Researchers

Dr. Jesus M. Alvarado
Faculty of Psychology
Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Professor, accredited as full professor, in the Department of Psychobiology and Methodology in Behavioral Sciences at UCM. Director (PI) of the research group “Cognitive Psychology: Measurement and Modeling of processes”, UCM group validated and with positive external evaluation. Coordinator of the practicum of the interuniversity Master’s degree of Methodology of Behavioral and Health Sciences (UCM, UAM and UNED) (ranked as 2^nd in the group psychology category of the world publication on the 250 best official Master’s degrees). He was part of the coordination commission in which the Master and its Doctorate were implemented, being the coordinator during its first seven years.

He has positive ANECA (National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation) evaluations of his research activity (4 six-year terms, the last completed in 2019) and has more than a hundred publications, 65 of them indexed in the JCR. H index = 19 (Google Scholar/WoS). Total citations: 2,118 (1,432 since 2017). He has published in outstanding journals of his research area like, for example: Multivariate Behavioral Research (JCR Q1) or Sociological Methods and Research (JCR Q1, first in its JCR category)

He has been PI or member of the research teams of eight national or regional competitive projects (see “Research projects” section), and external advisor in four international projects. In terms of transfer, he formalized seven contracts with companies in relation to the construction of psychometric instruments. He has directed/co-directed 18 doctoral theses with publications in high-impact journals of the JCR.  Doctoral theses aimed at both national and international students, whose studies have been financed to carry out their studies under my supervision, specifically different professors and researchers from Chilean, Argentine, Peruvian, Colombian universities and researchers in training from French research centers.

Since 2019 he is editor of Revista Iberoamericana de Diagnóstico y Evaluación – e Avaliação Psicológica, a journal indexed in WoS, from the Asociación Iberoamericana de Diagnóstico y Evaluación Psicológica (AIDEP-AIDAP).

Research Group: https://memopro.weebly.com/

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NwryADMAAAAJ&hl=es

Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jesus-Alvarado

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4780-0147

WoS Researcher ID: K-7296-2017
SCOPUS Author ID: 7006238112

Magister. Issac Augusto Caicedo Vera
Doctoral candidate in Doctorate in Education, Universidad Católica de Córdoba (ARG).

I began my academic formation at the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja, where I obtained a degree in Computer Engineering with the thesis entitled: “Virtual education in Ecuador: Analysis of the uses of technology in students of the Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral”, then I studied in the Master in Management and Human Resources Management at the Universitat de Barcelona, developing and implementing the Project: “HR Management Plan of the Colegio Santo Domingo de Guzmán” of Guayaquil.

After working at the Santo Domingo de Guzmán School in the city of Guayaquil (Ecuador) for more than 23 years, I felt the need to make a change in my professional training, and I began to study education, which is why I obtained the degree of Master in Education, mention in Teaching and Learning Processes from the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Thesis presented: “The use of portfolio as a performance evaluation tool in the discipline of mathematics in the framework of a skills-based model at the high school level”, my thesis work initiated a professional inclination and a new passion towards evaluation and self-assessment.

Subsequently, I decided to deepen my professional training and took a series of diploma courses such as Diploma in Management of Educational Organizations awarded by the Catholic University of Santiago de Guayaquil, Diploma in Quality and Educational Leadership and Diploma in Planning, design and management of digital platforms for education awarded by the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja.

Additionally, at the academic level I have served as director of Degree and Thesis projects, jury and member of Graduate Degree Tribunals.   Invited evaluator of the PODIUM Magazine of the Universidad de Especialidades Espíritu Santo.  Invited evaluator of NOVUS Educational Innovation Proposals of the Institute for the Future of Education of the Tecnológico de Monterrey.  Invited evaluator of the journal Sapientia Technological of the Instituto Superior Tecnológico Almirante Illingworth.

