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Creativity is often connected to imagination; it is the ability to produce original or unusual ideas and to make something new or imaginative (Cambridge University Press, n.d.). The term tends to be linked to artistic practices such as painting, composing music, or writing poetry. But what if the act of being creative is more than an artistic one? In this post, I will argue that creativity is a multifaceted practice that goes hand in hand with learning and the development of critical thinking skills, adaptive behaviour, and exploration.
In education and other learning environments, creativity is often linked to the ability of a learner to problem-solve and approach tasks and projects with flexibility, originality, and novelty. It includes a wide variety of categories such as the making of products, expression of creative traits, and engagement in creative thinking, behavior and accomplishment (Kaufman, Plucker, & Baer, 2008). An example of creative expression in an academic context may involve a student developing or sharing a unique method to approach a math problem, or the implementation of a solution to a social problem at school by a group of students (Beghetto et al., 2021). Creativity can also be endorsed in other learning domains, such as language. For instance, by encouraging expression through writing in the form of letters, poetry, comics, and more, students can learn to reflect, express themselves, and take perspective. Likewise, structured reading activities can foster idea generation and exploration (Marcos et al., 2020). These practices have been shown to positively impact learning, improving academic achievement (Gajda, Karwowski & Beghetto, 2017, Karwowski et al., 2020).
Beyond providing a platform for personal expression and academic achievement, creative thinking and behavior are associated with two very important yet overlooked elements: risk and failure. While these may sound negative at first, they are, in fact, crucial elements to the success of learning. Allowing for an environment in which students can explore their ideas, think outside of the box, and approach problems from new perspectives involves creative risk. This is a form of positive risk-taking that allows students to explore their environment using their creativity, thereby expanding their boundaries, and testing their strengths and limitations. Positive risks such as creative exploration can result in productive failures: setbacks that enhance learning and create opportunities for improvement (Henriksen et al., 2021). Productive failures are integral to the learning process, given that learning often involves multiple rounds of thinking, re-thinking, reworking, and adjusting. Giving space to creative risks allows students to learn that failures provide new insight that can be used in future endeavors. This can greatly increase students’ ability to learn from mistakes and challenges, ultimately allowing them to become resilient, adaptive learners.
Increasing creative practices in the school setting is thus relevant on multiple levels: it creates a platform for personal development, familiarizes students with positive risks and productive failures that foster learning, and enhances deep, critical thinking and acting. To foster creativity in students, schools can begin by establishing a supportive environment where students feel safe to make and learn from mistakes. This can be done by establishing an atmosphere that focuses on the learning process rather than the product, integrates multidisciplinary approaches, and allows students to express ideas. For instance, teachers can apply guided inquiry as a teaching strategy, in which students get the possibility to explore ideas, discuss, and articulate their thoughts. These autonomy-encouraging activities can, in turn, support the development of student’s growth mindset, in which they view ability as adjustable and in their own control (Yu, Kreijkes & Salmela-Aro, 2022). Another way of fostering creativity is by using theater exercises in history lessons, or by connecting natural sciences to the humanities. Likewise, collaboration and cooperation in projects may enhance the exchange of ideas, providing students the ability to see the power of teamwork and fostering inclusivity and perspective-taking. Most importantly, we can begin by recognizing the power of creativity in learning. Creativity is an integral part of development and a catalyst for positive risk that can ultimately help us grow and navigate an ever-changing, complex world. We could start actively endorsing our own creative side, value the creative practice around us, and allow for this exploratory behavior and cognition in our learning environments. If we decide to embrace the creativity inside of us all, it may not only nurture our potential but also equip us to handle the challenges in our daily lives with ingenuity and resilience.
Originally published at: https://www.gutsproject.com/the-power-of-creativity-in-learning/
On Friday 22nd of March, Merel van Vroonhoven delivered the 2024 Kohnstamm Lecture, a collaborative initiative between the Kohnstamm Institute, the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, Universiteit van Amsterdam, and Institute LEARN! (Vrije Universiteit) on topics of education and child-rearing. Merel van Vroonhoven, a trained engineer, spent 20 years on the boards of various large companies (NN, NS, ING). In 2019 however, she made a big, lateral career switch and became a special education teacher. In her lecture, she passionately argues that the craft of teaching needs to return to the center of attention, in an educational world focused on policymakers and in which bureaucracy rules. Only when teachers are once again at the heart of education will the appeal to start and stay in the profession return.
In her speech, Van Vroonhoven draws her audience in immediately. She reminds us of the power of teaching, by bringing us back to our own time at school and to those teachers that had the biggest impact on us. With this, she opens powerfully with a message that will color the rest of her talk: ‘everything stands and falls with the teacher’. In a fast, performance-oriented educational world where inequality reigns, she believes that teachers have a crucial role in fighting for a better future. When teachers create an inclusive learning climate and see beyond the differences in their student’s backgrounds, they can have huge impact. However, a crisis in the teaching world, with many leaving the profession and a chronic shortage of teachers, hinders this.
When Van Vroonhoven meets with ex-colleagues from before her time in the classroom, they often comment that teaching must have led to a more laid-back workweek for her. However, this could not be further from the truth. In fact, the burden of workload in combination with increasing stress in the profession are the top reasons for teachers to leave the classroom. Limited opportunities for personal and professional development come in at a close second. As a result, many teachers close to or with burnout choose to leave the profession permanently or in pursuit of self-employment. While this problematic state of the educational world, together with drops in student literacy and numeracy, may briefly reach headlines, it quickly returns to the back of our collective mind.
Here, Van Vroonhoven highlights the inspiring work of Afghan activist Laila Haida, whom even a corrupt government cannot stop in bringing education to adolescent girls. Education is worth risking your life for. But why then are we taking it for granted? With education receiving little to no attention during the recent elections and current formation of government, a society in which low literacy and numeracy are increasing steadily, should be cause for major concern.
Van Vroonhoven believes our approach to education is part of the problem. She argues that we created a system where bureaucratic burden and overwhelming workload put high pressure on teachers. Furthermore, we use limited criteria captured in multiple choice tests, designed to optimally track average development in school, as a base to determine societal status. Based on these criteria, children are sorted into categories from a very early age. Van Vroonhoven argues that this system leads to winners and losers, in which a university degree is idolized, and vocational education is stigmatized. This is unjustified and dangerous: our society needs craftsmen. More importantly, it creates the risk of young individuals developing rigid ideas regarding their worth, simply based on where they grow up or the wealth of their parents.
With these convincing arguments, Van Vroonhoven criticizes our current educational system. But how can we change the system and create a better, and more equal future for our youth? Van Vroonhoven makes the plea to radically change the value of the craftsmanship that is teaching. Additionally, she demands a fundamental reversal of the current educational system: switching from a focus on the administrator to the teacher. With this, Van Vroonhoven suggests that the teaching profession be put central to education, focusing on content and craftmanship rather than the fulfilling of rules and administrative tasks. She argues that for good teaching, we need to start relying on the expertise of those professionals directly engaged in the craft. She demands of teachers: ‘take your profession back into your own hands!’. Only when teachers stop merely performing bureaucratic rules made by administrators that often don’t have first-hand experience, and rather, start demanding time for the craft itself, can we move towards higher quality and satisfaction in the teaching field. For her, this switch in focus entails more time for professional development, to prepare classes and focus on teaching content rather than completing bureaucratic tasks. She thereby asks teachers to take responsibility for their own profession, to ‘raise the bar’. Importantly, van Vroonhoven highlights a potential ‘medicine’ to the current system: a strong teacher alliance, which currently is lacking in the field. With this, she believes a system in which both teacher and student curriculum are centralized and quality-controlled, can arise. With these words, she gives teachers a will to fight for their craft and a method to do so.
To those in government, Van Vroonhoven has sharp advice: ‘flip the system’. Rather than focusing on the administrator, she argues that the teacher should be central in the educational system. She also demands that vague propositions in education reports be replaced with specific advice. For instance, teacher education should focus on training quality, rather than quantity of trainees. She explains that creating strict requirements for teachers and school management through consistent, external assessment can prevent lack of expertise and effective leadership.
Finally, Van Vroonhoven speaks to those who, perhaps, have the most immediate impact: those in school boards and policy making. She implores them to fight for teachers to come back to their profession again, and to ensure that our youth sees a future in teaching again. Though she is not a fan of ‘curling parents’, she wishes for more ‘curling school boards’ - school boards that remove bureaucratic and practical obstacles to excellent teaching.
To conclude her lecture, Van Vroonhoven comes back to those that inspire her every day, that fuel her fire: her students. With an anecdote, she powerfully demonstrates that the questioning of her decision to move from the financial world to the teaching profession only makes her passion for the field grow. And it is not only her own passion that is sparked. After her lecture, the audience buzzed with new inspiration and a will to fight the system. In the audience’s often emotional questions to her, it became clear that her words gave space to feelings that have been growing in many for a long time. With her speech she strengthens a movement that she started by turning her back to the finance world and opening her heart to education. A movement towards equality in education, and a path towards the passion of teaching.
The full text and recording of the lecture can be found on the Universiteit van Amsterdam website (in Dutch).
