weber from the Department of Social Psychology was a successful applicant. 

“I am extremely grateful to the GPP for supporting my research visit to York University in Toronto, Canada. I had the privilege of working with Dr. Amy Muise and Dr. Emily Impett who are two of the most influential researchers in the social psychological study of interpersonal relationships and sexuality. During my stay, we collaborated on a project exploring how discrepancies between partners' perceived and actual sexual desire relate to both sexual and relationship satisfaction. This experience also allowed me to deepen my understanding of dyadic response surface analysis (DRSA) as a valuable method for analyzing the dyadic data structures common in relationship science. Overall, the research visit provided an invaluable opportunity for advancing my methodological expertise and building professional connections. This experience has inspired new insights and perspectives that will broaden both my personal and academic horizons.”