I have published some papers related to evaluation, metacognition, self-regulation and participated in congresses such as COMIE in Mexico, Universidad Sergio Arboleda in Bogota, Universidad Tecnologica ECOTEC, Tecnologico Universitario ARGOS and Universidad de Especialidades Espiritu Santo (UEES).

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/citations?hl=es&user=0V3Tt30AAAAJ

Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Isaac-Caicedo-Vera

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5624-5216

María Florencia Giuliani

Department of Scientific Education, Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences – Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina

Institute of Basic, Applied and Technology Psychology – IPSIBAT – UNMDP-CONICET

I am very curious, it is difficult for something not to interest me. However, it is also difficult for me to be interested in something for a long time. Literature and psychology are the two paths that lead me to the only question that never bored me: How do we become who we are? The learning comes back again and again in response to this question.

I studied Psychology at the National University of Mar del Plata (UNMdP) after a brief stint in Literature. I participated in research groups on the history of psychology and positive psychology in adolescents before dedicating myself to the psychology of aging, specifically emotional regulation in central ties during adulthood. I did my doctoral thesis on this topic. From this step I take that one learns throughout life and about the most intimate and complex issues of human experience, with reflection and metacognition as key tools.

At the same time, for some time now, I have been a teacher and researcher in the Department of Science Education of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the UNMdP. There I teach and do research on Educational Psychology, I am interested in addressing the development of socio-emotional skills in science teachers. I believe that this aspect is central to understanding why and how learning and human development work in the classroom.

I always look for something new in what I do. That search and the generosity of my colleagues and professors have brought me to this team, where I hope to collaborate intensely!

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=Uke4VzIAAAAJ&hl=es

Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maria-Giuliani

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5624-5216

Dra. María Alexandra Ulate E.
Ministry of Public Education
Universidad de Costa Rica

My childhood involved being reared in an educational environment in which every day there was the joy of awakening to knowledge, discovering and being amazed at how much is known and imagined. This educational experience evoked a desire to dedicate my life to working so that boys and girls had the same possibility in their development. I decided to be an educator and I acquired an undergraduate degree in educational sciences with an emphasis on Basic General Education. Subsequently, I decided to continue my training, achieving a master’s degree in educational administration and a doctorate in education from the Universidad de Costa Rica.

In response to global demands on the urgency of developing life skills in new generations, I directed my doctoral research to knowledge about “Pedagogical mediation that promotes the development of metacognitive executive functions in the reading and writing process employed by high school students: Cycle II of the Costa Rican educational system”. This research was approached from a descriptive approach that used a methodological design that integrates quantitative techniques such as descriptive analysis, psychometric studies, correlational analysis, and multiple linear regression models. The results served as support so that the decision makers on the Educational and Curricular Policy of Costa Rica (CR) would assess the importance of the ability to learn how to learn or metacognition and important decisions would be made about the training and development that the teacher requires to promote transformative pedagogical mediation that develops life skills and knowledge, a process that marked the path to start the advisory work in the country’s regions and that demands continuity and more support.

My career has alternated between teaching work in public service with children and adolescents and in academic development as a researcher and university professor.

I have been an official in the Ministry of Public Education (MPE) for more than 27 years, serving as an educator in the classroom, in areas of high social and economic vulnerability and in rural and urban areas that allowed me to appreciate the importance of equity and inclusion. I served as advisor to the Vice Ministry of Institutional Planning and Regional Coordination of the MPE, supporting the work as National Coordinator of the Institutional Strategy. I collaborated with education and the PROEDUCA project, supported by the European Union and as National Coordinator of the Unit for Permanence, Reincorporation, and Educational Success (UPRE). The strategy developed and the work of a committed country has managed to reduce the percentages of educational exclusion to historical figures, going from 13.5% of educational exclusion in secondary school in 2014 to 2.5% in 2022 .