First of all, what do we actually mean by “interest”?
Maartje opened her talk introducing models of interest development such as the four-phase model of interest development which states that interest is a response to certain external triggers from the environment and can grow into a more stable characteristic.
Next, Maartje introduced a more dynamic theoretical framework about interest development and network models which can help us better understand how a change might be facilitated. This more dynamic point of view suggests that if somebody is interested in something, you have some knowledge about the topic, you think it has value (could be societal value, but also personal value) and you have certain positive emotions about it. Behaviour, value, emotion and knowledge are all influencing the interest in a certain topic such as climate change, wicked problems or science.
Topic 1: Interest in climate change
In a psychometric network study, it was examined what determines whether young people engage with climate change. This study showed that the Locus of control seems to be one of the central nodes and predicts seeking information on climate change in young adults. So, people who believe to have an influence, are more likely to engage with climate change.
Topic 2: Wicked problems in the science museum (NEMO)
The question was: How can NEMO entice a broad and diverse audience to develop their own perspective on these complex topics? What background variables and what interest dimensions predict participants’ interest? It was found that “finding it important for society to participate in scientific research” was quite important for this. No effect was found for predictors such as socioeconomic status or educational level.
Link to the article: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1113019/full
Link to the project: https://www.nemosciencemuseum.nl/nl/de-studio/
Topic 3: citizen science primary school
Here the project: “alle scholen verzamelen” was mentioned. How can we identify interest in doing research? It appears that there was a stronger developed interest for doing research after the intervention since there was a better connected network. Also, a positive change in the relation between school weight and interest in doing research was found!
Link to the project: https://www.wetenschapsknooppunten.nl/alle-scholen-verzamelen/#eerdere-edities
Rashmi Kusurkar is a professor and research programme leader at Amsterdam UMC. In her research, she focuses on diversity and inclusion in Health Professions Education and how these relate to students' motivation. Recently, she was nominated as a role model from Amsterdam UMC for the Equals campaign. Please continue reading to find out more about the campaign and Rashmi's experiences with integratign the Dutch and Indian identity on her path to a professorship.
Could you briefly introduce yourself and give an overview of your background and experience?
By background I've been trained as a medical doctor in India, and I completed my specialisation in physiology. I was teaching for about 7 years in Mumbai, India, and then my husband took up a job in Amsterdam. That's how we moved to Amsterdam. I wanted to do a PhD in medical education, but it wasn’t possible to do that in India at that point. When I came to the Netherlands, I had a desire to pursue my dream PhD position, but because I didn’t know anyone in this country, it was really difficult to get started. On top of that, there was hardly any information available in English, all the websites were in Dutch. That is when my husband suggested I should start reaching out to people in real life. I wasn’t proficient at using PubMed, because in India we didn't have those resources back then. In the end I found some papers in which I found potential names I could reach out to, and that’s what I did. I went through 7 to 8 interviews to get the position at the UMC Utrecht. I was very satisfied with it because I got the opportunity to choose my topic and research what I wanted. Drawing onto my former teaching practice in India, I had questions about students' motivation, academic performance and learning. This is what I decided to do for my PhD studies. After 3 years of research, I graduated from UMC Utrecht. At that time, my second supervisor moved to the VU as the director of medical education and invited me to join. I then got a wonderful opportunity to create my own group in education research. I started with two PhD students and then slowly the group expanded. Seven PhD students have graduated from my research programme and currently I am supervising around 12 students, also international.
What is the focus of your research group within Learn?
The name of my group is Developing students for life - Motivation for lifelong learning. Developing students for life means that we try to nurture students to become intrinsically motivated, to constantly learn from the practice and be dedicated to continuing professional development. We focus on students from the moment they start thinking about joining health professions education, which is also our domain, throughout their undergraduate and postgraduate education, as well as during their practice. There are two main research themes within the program: one is about motivation and all the factors that influence motivation, such as gender or background, and at the same time about all the things that motivation influences, like academic performance, professional identity, engagement or even burnout. The other theme focuses on inclusion, equity, diversity and accessibility. Here we look at the basis of people’s background and other factors to see whether people get equitable chances or not in professional development. Through my research group I succeeded in connecting the two themes which have always been connected in my mind. My point of view is that if a person doesn't feel included in the educational or professional environment, they cannot have intrinsic motivation for their work.
The role of inclusion in motivation was also the theme of your inaugural lecture. Could you elaborate more on this topic?
The title of my oration was The ABC of inclusion and motivation, with which I aimed to answer the question of how to bring students to flourish. I use Self-determination theory while talking about motivation. The backbone of that theory is that everyone can flourish with the optimal motivation, meaning that everyone can grow to their potential. But to be able to flourish, you need the desirable type of motivation, namely autonomous motivation; you either have to be genuinely interested in something, or find it important. The other type of motivation is called controlled motivation, and it appears when you are doing something out of internal pressure, for instance because you want to become famous or earn a lot of money, or because someone in the family is pressuring you to do something.
How can you make sure that students and employees are autonomously motivated?
This is exactly why I connect the two themes in my research. Inclusion is an important part of it, because if you don't feel included in your learning or working environment, you can never be autonomously motivated. What the Self-determination theory talks about is 3 basic psychological needs, which are called autonomy, belongingness and competence. This is what the ABC stands for in the title of my oration. According to that theory, for anyone to be autonomously motivated, they need to feel a sense of autonomy or choice in their actions. When a person asks themselves, 'Why do I want to do it?’, the answer should be: ‘because I want to’ and not ‘because someone else wants me to do this’. This is what autonomy is about.
Other important factors are belongingness, which is the need to feel a sense of belonging to peers, to the learning and working environment, and competence. What follows, when people don't feel competent, they will not be autonomously motivated. These are the three basic psychological needs in ABC, but I personally also connect it to inclusion.
"For me, inclusion means the sense of belongingness combined with the empowerment to make meaningful contributions."
So it is possible that someone may feel a sense of belonging, but may not have the power to contribute. That process is called assimilation, where someone from a different culture comes to the majority culture and is accepted only when they exhibit the behaviours of the majority culture. They have a sense of belonging to the group, but their individual characteristics are not valued. This is not inclusion, but rather assimilation.
I always talk about inclusion in the context where you feel a sense of belonging plus the empowerment to contribute meaning. Furthermore, our research shows that if people don’t feel included, it has a negative effect on their motivation, because these three basic ABC needs are not met. People will lose their sense of autonomy, stop feeling competent, and lose the sense of belonging. And because of that, they will no longer be autonomously motivated, but controlled motivated. As we have shown in our previous studies, controlled motivation is more associated with burnout, lower engagement and lower academic performance as compared to autonomous motivation. Thus, in conclusion, what I tried to show is that inclusion is necessary for someone to feel optimally or autonomously motivated, and therefore it is also necessary for our well-being.
Could you give some practical examples of how you can evoke these ABC factors in everyday educational practices?
When you are teaching a group of students, the best you can do is to give them lots of choices. You should be asking questions like: What do you want to study? How do you want to study it? How do you want to assess it? What types of activities do you enjoy doing? There are obviously things which are restricted by the curriculum, like the reading or writing material, but you could always plan a nice activity around it. For example, have a debate in the class with someone speaking for and against a topic, or you could actually ask students how they want to handle a particular topic.
And how does it work on an individual level?
For instance, if there is a very bright student who might want something more than others, I, as a teacher, can address those needs and give the student a more challenging exercise. To give an example, the student can look for an article related to a topic discussed in class and can later explain it to the rest of the students. As a result, there is no additional burden for the rest of the class or the teacher, but the person who wants extra gets extra.
This example concerned the possible adjustments on different levels regarding what to learn or study. However, it can also be about how to learn. Think of a student preparing for a test who wants to effectively revise the information. The student’s task can therefore be to look for real life examples where this can be used and to write it down. The student could also give a presentation about what they have learned so far, followed by a discussion. What is important is that the ideas should come from the students; they are the ones who should decide how they want to learn a certain topic. These are all ways of passing the responsibility to the students, which makes them feel like they have autonomy while the teacher also holds the accountability for facilitating the learning process. So it is possible to give autonomy to students within an already existing structure or curriculum.
The second aspect is competence. Students often receive feedback, however, it is important that the feedback focuses on the activity instead of evaluating them as a good or bad student. Teachers can give such feedback by outlining the aspects that the students did well and pointing out possible areas for improvement. Furthermore, having a one to one relationship with a student or creating activities in the class where they start feeling like a group stimulates that relatedness or belongingness within the group.
The topic of equality and inclusion really shines through in all aspects of your work. Why are these factors so important to your research?
After my PhD, I had meetings with a lot of teachers and people who were working in education. And every time I would start to say something about how things are done in India, people would immediately say something like: but that is in India, that's not relevant for the Dutch context. I find it strange that people say that because students are the same everywhere. Of course there are differences, but there are also overarching similarities. Sadly, few wanted to hear about these similarities. Thus, I was not able to share my knowledge because people could be too close-minded. And whenever I talked about motivation, people would say that in Indian or other collectivistic cultures, students' motivation comes from the parents’ pressure, which is a stereotype. It triggered me and I started wondering why people think like this. And then I started observing things around me and I saw that students who came from collectivistic cultures or people of colour constantly had to face so many barriers and face the same kind of rejection or exclusion everywhere.
