Assoc. Prof Sonja UGEN

Sonja is a research scientist at the and head of LUCET’s research portfolio focussing on diagnostic test development. Luxembourg Centre for Educational Testing (LUCET)  Coming from a background in developmental psychology and psycholinguistics, she acquired experience in (large-scale) standardised test development through her role in setting-up the national school monitoring programme (). Her main research interests englobe typical and atypical learning in and test development for multilingual contexts in the areas of reading, writing and mathematics. ÉpStan   More on LUCET’s diagnostic portfolio:  The diagnostic’s portfolio is in charge of developing specific tools allowing to screen for or diagnose (developmental) disorders in a linguistically heterogeneous school population. Currently only few diagnostic tools exist that are adapted to the multilingual school population in Luxembourg. Hence, the projects within this portfolio specialize in encompassing the linguistic diversity either by including various languages or specific language-independent tasks depending on the target area.  Major on-going projects:   Language- and culture fair diagnostic test batteries  Most existing cognitive test batteries or (neuro-psychological) diagnostic tools are language-based and thus language proficiency in the test language may have an influence on the test outcome. This is esp. true for the assessment of scholastic skills (i.e. reading/writing, mathematics). The LUCET is therefore developing new test batteries adapted to the multilingual and multicultural school population in Luxembourg in three crucial developmental domains for learning: cognition, mathematics and reading/writing. This project is a collaboration between the LUCET and the (CDA) responsible to diagnose specific learning/attentional disorders and provide appropriate support. Centre pour le Développement des Apprentissages   Screener for functional vision impairments  Functional vision impairments, i.e., limitations on the use of binocular vision in day to day tasks can often go undetected. Undetected difficulties of the functional vision are likely to have a negative impact on children’s learning progress at school. It is thus crucial to assess children’s visual perception at an early stage to provide the appropriate support. The aim of this project is to develop a large-scale screener for functional vision at the beginning of children’s formal schooling (in grade 1). This project is a collaboration between the LUCET and the Centre pour le (CDV) responsible to diagnose visual impairments and provide appropriate support. Développement pour les Compétences Relatives à la Vue