I was entrusted with the challenge of bringing to the regions and teachers the curricular transformation approved in CR by the Higher Education Council, as Director of Curriculum Development and later as Academic Vice Minister of the MPE. In these last two positions, the work demands a high degree of commitment and proactivity as it develops in the period in which the world faced the COVID 19 pandemic, a situation that generated unprecedented scenarios for the world’s educational systems, and CR was not the exception. In the last 4 years I have led the process of distance education and hybrid education (distance and face-to-face scenarios) in my country, creating together with my work team the necessary pedagogical orientations, technological learning platforms, and learning evaluation, the virtual and hybrid teacher training, and many didactic resources. In addition to the planning and presentation of the Comprehensive Academic Leveling Plan 2022-2025, throughout this period we worked with the great inequality gaps that mark the social areas of economy and culture of our families as a threat, and that the country went through a process of economic crisis because of the pandemic. The efforts were many, but the challenge of academic leveling continues to be great.

In the area of higher education I have worked for more than 15 years, as a professor at the College of Education of the Universidad de Costa Rica at the Rodrigo Facio campus in the Latin American Doctorate in Education, in the Department of University Teaching (DEDUN) of the School of Teacher Training, at the Western headquarters of the Universidad de Costa Rica as a teacher of various courses and at the State University at a distance, in educational extension programs.

My work in the civil service and university have enabled me to be a national and international speaker on topics such as metacognition, curriculum, transferable skills, the process of building a psychometric instrument for measuring metacognitive skills in writing texts, and the focus of the processes for teaching reading and writing in the Costa Rican curriculum. In addition to highly important issues, analyzing how to improve the curriculum in secondary education to improve quality and student retention and, more recently, how to face educational processes in a context of the COVID 19 pandemic.

As part of the research processes in which I have participated, it was possible to publish, with the support of the EOS editorial, a psychometric instrument for metacognitive awareness in writing known as EVAPROMES, an instrument validated in CR and Spain, in which I worked with the research team made up of Dr. Puente, Dr. Rodríguez and Dr. Alvarado, in addition to some articles entitled: “EVAPROMES, a scale to assess metacognitive processes in writing”, “Metacognitive skills in writing texts: Construction of a psychometric instrument”.

In recent years I have been interested in researching the classroom climate because it was one of the variables of my doctoral research that reported practical importance and statistical significance. The student body that shows high scores on the class climate scale achieves higher scores on psychometric tests of metacognition in reading and writing. To expand on this topic, I was part of the MEP – BID group investigating the “school climate and class climate in Costa Rican classrooms and their relationship with permanence and academic performance.” Some publications resulting from this work are:

A cross-cultural study of the validity of a battery of questionnaires for school climate quality. Educational Psychology Magazine 2020.

“Classroom climate: Nature, measurement, effects, and implications for social education. A cross-cultural study”. Annals of Psychology Magazine 2019.

I currently carry out my work in two research lines: from the MEP, the support for students from my country to remain, rejoin, and have educational success, and at the Universidad de Costa Rica with the project “Multicultural intervention in metacognitive monitoring through strategies of learning for students from different Spanish-speaking countries” that receives the support of the UCREA University Space for Advanced Studies.

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=yPdBYygAAAAJ&hl=es

Klency González Hernández
Basic Training Department
Universidad de la Habana, Cuba

I am Full Professor (2028) and Full Researcher (2021) in the Department of Basic Education at the University of Havana, Cuba.  I have been working at that University since 2002 and I am currently Vice-Dean of Graduate Studies, Research and International Relations of the Faculty of Psychology, as well as coordinator of the Master’s Program in Educational Psychology. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses such as Cognitive Processes, Reading Comprehension Intervention, Educational Neurosciences and Psychological Assessment and Intervention in Education. I am head of the research line “Neuropsychology and Neurosciences”. I am currently directing a research project belonging to the National Neurosciences and Neurotechnologies Program (PNCTI-NN), in which I am also an expert. On the Cuban side, I coordinate an international collaboration project with the University of Almeria, Spain.