This is when I realised the true importance of the topic and decided to write a grant proposal on it. Ironically, my grant proposal wasn’t accepted because they didn't even recognize it as a topic. Nonetheless, I found a possibility to convert it into a PhD project which was taken up by my student Ulviye Işik, who did research on academic motivation and performance of ethnic minority students.In the study we found that the ethnic minority students actually had higher autonomous motivation and that their academic performance did not differ. We were intrigued by the results and wanted to find an explanation. We carried out two qualitative studies where we came to know that students from other backgrounds face everyday discrimination - like people making fun of their names, doubting their abilities and competence in their learning, work and professionalism, giving them poor grades in their clinical performance and judging them as unprofessional in their behaviour. There is a lot of implicit bias, for instance an assumption that their quality of learning is low, which they have to face everywhere. We observed that even though it had a negative effect on their situational (at the moment) motivation, they were so determined and so resilient that they overcame the initial dip in motivation so that the long term motivation to become a doctor was not affected. They went on, they faced all barriers and kept going without giving up, which was amazing to us. And on the basis of that we wrote a consortium grant proposal about the unintended effects of selection on the student population and the applicant pool. We analysed the pipeline from childhood to becoming a medical specialist, and then we expanded it to health professions education, so not just specialists. We found that women with ethnic minority backgrounds have the lowest chances of becoming a medical specialist.
"Overall you could say that I found the topic of motivation, but inclusion found me. It wasn’t my initial intention to do research on inclusion, but I got there because of my experience."
What are the key challenges that you face in promoting inclusion and diversity and education?
The topic of inclusion and diversity is a very uncomfortable one because it is related to the history of slavery and colonisation. I noticed that if you want to make equitable chances for people who are of a different ethnic minority, the majority starts feeling threatened because they think their chances and opportunities will decrease. We faced a lot of challenges when we were presenting our research, in the sense that people were really resistant. At some point I realised that talking about exclusion is not helping me create an impact. And that's when I move towards the story of inclusion. And suddenly there was a change in how people looked at it because everyone wanted to be inclusive. It was surprising how the change of frame and terminology opened doors for our work.
I actually have ethical dilemmas sometimes because I feel like I'm ignoring the people who have exclusion and discrimination experiences while I'm moving forward on inclusion. I feel like I'm not doing justice to them. It's a difficult dilemma to live with because I know I'm doing it for the long term gain since everyone wants to join the movement of inclusion which I'm happy with. But there are times when it really bothers me.
Recently you became a role model from Amsterdam UMC for the Equals campaign. Could you explain what the goals of the campaign are and how you got chosen?
On my way to becoming a professor, I had a lot of experiences about which I talked with the Committee Talent Assessment and the Executive Board to help them understand that it is harder for a person of colour to become a professor. It was sort of expected of me that I would find a sense of belonging in a homogeneous group of white, male professors, but I didn't want to lose my Indian roots. I went through an identity struggle while going through my career path and I chose not to give up my true identity. I actually even have a visual of what it felt like, which is a painting that my sister-in-law made for me. It shows an Indian rose which is at the centre of a painting, which represents my Indian identity, and my Dutch identity is represented by tulips built around it. It was a difficult journey, but I was successful in maintaining my values and still becoming a professor. Then I was invited to join the Steering Committee on Diversity and Inclusion at Amsterdam UMC, meaning that I could finally give input based on my experiences and perspective. When I talk about these things now, people take it more seriously, than when I was an associate professor. Getting the professor position made all the difference in the world, which I knew would happen and that was my main motivation to become one. I was never interested in the title, but in what it could bring further for my group and our research work.
Coming back to the question, Equals is a company that conducts a campaign about equality between men and women, which they have been doing for the last 4 years. Every year, they interview and photograph women from the bigger cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht, and they advertise it with posters placed all around the city. It is actually the company who has to sign up to become part of the campaign in order to show that they really value equality. It is the first time that Amsterdam UMC participated. I got nominated because of my perspective on diversity and inclusion and became a role model on equality.
After my photoshoot, they asked me to talk about my motivation and why I think that role modelling is important. It connects very well to my research, because we have found that role models are very important particularly to minority students who often don’t see people working in healthcare who look like them. Because of that they think they cannot reach those positions, which is sadly also true. We found that they often don't get into a specialisation because all the supervisors want to pick students who look like them. It has a lot of exponential effects. In our research we have seen that having visible role models is important for students, especially of ethnic minorities, so that they can imagine a future for themselves. So when they asked me to become part of the campaign, I immediately said yes. And then I came to know that there is going to be a poster of me in the centre of Amsterdam, next to the National Opera, which is a very beautiful location. I had never dreamt in my entire life that there would be a poster of me at such a crossroad, especially after all the difficulties I had to go through on my career track to become a professor resulting from the systemic expectations.
My daughter experiences school-related stress on a regularly basis. She often comes home telling me she had to work really hard, with almost no time for fun or games. The many tests and grades make her nervous. Of course, this type of stress is not uncommon and not necessarily a concern. However, my daughter is 10 years old. I find that far too young for the pressure and stress that she experiences at school. Why can’t learning be more fun? And why can’t schools focus more on children’s motivation and well-being, rather than on their grades? To find answers, we need to look beyond one single research discipline...
Many issues related to our children’s education are complex and rooted in different intertwined layers. In science, these layers are called levels and we distinguish between, for example, the individual, social and societal levels. Each individual child goes through a unique developmental trajectory during their school period. Their neurobiological developmental processes are strongly shaped by their social environment: interactions with peers, siblings, parents and teachers. Influences are also exerted at the macro level by teaching practices (school systems) and the dominant values and goals within a society (the sociopolitical context).
Let’s go back to the example of my daughter. I remember her starting primary school as a happy and confident little girl who was eager to learn. Over the years, we have seen her losing motivation for schoolwork and becoming more worried about her performance. And my daughter is not an isolated case, as the Dutch Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) study convincingly demonstrates. HBSC’s 2022 report shows a concerning tripling of experienced performance pressure among Dutch youth over the last two decades. This increased pressure is accompanied by mental health problems, especially in girls.
Because of the complex and multi-levelled nature of a child’s development during the school period, we need to connect research from different fields and traditions to get to a better understanding of wicked problems such as performance pressure.
Connecting neuroscience, education and society: why?
To understand why many children feel more stressed about their performance than they enjoy learning, we need to understand the interplay between the development of their brains and minds, school practices and societal values. During the entire school period, important developmental processes occur in a child’s brain, shaping their behaviour and learning mechanisms. At the same time, brain development is influenced by the inputs a child receives, often in interaction with others. During this developmental interplay, certain children maintain their intrinsic motivation to learn new things, while others start to focus more on performing well and comparing themselves to peers. This focus is also shaped by their social context: the norms in their classrooms for example, and the messages they get at home. What do teachers and parents emphasise? In the current western meritocratic societies, the emphasis is often on measurable achievements, or in other words, getting good grades in comparison to others, instead of improving against a child’s own benchmark.
The influences at the diverse levels are often studied in isolation, but this inevitably leads to incomplete answers. This is because the interactions between the different levels lead to emergent properties. This means we cannot understand the complete problem by understanding its isolated parts. In other words, only studying brain development will not provide answers, and neither does only studying sociological processes.
The risk of focusing on one level and being blind to other levels can be exemplified again by my daughter. Cases like hers might urge research at the individual level, for example to investigate predictors of stress resilience, and interventions to increase it. But is it really an individual problem? Shouldn’t the research be focused on why so many children experience performance pressure, with the aim to intervene at a more societal level? To find the right questions to address, and the right impacts to pursue, we need to integrate research on all the relevant levels, from the start.
Connecting neuroscience, education and society: how?
Although the need to combine forces in interdisciplinary research has long been recognised, this is easier said than done. To integrate different disciplines and traditions, scientists first of all need to get out of their comfort zones and be exposed to different perspectives. But being exposed to different ideas does not automatically lead to synthesis. We need to know what to make of these ideas and how to combine them with our own. For this, we need to ask a lot of questions. Do the same terms have the same meaning in different fields? What assumptions are being made?
An even more essential counterpart of asking questions, is listening. Very inspiring in this context is Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits Model, in particular habit 5: ‘Seek first to understand, then be understood’. Too often, we are focused on being understood and making ourselves heard. But the order suggested by Covey, to first understand the other, is essential for interdisciplinary work.
In conclusion, only through connecting the individual and context levels of research can we achieve the interdisciplinarity required to reduce performance pressure and improve the well-being of our youth. In the meantime, I will continue to juggle all levels of influence in an effort to prevent a downward spiral, at least for my daughter.
The above text was originally published as part of the Connected World - Insights from 100 Academics on How to Build Better Connections. You can read and download the original publication here.
Imagine a sudden rustle in the tall grass. A ripple of alarm passes through the group of early humans who live together amid ancient, rugged terrain. In the center of the encampment, a 3-year-old child – let’s call her Raina – stumbles and falls, her eyes wide with fear.
