Associate Professor in Educational Psychology, Department of Psychology and Pedagogy, Faculty of Education. Universitat de Lleida.

Honorary Research Fellow, Graduate School of Education. University of Exeter (U.K.).

Doctor in Psychopedagogy by the Universitat de Lleida (1999).

e-mail: pifarre@pip.udl.cat / M.Pifarre@exeter.ac.uk

View her publications


BIOGRAPHY

She began her research stage at the Department of Educational Psychology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She participated in different research projects about the incidence of computer mediation in the development of students’ learning strategies. She wrote her PhD about the incidence of educative use of spreadsheets in the development of problem-solving strategies. Her PhD was awarded by Educational Research and Documentation Centre (CIDE, Ministry of Education, Spain) in 2000.

Nowadays, she coordinates the COnTIC group. Her main interests of research are based on how Information and Communication Technologies may influence the development of cognitive, metacognitive and social processes. In this topic of study, she has led different research projects funded by Education Ministry (MEC, Spain).

She works in collaboration with other international research groups. She has been as an invited researcher at Centre for Language and Communication -CLAC- The Open University (United Kingdom) with Dr Neil Mercer’s research group (2004) and as honorary researcher at “Graduate School of Education”, University of Exeter (United Kingdom) working closely with the Educational Dialogue and New Technologies Research Group, led by Professor Rupert Wegerif (2009/2010). Currently, she is actively collaborating on research projects with Professor Wegerif.

"Students could learn meaningfully when they learn with computers, and not about or from computers. Technology should not be seen as an end itself, but a means to an end."