This text is part of the special Acfas awards
Suzanne P. Lajoie, professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University, owes a lot to the video games she discovered during her doctoral studies at Stanford, California.
“It was at the beginning of the 1980s and we met the very first gamers. But where some only saw very violent games, I saw the potential of computers as a tool to motivate learners, but also to study their learning trajectory, ”says the winner of the Acfas Jeanne-Lapointe prize for science of Education, which rewards a career at the intersection of psychology, education and computer technology.
After a doctoral thesis that demonstrated the potential of computer science to teach people with strong visual spatial intelligence, such as engineers, the researcher did like her playful friends: she went to the other level, to examine the link between cognition and emotions. Here again, computers allowed him to go beyond the verbal expression of the learner to collect data on his facial gestures and his physiological reactions (pulsations, sweating, breathing) in real time.
“When a person thinks, they are crossed with emotions, and even with a lot of emotions,” she explains. The relationship between the two is very complex, but it is critical. Even positive emotions can interfere with learning. “
If her two books on computers as a cognitive tool are authoritative and if her work is widely cited, it is also because Suzanne P. Lajoie has found practical applications for her work in fields as varied as medicine, avionics, history and mathematics.
Currently, her favorite subject is collaborative group learning. “What we call distributed cognition involves the social relationships in which emotions play out. This is critical in contexts where one intelligence is not enough, such as for a medical team. “
As her work has a direct impact on understanding early school leaving, she has directed several major international and national study projects in pedagogy.
“If a student drops out, it’s not just because he doesn’t have a fun. There is also the question of meaning. When we are “in control”, or when we value what we learn, we learn better. Emotions are in full swing, and computers help us track what is really going on in our heads during learning. “