Without hesitation, her mother sweeps her up into her protective arms, while her grandmother quickly gathers herbs and leaves to create a pungent smokescreen to deter lurking predators. Simultaneously, Raina’s father and uncles move swiftly to the outskirts of the camp, their vigilant eyes scanning for signs of danger.
In this heart-pounding moment, Raina was enveloped in a web of care. Multiple caregivers worked seamlessly together, their collective efforts serving as a shield against the unknown threat that lurked beyond the safety of their campfire’s glow. It took a village to ensure Raina’s safety.
For at least 200,000 years, children grew up in a similar setting to Raina’s: a social environment with multiple caregivers. But 20th-century child psychologists placed almost exclusive importance on the mother-child bond. Research on children’s attachment relationships – the emotional ties they develop with their caregivers – and how they influence child development has had a mother-centric focus. Academic psychology’s emphasis on the child-mother relationship can be at least partly attributed to social norms about the appropriate roles of mothers and fathers. Whereas fathers have been characterized as the breadwinners, mothers have been thought of as more involved in the daily care of children.
We are clinical-developmental psychology and child and family researchers interested in studying how the quality of child-caregiver relationships affects children’s development. With 29 other researchers, we started a research consortium to study children’s attachment relationships. Together, we ask: How does having attachment relationships to both mothers and fathers affect children’s socioemotional and cognitive outcomes?
Children develop attachment relationships with people whose presence around them is stable over time. For most children, these people are their parents.
Social scientists broadly classify attachment relationships as secure or insecure. A secure relationship with a specific caregiver reflects a child’s expectation that when they’re alarmed – as when emotionally or physically hurt – this caregiver will be available and emotionally supportive. In contrast, children who are uncertain about the availability of their caregivers in times of need are likely to form an insecure attachment relationship.
In the U.S. and Europe, where most attachment research has been conducted to date, the primary caregiver was frequently assumed to be the mother. Accordingly, researchers have almost exclusively focused on mothers as attachment figures. Mothers were also more accessible for researchers, and they more readily consented to participate in studies than fathers and nonparental caregivers such as grandparents and professional caretakers.
Furthermore, many researchers have assumed that there is a hierarchy within parental caregiving, wherein attachment with mothers is more important for understanding children’s development than attachment with caregivers considered “secondary,” such as fathers.
Already by the late 1980s, some scholars recognized the need to assess the joint impact of children’s attachment relationships with multiple caregivers on their developmental trajectories. But little research ensued. Recently, we revived such calls and proposed models that researchers can use to systematically assess the joint effects of children’s attachment to both mothers and fathers on an array of developmental outcomes.
Then, we recruited more than two dozen social scientists from eight countries who are interested in these questions around attachment relationships. Together, we formed the Collaboration on Attachment to Multiple Parents Synthesis consortium.
The first step our group took was compiling data collected by attachment researchers across the globe over the past 40 years. We identified previous research on the attachment relationships of more than 1,000 children with both their parents.
Instead of categorizing children as securely versus insecurely attached to one parent, we placed them into one of four groups:
In two separate studies, we assessed whether the children’s attachment to mother and father predicted mental health and language competence. In these studies, children’s attachment relationships were assessed by observing how they behaved during brief separations from each parent – for instance, in what psychologists call the strange situation procedure.
We found that children who simultaneously had secure attachment relationships with both mothers and fathers were likely to experience fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression and to exhibit better language skills than kids with one or no secure attachment relationships within their intact, two-parent families.
How might a child’s network of attachment relationships have these effects? While we couldn’t assess it in our study, there are various plausible mechanisms at play. For instance, think about a child with two secure attachment relationships to both mother and father who has trust in both parents that they will be there in challenging situations.
All children encounter sadness, anger and despair. But because a child with dual secure attachments can readily turn to their parents for help and support, negative emotions may be resolved quickly and not turn into defiance or depression. Because they have less of a need to monitor their parents’ whereabouts, this child may also be more adventurous and exploratory, giving them experiences to share and talk about. They might be exposed to a wider range and amount of verbal expression – helping expand their language skills.
It is also important to note what we did not find: There was no hierarchy of importance in terms of which parent a child developed a secure attachment with. Children with secure attachment only to mothers (but not to fathers) and children with secure attachment only to fathers (but not to mothers) were not statistically different in their mental health and language competence outcomes.
These findings support an important takeaway: Mothers and fathers are equally important in raising children and setting them up for optimal developmental trajectories. In other words, it is the number of secure attachment relationships a child develops within the family network – not the specific gender of the adult with whom a secure relationship is developed – that matters.
Children have also been shown to thrive when developing secure attachment relationships in nontraditional families, such as those with same-sex parents. We thus expect that future studies will replicate our findings in nontraditional two-parent families.
Future research should also investigate other family networks that include nonparental caregivers, such as grandparents, who often take an active role in rearing children. In collectively oriented cultures, family households often comprise a wider network of attachment figures than the traditional two-parent households often found in the U.S., Canada and Europe. Studies in these cultures are likely to find that attachment networks may be more pertinent than research on single relationships when it comes to understanding children’s mental health and academic skills.
As the African proverb goes, it takes a village to raise a child. We are all descendants of children like Raina. Our findings highlight the critical need to adjust policy and early intervention efforts to support the parent couple and potentially other configurations of stable caregivers – not just mothers.
Authors:
Or Dagan, Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology, Long Island University Post;
Carlo Schuengel, Professor of Clinical Child and Family Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. You can read the original artilce here.
Prof. dr. Melanie Ehren
YOU WORKED AS THE DIRECTOR OF LEARN FOR THE PAST FOUR YEARS. WHAT WAS YOUR MOTIVATION TO TAKE UP THIS POSITION?
I started working at the VU in 2019 after 7 years as an associate and full professor at University College London and this role was part of the job description. Martijn Meeter had led the institute before me but he had a number of other leadership positions and a really heavy workload so handed over the leadership of LEARN! to me when I arrived. I loved the opportunity to work with colleagues in setting our research agenda and create a vibrant community and interdisciplinary portfolio of work and have enjoyed doing so over the past four years.
HOW HAS THE INSTITUTE CHANGED OVER THESE YEARS? IN WHAT WAYS HAVE YOU PERSONALLY DEVELOPED DURING THAT TIME?
When I arrived, LEARN! was particularly known for our past research around educational neuroscience and I’ve invested mostly in broadening our work and including the breadth of disciplines we have in the institute. In the first year I worked with our programme leaders to establish our new mission around Bronfenbrenner’s model of human development which provides a really valuable frame to position the entire portfolio of our work. We also increased the level of activities and communication over the years, and connections to external stakeholders (including through our advisory board with -inter-national colleagues) and that has helped in improving our visibility, both to external stakeholders as well as colleagues within the VU. I’ve had leadership roles in the past, but this was the first one which involved leading a research institute that is set up as a network of colleagues across departments and faculties and the specific opportunities and challenges that come with that. Rather than coordinating the work through centralised decision-making and line management, you really need to be able to motivate people to get involved in the institute and provide more informal incentives or opportunities to ensure engagement.
COULD YOU SHARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS FROM YOUR FOUR YEARS OF WORK AS THE LEARN DIRECTOR?
A large part of my tenure as a director was leading the institute through the pandemic. This was a difficult time as I had only just started working at the VU and hadn’t had a chance to establish strong relations or a sense of the place. But the pandemic also offered good opportunities to showcase the relevance of our work and ensure our relevance to society. At the start of the pandemic we initiated a small rapid response network of practitioners working in schools and with parents to know the challenges they were facing. We used these weekly online check-ins with them to identify themes that connected to our research and reached out to colleagues to write brief blogs on these (e.g. student well-being, how to engage in online learning etc). This eventually also led to a large research grant to evaluate all the catch-up programmes in primary and secondary education with further work on improving evidence-informed education.
WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER TO BE YOUR MOST SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS DURING YOUR TENURE AS THE DIRECTOR?
Our work during the pandemic is something I’m proud of, particularly for how it allowed us to bring a group of colleagues together with different backgrounds and expertise and to respond to one of the then biggest challenges in education. Even when we were all working from home, we were able to work with schools and school boards and share our findings and observations continuously with national stakeholders. To me this was an example of how you can do both rigorous research that is also immediately relevant to the field.
WERE THERE ANY SPECIFIC CHALLENGES YOU HAD TO FACE? HOW DID YOU OVERCOME THOSE?
The biggest challenge of leading a research institute that is set up as a network is to get people on board and create commitment. It’s a continuing effort to find events and ways of working that are motivating to colleagues, that they want to be involved in and want to identify with.
WHAT FUTURE PLANS DO YOU HAVE ON YOUR CAREER PATH?
I’d like to have a bit more time for my international comparative research. And who knows what’s next..
Prof. dr. Nienke van Atteveldt
COULD YOU BRIEFLY DESCRIBE YOUR ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND AND YOUR PREVIOUS ROLE AT LEARN?