In my undergraduate training I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology (2002) from the University of Havana, with postgraduate degrees in Attentional Networks and Neurocognitive Evaluation from the Center for Neurosciences of Cuba, and in scientific texts and academic writing from the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. I have a Master’s degree in Educational Psychology (2008) with a research on reading comprehension intervention in Cuban university students. I have a PhD in Psychological Sciences (2017) from the University of Havana, with a research on Intervention in reading comprehension in Cuban schoolchildren, where two comprehension assessment instruments were validated in the Cuban context and two programs of strategies for 6th grade children were applied.

I have developed research projects and tutored bachelor’s, master’s and currently doctoral theses on topics such as assessment and intervention of cognitive processes, reading fluency and comprehension, learning strategies, executive functions, digital tools to improve learning, numerical processing, mild cognitive impairment, among others. I have done research and scientific and academic exchange stays in universities in Spain (University of Granada and University of Almeria), Germany (University of Munster), Mexico (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla, Universidad Iberoamericana), Costa Rica (University of Costa Rica), Panama (University of Panama) and Ecuador (University of Cuenca). I have participated in more than 50 international events in Cuba, Mexico, United States, Panama, Spain, Germany and Ecuador, in the last 10 years.

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com.mx/citations?hl=es&user=Mv-gNQ0AAAAJ&

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8927-6825

Consuelo A. Bojorquez Falla
Universidad Del Valle De Guatemala

Since I was a child, my family highlight my skills to teaching and this guided me to study for been a Bilingual Spanish-English Pre-School Teacher, then I continue studying at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (UVG) a technical specialization in Learning Problems and later Psychology, in both careers I obtained a scholarship from the university Foundation. I was impressed and fascinated by everything related to psychological evaluation, which is the reason I searched for opportunities and received a scholarship from the Carolina Foundation to study the master’s degree in Evaluation and Measurement of Human Behavior at the Rovira i Virgili University in Spain. For my Master’s graduation project, I chose to research about Executive Functions and since then it is the topic that has guided my interest to learn more, and was the reason I started the Master’s program in Clinical Neuropsychology in the UVG, to investigate the functioning of the brain and its impact on executive behavior, the research project was “Rehabilitation of Executive Functions in patients with Acquired Brain Injury”.

Due to my academic training and career as a university teacher, I obtained a scholarship to the PhD in Psychology program with a double degree at the Universidad Internacional Iberoamericana de México and Universidad San Carlos de Guatemala, following the Neuropsychology as a line of research. Right now, I am currently developing my research related to Inhibition, Metacognition and Academic Performance in university students with High Intellectual Abilities.

Before joining the International Metacognition Group I had the opportunity to collaborate, thanks to my mentor Dr. Claudia García de la Cadena, in the Symposium on Executive Functions and Cognition with the topic “Cognitive flexibility, high abilities and metacognitive judgments in university students: pilot study”; as well as in the Metacognition Monograph with the article “High intellectual capacities and metacognition in adults”, both projects carried out together with Dr. García de la Cadena. My motivation to investigate, explore and evaluate has led me to carry out research projects that I have presented at both national and international conferences.

I started working as a pre-school teacher, then as a school counselor, having the opportunity to be part of the Board of Directors of the Association of School Counselors of Guatemala for 7 years. Upon graduating as a Psychologist, I began carry out psychoeducational evaluations and interventions since 2010, nowadays I do Neuropsychological evaluations throughout the life cycle.

At the end of 2012 I was invited to be a teacher at the UVG in the Psychology program and since then I have taught courses about Psychological Assessment and other related to Neurosciences. Throughout these years I have also collaborated as a professor at others private universities in Guatemala teaching courses in Neuropsychology, Neuropsychological Assessment and Executive Functions.

Definitely this journey was blessed by God and supported by my husband, family, friends and colleagues who have encouraged me to be a better professional every day. In 2024 I will begin directing research projects at the Neuroscience Laboratory at Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, which fills me with excitement, motivation and commitment to contribute to the growth of Neuropsychology in my country.

Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Consuelo-Bojorquez

ORCID: https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0009-0002-1476-4135