I did my PhD research at Maastricht University in cognitive neuroscience, during which I learned to work with a variety of neuroimaging methods. The topic was reading and the learning of letter-speech sound mappings, so already then I was interested in learning and development. After Maastricht I obtained funding to spend some years at Columbia University in New York, where I did more basic research on how the brain integrates what we see and what we hear. I discovered that I did not want to continue doing very basic research, and got more and more interested in how the results of neuroimaging methods can (and can’t) be useful in addressing societally relevant questions. This thinking got materialised in a book I wrote with two colleagues (Kijken in het brein - mythen en mogelijkheden) and also in changing my research field into Educational Neuroscience when I obtained my position at the VU. Since then, I founded the Lab of Learning, where we combine multiple methods to study how children can develop into motivated and resilient learners. I joined Learn! first as a member and then as leader of the program Educational Neuroscience: brain, learning and development, which brings together researchers from different departments with the joint goal to understand the social-emotional, motivational and meta-cognitive factors needed for children to do well and feel well in school.
WHAT MOTIVATED YOU TO BECOME THE NEW DIRECTOR OF LEARN?
Learn’s mission to bring together colleagues from the behavioural, biological, social, medical and educational sciences to understand learning and the context wherein learning happens fits very well with my own vision regarding the importance of connecting disciplines and perspectives. Research Institutes such as Learn! are crucial for such endeavours to succeed as they provide the conditions to do exactly this; by connecting researchers beyond their own niche, and facilitating activities and initiatives to exchange ideas and collaborate, also with non-academic stakeholders. Only in such joint endeavours can we tackle complex issues and reach societal impact. After being program leaders for several years, it felt like a great next step to become the scientific director, to contribute to the Institute’s mission even more.
WHAT IS YOUR VISION FOR THE INSTITUTE FOR THE UPCOMING YEARS AND HOW DO YOU PLAN TO ACHIEVE IT?
My vision is to continue enabling what Learn! is already very good at, and working on the aspects that can still improve. The timing is ideal with the positive and constructive report we received from the audit committee earlier this year. My plan is to start working on a new strategic plan for the next years, together with the program leaders and Learn! members. In this joint effort we will refocus the Institute’s aims and define strategic areas, and make an action plan for improving our visibility and including more researchers in and perhaps outside the VU. Now that the pandemic is behind us, I will also invest in motivating members to join the face-to-face opportunities provided by Learn! to interact and exchange ideas.
SINCE YOUR DAILY WORK AND RESEARCH FOCUSES MOSTLY ON EDUCATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE, ARE YOU PLANNING TO INCORPORATE MORE OF THESE ASPECTS INTO THE MAIN MISSION OF THE INSTITUTE?
Not necessarily as Learn!’s strength lies in the interdisciplinarity. The brain level is one part of the puzzle, but we need to connect all parts.
Last but not least, I would like to express a big thank you to Melanie for the excellent and important work she has done for Learn! during her term as scientific director. Her leadership is a great example and I couldn’t wish for a better start of my term as director; Melanie leaves Learn! as the high-quality and viable research hub it is today. Thank you Melanie, and I’m very glad to keep collaborating within Learn!.
COULD YOU BRIEFLY DESCRIBE WHAT YOUR PROJECT ENTAILS?
We develop the SCCILLS intervention for teachers in first- and second-grade of elementary schools, which is a psycho-education and video coaching intervention to enhance children’s Social Emotional Learning (SEL) competencies.
“SEL is the process through which children acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions'' (CASEL, 2020).
SCCILLS improves SEL via 1) enhancing knowledge of teachers about SEL and how to stimulate SEL, 2) fostering healthy and positive teacher-child relationships and 3) stimulating responsive pedagogical strategies of teachers.
We expect that this will lead to not only improved SEL competencies of children, but also a reduction of emotional and behavioural problems. Furthermore, SCCILLS will lead to a more positive classroom atmosphere, and improve teacher efficacy and wellbeing.
SCCILLS consists of 3 team meetings for the whole school team, 4 individual meetings which are focused on enhancing the teacher-child relationship, and 2 video-intervision meetings which are focused on increasing responsive teaching.
At this time, the SCCILLS intervention development is almost finished. This academic year and next year we will collect the data. We will train videocoaches to apply SCCILLS at their schools. We will test SCCILLS in 28 classrooms, and include 28 control classrooms in our study.
WHAT ARE THE MAIN AIMS OF YOUR PROJECT?
We aim to:Test whether SCCILLS improves SEL competencies, via increases in positive teacher-child relationships and responsiveness of teachers. Test whether SCCILLS via improving SEL, 1) reduces emotional and behavioural problems of students, 2) improves the classroom climate, and 3) enhances teacher wellbeing.
WHAT IS SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING?
In addition to what was already mentioned, SEL competencies include 5 domains:
1) self awareness (e.g., recognizing your own emotions and knowing your talents)
2) self management (e.g., regulating your emotions, planning, and organisation skills)
3) social awareness (e.g., perspective taking, empathy),
4) relationship skills (e.g., building positive social relationships, resisting social pressure), and
5) responsible decision making (e.g., evaluating consequences of your actions). This last domain builds on the previous four domains.
THE TARGET GROUP OF YOUR PROJECT ARE CHILDREN ATTENDING THE 3RD AND 4TH GRADE OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. WHY THIS GROUP IN PARTICULAR? WHY NOT YOUNGER/OLDER CHILDREN?
Ideally, a SEL-intervention is implemented throughout all years of elementary school to be most effective. Due to budget limitations and practical limitations, testing SCCILLS from kindergarten to sixth grade is not possible at this moment. We chose to focus on first and second grade teachers and students (Dutch 3rd and 4th grade), because SCCILLS at this developmental stage of children still has a preventative effect regarding the development of behavioural and emotional problems in children, which should be addressed as early as possible. Furthermore, SCCILLS builds upon a previously developed intervention program (Key-2-Teach) which was implemented and found to be effective in first and second grade in a previous research project. However, Key-2-Teach was focused on reducing behavioural problems of students only, while SCCILLS focuses on the full SEL spectrum.
YOU MENTIONED THAT THE INTERVENTION WOULD INCLUDE PSYCHO-EDUCATION OF TEACHERS. COULD YOU ELABORATE ON THAT?
Psycho-education means that we provide teachers with knowledge about what SEL is, and how the relationship of the teacher with the student, as well as the pedagogical strategies of the teachers are related to children’s SEL. Teachers often do not precisely know what SEL is, and feel incompetent to address SEL. From previous studies we know that knowledge about SEL and how to improve SEL in students as a teacher is important for the effectiveness of SEL-interventions. Current programs do not provide teachers with tools on how they can improve SEL in their daily interactions with children in the classroom. Currently, programs often consist of weekly lessons for students, similar to maths or reading, but they do not include effective teacher practices and pedagogy.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF ENHANCING POSITIVE TEACHER-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS? DOES IT HAVE AN INFLUENCE ON CHILDRENS’ PROGRESS AT SCHOOL?
The teacher-child relationship the teacher experiences consists of the emotions and attitudes of teachers about a student and about the relationship with this student. These views are often coloured by previous experiences of teachers. This may be experiences the teacher had with this particular student (“X is angry again, he is not motivated just like last week”), with other students with similar problems (“this student behaves just like X last year”), or even hearing colleagues talk about a student during lunchtime. These quick interpretations are very handy, because they allow you to make quick decisions in complex situations such as the classroom. However, these views are also coloured and tend to become more rigid and inflexible, particularly under stress. Especially for students that have problems with SEL, who often experience challenges regarding emotional and behavioural problems, there is an increased risk of developing a negative relationship with their teacher.
Looking through this coloured lens, teachers are prone to focus on information that is in line with their prior views and disregard information that conflicts with their views. In practice this means that positive behaviour might be disregarded, while negative behaviour receives more attention and gets affirmed by the teacher. Thereby, the teacher-child relationship also shapes the interactions of the teacher with the student, and consequently affects the student’s behaviour. Conflict in the teacher-child relationship is related to increased behavioural problems, and problems with self-regulation. Furthermore, conflictual teacher child relationships are related to reduced engagement, cognitive functioning, and academic achievement. Reducing conflict and building warm teacher child relationships therefore is important for children’s emotional, behavioural, and academic development.
Therefore, an important component of SCCILLS is to address this coloured lens of teachers, by reflecting on the relationship and actively taking the perspective of students. This way, current views become more flexible, and teachers see students in a more favourable light. They become more effective in looking behind the behaviour of the student (so, “what does the student communicate/want to express with this behaviour?”). This improves teachers' sensitivity and sensitive responsivity to students, and they can better adapt to the students’ needs.
COULD YOU GIVE AN EXAMPLE OF AN EFFECTIVE COACHING METHOD/APPROACH?
We use different coaching methods with SCCILLS. We use a reflective instrument (BeGRP, Endedijk et al., 2023) to increase perspective taking of teachers. We also use video coaching. A coach films interactions in the classroom. These interactions are analysed on a micro-level together with the teacher. The focus is on positive interactions, and generalising these to other situations and other students. SCCILLS is an intervention with a schoolwide component, by including three team meetings. Schoolwide programs are more effective than individual programs.
You can read more about the SCCILLS project here: https://www.sccills.nl/
"Controversy and Conflict have become inescapable aspects of classroom teaching in the 21st century. Not only are teachers tasked with discussing contentious political policies, questionable historical practices, and violent international conflicts; they are faced with deep ideological divides among students, parents and other stakeholders (as can be witnessed, for instance, in recent reactions to the current situation in Israel)." - this was one of the arguments during the conference, which took place on the 22-23 September, 2023.
You can read the highlights from the conference below.
This contentious educational atmosphere has placed immense strain on educators at almost every level of the educational system, and it has made the civic dimensions of public schooling hazardous political terrain. At the same time, teaching controversy harbours great potential for advancing civic and democratic goals in the classroom. Teaching controversy can improve students’ rational and critical thinking skills; it can increase empathy and understanding of different views; and it can provide opportunities to hone the discussion and deliberation skills that young people will need to participate in democratic processes.
This research has widened our understanding of civic education in an important way; yet it has tended to overlook several political, ethical and practical aspects of teaching controversy that are essential for its success. In particular, the specific classroom conditions necessary for productive democratic discussion, the appropriate decision-making criteria for determining what makes an issue controversial, and the most effective teaching methods for teaching controversy need to be addressed with clarity and vision, if educational practitioners are to be prepared to face the challenges of teaching in the 21st century.
These and many other related themes have been discussed during the international conference “Conflict and Controversy in the Classroom”, which took place between the 22.09.23 and 23.03.23 at the VU. The conference was organized by Prof. Johannes Drerup in cooperation with Douglas Yacek and Dorothee Gronostay (both TU Dortmund University). The conference dealt not only with philosophical and historical questions related to teaching controversy (such as the history of the culture wars in the US, the civic role and authority of the teacher as a representative of the liberal state, racial justice and injustice, the democratic justification of teaching controversial issues, as well as the distinction between indoctrination and legitimate forms of democratic education and moral influence), but also with subject specific challenges that arise in different sociopolitical constellations (such as religious education in Germany and democratic education in India).
Moreover, a major part of the conference was devoted to empirical issues concerning the concrete practices and effects of teaching controversial issues. It was especially this diversity of disciplinary perspectives that enabled the participants to develop an expanded view of teaching controversy and a better understanding of the complex and multifaceted nature of teaching controversy in schools. In so doing the conference offered insight into the conditions that support civic learning and community-building in the classroom, and those that can undermine the project of democratic education.
In the second part of this two-part interview, Melanie Ehren talks with Thomas Hatch about the five “waves of funding” designed to help the Dutch education system respond to the learning challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures. The first part of this interview focused on the initial school closures and the suspension of exams in the Netherlands, and can be read here.
Thomas Hatch (TH): You and your colleagues spent a considerable amount of time studying how the Dutch government has used a series of funding initiatives to help schools and students in the Netherlands recover from the pandemic. Can you give a sense of these “waves” of funding and how schools and school networks used them?
Melanie Ehren (ME): The Dutch government provided funding to help schools respond to COVID pandemic in five different “waves,” with the first wave in July, 2020, after the initial school closures. At first, consistent with the decentralized Dutch system, schools and local school boards could decide on the type of “catch-up” approach to pursue and which pupils were eligible for the additional support. However, after the first round of funding there was considerable negative press about the unfocused nature of the approaches and the fact that some of them had little, if anything, to do with instruction. For example, in one meeting, I heard some people complaining about a school that used the funds to take their students on a trip to an amusement park (like Disney-land), with the rationale that children had experienced such socio-emotional suffering that they needed a break and a chance to re-establish their relationships with peers and their teachers.
After the initial round, the requirements for the funding were tightened and schools had to use student achievement results to target students with “learning loss” and to choose from a ‘menu of effective interventions’ to help them catch-up. This menu was modelled directly on a “Toolkit” developed in England to ensure that schools used “catch up” approaches that had some “evidence of effectiveness.” The first version of this was what the Dutch called a “menu card,” which was essentially the English toolkit translated into Dutch.
I think this move was made because the government felt that schools were not very evidence informed in their thinking about what interventions and programs to implement in the first wave. In fact, when we interviewed schools that had applied for funding about why they picked a particular intervention – asking things like “why are you thinking that this program might lead to improved outcomes for this particular groups?” – many of them had a hard time answering. In some cases, the decisions appeared to be based on professional expertise and their previous experiences of what had worked or didn’t work well for their students. But some schools also told us they were choosing these programs out of convenience or building on partnerships with external agencies that were already in place. For example, they might say “this is a tutoring agency we’ve worked with before; we’ve had good results with them, so we thought that that might be a good way to use the funding” or “this is something that we know we can organize for our school.”
For this second wave of funding, we studied the applications of schools and found that the schools planned to focus mainly on three types of outcomes:
Despite these plans, we found that many schools actually ended up using the funding quite differently. For example, a school might have planned to spend the funds on after school tutoring; on providing additional remedial instruction at the start of the school day; or on having additional teachers in the classroom. But then when it came time for implementation, another issue or need might have emerged or they might have found they couldn’t secure additional teachers. Overall, schools were really struggling to organize these programs as planned because of the constant disruptions to in-person teaching and then there was a second lockdown so they were constantly changing and revising. I also had many conversations with school leaders who said “we did not apply for this funding, because we need more time to actually think about what makes sense for our kids.” We detailed some of this at the time in a blog post “Catch-up and support programmes in primary and secondary education.”
Overall, schools were really struggling to organize these programs as planned because of the constant disruptions to in-person teaching and then there was a second lockdown so they were constantly changing and revising.
Over time, the government did add more background information and context to the menu to help schools to use the information to make choices. For example, the new version produced by the Ministry of Education, Culture & Science (which they referred to as an “Intervention card improving basic skills“) included links to guidance and support for choosing and using the guidance and urged the schools to consider the demands of their own context, stating:
“it is important how your school implements a chosen intervention. For a concrete step-by-step plan, you place each approach in the context of your school: does this approach suit the education you provide, your students and the issues you face? The professionalism and autonomy of the teacher are paramount here.”
All of this has led to much more emphasis on evidence-based and evidence-informed work in schools, and particularly how the government can support that. That’s another consequence of the pandemic in the Netherlands, I think: A belief that we need to build more capacity in schools for using research evidence to improve education.
TH: What’s happening now and what’s likely to happen in the future?
ME: Building on the catch-up schemes, the national government has developed a broader funding scheme – the National Program for Education – that is continuing to help schools, particularly schools with a high level of deprivation, to improve reading, writing, and literacy. This program provides an additional investment of 8.5 billion for 2.5 years for the entire education system. This National Program offers funding to improve education in these basic areas, and schools are expected to use the same approach as under the catch-up funding: the schools have to identify children who need additional support and use the menu card to decide on what kind of interventions are effective. But the national program of education has a much wider infrastructure to improve basic skills, including support teams that are initiated by the Ministry of Education to work with schools, but all around this idea of evidence-informed interventions.
Despite the huge amount of funding there have been a lot of critiques of the national government, given the short time span in which the money has to be spent, which doesn’t allow schools to implement more sustainable solutions to improve education and learning outcomes. The funding for example doesn’t allow schools to hire additional staff as these would have to be offered permanent employment which cannot be guaranteed with temporary funding.
Given that the most pressing problems in our education system are teacher shortages, high inequality and a decline in student outcomes in literacy and numeracy, there is an understanding that a long-term investment and program of reform is required to improve education. The short-term catch-up programs seem to have done relatively well in getting students back on track, but they have not been able to buck the wider trends in declining outcomes and increasing shortages of teachers.
In some ways, all of this a natural consequence of problems coming out of the school closures, but it’s reinforced by the fact that the Netherlands’ performance has been declining in international surveys like PISA at the same time that inequality has been increasing. That’s also something that the Dutch Inspector of Education has reported on in their annual reports. All of these reports have been alerting people to the facts that children are not reading at home and that reading scores are declining, and that’s having an effect on other outcomes. All of these things come together in the drive towards trying to improve basic skills.
TH: Can you talk a little about how the response in NL compares to those in other systems you’re familiar with, particularly the UK?
ME: During the pandemic, the Netherlands had a decentralized approach to allow schools to choose a contextually appropriate response to school closures within a centralized funding framework. This is different from other countries such as the UK that saw a highly centralized roll-out of a tutoring programme. Now, however, we are seeing a much more centralized approach to improving education. Recently an ‘interdepartmental investigation into education (IBO Koersen op kwaliteit en kansengelijkheid) was published with a range of proposals for stronger governmental coordination/control over education to reduce inequality and enhance learning outcomes, including more centralized coordination of the curriculum, compulsory assessments, more inspection, enhancing evidence-informed work in schools (including through an application for funding to hire a school support team to work with a school). Given the Netherlands’ tradition of high autonomy and freedom of education, this is being described as ‘a committed and responsible government’, but it is essentially a move towards greater centralized control.
Now, however, we are seeing a much more centralized approach to improving education... Given the Netherlands’ tradition of high autonomy and freedom of education, this is being described as ‘a committed and responsible government.’
TH: Have you seen any particularly innovative or promising new practices or policies that have grown out of the COVID response?
ME: Schools are much better equipped to move to online learning when needed. With the train strikes we had in some regions last year, schools closed again but they have been able to take advantage of the new infrastructure and teachers’ skills to teach online. In Higher Education there is some discussion of having a COVID-generation of students (who also talk about themselves in these words) who sometimes find it difficult to engage in on-campus education and feel they should have more support.
Teacher shortages are also increasing and this is partially attributed to the high levels of stress and workload during the pandemic and reduction of the status of teachers in society and the cost of living in relation to teachers’ salaries. Our most recent research also suggests that there may be an increase in the number of teachers working on private contracts (through recruitment agencies). The amount of temporary funding for catch-up programmes and the National Education Program may also lead to an increase in private agencies and what some are calling “edubusinesses,” but I have not yet seen the evidence on this
Interview originally published at: https://internationalednews.com/
In this interview, Melanie Ehren (LEARN! ) talks with Thomas Hatch about how the Dutch education system responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and what has happened since. This interview is part of a series by the International Education News, exploring what can change in schools after the pandemic.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:
Thomas Hatch (TH): Can you give us an overview what happened in schools in the Netherlands after the COVID-19 outbreak? When did schools close and how long were they closed?
Melanie Ehren (ME): The national government closed schools three times. The first national closure lasted from March 16 to 10 May 2020 (for primary schools) and until the 2nd of June (for secondary schools). Teaching and learning was fully online during that time. The second national closure went from the 16th of December 2020 until the 8th of February 2021 and then the third national closure went from 14 December 2021 until 10 January 2022, although this was more of an extended Christmas break. All the closures were in response to a rise in cases, but around the time of the second closure there was also a discussion about whether closing schools was the best measure to prevent virus spread. The argument for closing schools included that it would help enforce the working from home policy. Too many people were still going into work and by closing schools, parents had to stay home with their children.
When schools reopened after the first and second closures, schools had to ensure social distancing of 1.5 metres between people inside and ensure good hygiene. Schools were allowed to decide on how to meet these guidelines, with support and proposed models by the national councils for primary and secondary education. In response, schools did things like splitting classes in half with some students attending during the first part of the week and the rest attending at the end of the week. Even though the periods of national school closure were relatively short in comparison to some other countries, the disruption lasted much longer. For example, even when schools were technically open, many teachers and classes had to quarantine for periods of time. Since the beginning of the school closures, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, & Science has monitored the reduction in lesson hours due to COVID over the pandemic in a series of monthly reports. The Dutch Inspectorate of Education also documented the timeline of COVID-related decisions in 2020 (including the start of the second closure in December of 2021) and then again in 2021 in their annual reports on the state of education.
TH: What was the initial response from policymakers and others in terms of support?
ME: In the Netherlands, there was a coordinated approach by the national councils for primary and secondary education, the ministries for education and economic affairs and a national association of school boards. That approach focused on ensuring that all students had access to online learning when schools were closed. These organisations collectively investigated how many students and teachers did not have internet connections or laptops at home. Based on this information, telecom providers searched for the best solutions together with the parties involved. Those solutions included issuing hotspots and creating public Wi-Fi networks and arranging laptops for children who needed them. In addition, NPO Z@ppelin, a national broadcaster, initially offered instruction on television for children without a laptop/tablet. But I also saw schools where teachers would just hop on their bicycle and tour around the city to check in with families and have conversations on the doorstep.
A lot was left up to the initiative of the boards of each school and the networks responsible for ensuring inclusive education in each region. Honestly, because the Dutch school system is so decentralized, we just don’t know what happened at the school level in a lot of communities. All this raises a really interesting question: are highly centralized systems or more decentralized systems are best equipped to deal with a crisis like the pandemic? To me, the examples of teachers going door to door to check in with kids really speaks to teacher agency and how teachers understand their role and responsibility. That agency is a really important thing to have during a pandemic, but also when thinking about school quality in general. My colleagues and I wrote about some of these issues of teacher agency from the perspective of several different education systems (Teaching in the COVID-19 Era: Understanding the Opportunities and Barriers for Teacher Agency).
You can read the entire interview here: https://internationalednews.com/2023/09/27/initial-school-closures-and-suspensions-of-exams-in-the-netherlands-an-interview-with-melanie-ehren-on-the-educational-response-to-the-covid-19-pandemic-in-the-netherlands-part-1/
Children go to school to learn, and learning takes place in the brain. In the age period of formal schooling, a child’s brain is still undergoing major developmental changes. For these reasons, neuroscience (the study of the brain) and education are closely connected. Learning is possible because the brain is plastic: plasticity refers to the capacity of the brain to reorganize its structure and thereby change function and behavior.
But what exactly changes in the brain when we learn something new? What are optimal conditions for the brain to learn? Why do we also forget things? What developmental changes occur in the brain during childhood and adolescence, and how are these processes different or similar to the neural mechanisms of learning and memory?
Neuro-imaging research, or ‘brain scanning’, has accelerated our current understanding of brain development, learning, memory and other school-related skills such as reading and math but also creativity, metacognition and learning-related emotions and anxieties. But what do these brain scanning techniques actually measure? What kind of questions can we address with neuro-imaging, and what are the limitations?
In this Collection, we will provide an accessible overview of the current state-of-the-art insights into the mechanisms of brain development, learning and memory. The collection will help children understand how their brains learn and develop, and how these processes are shaped by their environment and their own efforts. Moreover, we will discuss why it is important that their teachers and other educational practitioners know about the brain and neuroscience methods. Finally, we will also explain what happens if wrong ideas about the brain circulate, or the correct knowledge is misinterpreted. Neuromyths such as ‘we only use 10 percent of our brain’ are persistent, but important to counter with explaining why they are false, and what is true instead.
In sum, this Collection will provide children with all the relevant knowledge about the brain to understand themselves and their learning processes better, and to equip them to distinguish myths and facts.
With funding received of the Jacobs Foundation, the eBook of this Collection has been translated into Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and Dutch.
Link to the Collection: https://kids.frontiersin.org/collections/10207/everything-you-and-your-teachers-need-to-know-about-the-learning-brain
Most countries in the world have some form of accountability system to measure school quality and student outcomes, and provide transparency over how taxpayers’ money is spent on schooling. Examples are high-stakes tests, school inspections or report cards and monitoring systems. These systems often have an element of control and compliance, while also aiming to improve student outcomes. Ofsted, the English Inspectorate of Education’s famous strapline of aiming to ‘ improve lives by raising standards in education and children's social care’ is a key example that can be found in similar wording in other parts of the world.
It is no surprise then that many academic studies have tried to establish whether these systems meet their promise of benefiting the schools and education systems they test or inspect. Measuring the effects of high stakes tests, inspections or other types of accountability is however inherently complex and requires a systems approach to data collection and analysis. Here is why:
In 1975, Donald Campbell introduced his famous law[1]:
“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
His law has proven to be relevant for many contemporary accountability systems, particularly those that are high stakes. Daniel Koretz (2017[2]) for example has provided mounting evidence that high stakes tests in the United States lead to score inflation and no longer represent actual improvements in learning; teachers learn about the types of items and content in the test and reorient their instruction accordingly. A similar strategy of ‘teaching to inspection’ (Ehren, 2016) can be found when inspectors observe lessons to measure teaching quality. A teacher once told me that staff would agree on having their students sing a particular song to alert their colleagues further down the corridor of the unannounced arrival of an inspector in the school. This would give colleagues time to change their teaching to the subject that was scheduled for the designated slot on the school timetable.
And who would blame them for doing so? Monitoring and inspection, even with the best intentions of only providing an evaluative assessment of strengths and weaknesses, is often high stakes and puts someone’s work under a magnifying glass at a specific point in time. Over time, teachers and school leaders will learn what is expected of them and will align their work to ensure a good outcome against the standards by which they are assessed. As a result, measures lose the ability to distinguish between those who perform poorly and those who perform well. To understand these responses and how measures (test, inspection or other types of monitoring) change teaching and learning (for better or worse) requires a research design that looks at change over time and what causes such changes.
Secondly, accountability systems are by nature composed of multiple actors (students, teachers, principals, school inspectors/district supervisors etc) who all interact in measuring school quality and in acting on these measures. In doing so they change and affect each other’s behaviour. The sum of all these interactions results in an entirely different outcome than what we would expect from the responses of each individual actor to an accountability measure. An example is the reputation loop described by Honingh et al (…) for the Dutch school inspection system. This study found that a school in a highly competitive environment with neighbouring schools that have a positive inspection report would enter a downward spiral when receiving a negative inspection report. This would result in parents (particularly relatively well educated and middle/high income) taking their children to another (higher performing) school, which would lead to a decline in school funding, difficulty in recruiting new, highly qualified staff and further difficulties to improve the standard of education.
Such a reputation loop would however not occur for a school in a rural area where there is no school choice or where parents are less preoccupied with good test or inspection outcomes.
What this example shows is that effects of accountability systems are highly contextual and the result of specific interactions: there is no average effect that can be interpreted meaningfully. Responses of individual actors are embedded in, and constrained by choice options and by the responses of other actors. We can only understand these by questioning the how, under what conditions and through which mechanisms accountability systems lead to change over time. Such questions cannot be answered by the type of experimental designs that tend to be seen as the golden standard to measure effects of interventions. Instead we need research designs that look at the functioning of systems and the interactions between actors that lead to change over time.
The world is not simple, let’s not assume it is through our choice of research design.
[1] Donald T. Campbell, (1975). “Assessing the impact of planned social change.” In G. M. Lyons (Ed.), Social Research And Public Policies : The Dartmouth/OECD Conference.
[2] Koretz, D. (2017). The Testing Charade; Pretending to Make Schools better. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
In my dual role as a PhD student and educator, I am delving into the Excellent Maths programme (‘Foutloos Rekenen’), for the Dutch context an innovative approach to mathematics education. My research is about the impact of this programme on pupils’ proficiency, their emotional journey, conceptual change among teachers and changes in teaching methods in primary schools. Together with my supervisors and other researchers, I am excited to make important contributions to the transformation and improvement of Dutch mathematics education.
Opening the monoculture of maths education in the Netherlands
As an external PhD student at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and an educator at the Netherlands Mathematical Institute (NMI), my unique position allows me to investigate mathematics education in the Netherlands from two intertwined perspectives. My passion is channelled into research that aims to delve deeper into the effects and conditions of 'Foutloos Rekenen', an innovative mathematics education programme that is part of my work at NMI. This programme stands out due to its focus on accelerated learning, a procedural and a mastery approach. A completely different approach to maths education, which is distinct from the current realistic maths education that characterises the monoculture in Dutch education.
Mastering Maths: searching for multi-study insights
A crucial question that drives this part of my study is whether there's a substantial difference when students achieve 75% proficiency versus full mastery (100%) of mathematical proficiency. Moreover, my research also seeks to capture the emotional journey of pupils through a Experience Sampling Method. It provides valuable insights into students' experiences with the programme and how their perceptions about mathematics evolve over time. My study also extends to evaluating the programme's impact at the primary school level, particularly focusing on the improvement in pupils' mathematical proficiency and potential shifts in the teachers' approach to mathematics instruction. From the perspective of the teachers, I aim to understand their experiences with the 'Foutloos Rekenen' programme and how it may lead to any conceptual change in their pedagogy and views of mathematics education.
Improving mathematics education through collaboration
I am excited to apply my knowledge and experience to understand and improve mathematics education, whereby I firmly believe that my PhD research and collaboration with my supervisors, Martijn Meeter and Ilja Cornelisz, along with other researchers, will contribute to shaping the future of enhanced mathematics education in the Netherlands.
The Dutch Minister for Primary and Secondary Education, Dennis Wiersma, issued a proposal this month to limit the number of temporary employees in education. The idea behind the proposal is to make the teaching profession more attractive, which should help solve the major teacher shortage. But what about teachers who prefer working on a temporary basis?
It was early May when Wiersma issued his proposal, which states that schools should employ at least 80 percent of their staff on a permanent basis. In addition, they may spend a maximum of 5 percent of their personnel budget on hiring self-employed teachers, or teachers employed by a temporary employment or secondment agency.
At present, an estimated 3,000 teachers work in primary education on a flexible contract. In secondary education, the number is similar. These teachers a hired through a secondment agency or temporary employment agency. In addition, more than 2,400 teachers are registered as 'self-employed teachers' in the Trade Register of the Chamber of Commerce. Although there is an upward trend in the number of so-called ‘private practice teachers’, this is still a relatively small number.
A more important question is what motivates this group of teachers to opt for a flexible contract. After all, in the current labor market they would have a sufficient chance of obtaining a permanent contract.
Recent interviews with teachers show that teachers’ motivations are partly related to the content of the work and what they consider important about being a teacher. They want to be able to focus on teaching instead of taking part in meetings, excessive grading or performing administrative tasks and also want to be able to give more individual attention to students. In their view, a temporary, flexible contract offers better opportunities to do this.
A high workload, large classes and administrative burdens all distract and prevent them from focusing on what they consider their primary task: teaching in the classroom and contributing to the development of their students.
Restricting temporary and flexible contracts may exacerbate the teacher shortage: school boards will then no longer be able to respond flexibly to fluctuating numbers of pupils, nor use temporary funds, and the group of teachers who consciously opt for a flexible contract with adapted working might choose a career outside of education.
If we want to make the teaching profession more attractive, we must listen to what teachers themselves want: to practice their profession well, in the classroom.
Dr. Neha Miglani will be joining as an Assistant Professor at the Universiteit voor Humanistiek, Utrecht. She is a sociologist of education with interests in well-being, educational technologies, and public policy. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Spencer Foundation, and the American Educational Research Association (AERA), among others. Dr. Miglani received her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, and worked as an Assistant Professor at Florida State University before moving to the Netherlands.
YOU PRESENTED AT A LEARN SEMINAR LAST MONTH ABOUT EDUCATIONAL WELL-BEING; COULD YOU SHARE MORE ABOUT YOUR BROADER INTEREST IN THE FIELD?
Over the last two decades children and young populations' lack of well-being has become a global concern. Educational policy and practices across the world are discussing student, and sometimes teacher well-being. As a response, schools are adopting various interventions towards student well-being such as social-emotional learning, 21st century skills, life-skills, happiness, character, vocational education etc. The COVID-19 pandemic has understandably intensified this focus. I have been closely following this discourse and developments in the education sector in various countries. What fascinates me most is an 'educational turn' in the conceptions of well-being itself. Well-being is no more a thing in the abstract, not a retrospective reflection of life lived a certain way. It has become a 'skill' to be acquired, to be actively pursued, and practised on specific dimensions. The obvious questions for me were:
How do you learn to be well? More importantly, how do you teach others to be well? What are the possible pedagogies of well-being?
HOW DO YOU DEFINE AND MEASURE EDUCATIONAL WELLBEING IN YOUR RESEARCH? ARE THERE ANY PARTICULAR FRAMEWORKS OR MODELS YOU EMPLOY?
Even though there is so much talk about well-being, there is relatively less consensus on how to define it. It is seen as subjective, i.e. interior to a person, or objective i.e. having externally observable characteristics, such as housing, education etc. Many conceptions see well-being as closely related to health. Well-being is seen to have an aspirational quality, encompassing combinations of physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, social, and material dimensions. Realising these multidimensional characteristics I do not start with an a priori definition of well-being. My interest is not to measure quantitatively how well or happy people are.
Instead, I explore how people make sense of it, what meanings they give to being well. And this anthropological focus allows for inclusion of different definitions that might sometimes be contradictory too. In the case of a specific intervention called the Happiness class implemented in government schools of Delhi in India, the teachers used the terms happiness, well-being, being content, good mental and physical health almost interchangeably. So there is a contextual element too.
IF YOU WERE TO BRIEFLY ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS YOURSELF, WHAT ARE THE POSSIBLE PEDAGOGIES OF WELLBEING BASED ON YOUR EXPERIENCE? HOW DO PEOPLE, AND ESPECIALLY STUDENTS, LEARN TO BE WELL?
It’s complex and there are several things. But if I was to answer briefly, I would talk about three things. One, I have found that educational well-being - involving conscious teaching and learning of being well - is a deeply embodied project. Bodies become both the means to achieve well-being as well as the end sites where well-being can be potentially realised. Second, in formal educational contexts like schools, well-being is very much influenced by teachers’ moral frameworks, and in some contexts gets deeply intertwined with a sense of embodied discipline. So I have highlighted the need for teacher well-being and working with teacher beliefs as opposed to simply transmitting a skill-set in training. Third, relatedly, many popular interventions that explicitly target student well-being have too much of an individualised focus, while ignoring the relationality in being well. We need to imagine more holistic and integrated interventions that equally focus on the larger institutions of schools, and examinations etcetera.
HOW WOULD YOU SAY THIS APPLIES TO EDUCATION IN THE NETHERLANDS?
First of all, the focus on overall well-being of students is not a novel concern. Many thinkers, including the Dutch philosophers, Erasmus and Spinoza articulated concerns around related areas of morality, ethics, and citizenship. Of course there is a heightened focus on bringing initiatives that explicitly target student well-being. And it is partly inspired by research and trends around rising rates of students’ school-dropouts, inclination to violence, depression and suicides here in the Netherlands, but also more generally in Europe. Dr. René Diekstra's work has captured some of the historical influences on specific interventions in the country, especially influences from therapeutic movement, focus on community and inclusion of civic skills.
The Skills for Life education programmes for schools taken up by the greater city of Rotterdam in the 1990s were arguably the first organised effort in this direction. Ever since, the specific educational interventions, services, and research around social-emotional learning, positive behaviour support, and skills for life have only grown. There are recommendations around these areas from the European Council as well. Earlier this week, I was reading a news item about several youth organisations in the NL handing over a petition to the House of Representatives to include social-emotional learning in their curriculum.
THE OTHER STRAND OF YOUR RESEARCH FOCUSES ON EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES. COULD YOU BRIEFLY DESCRIBE YOUR WORK IN THAT AREA?
My research with Dr. Particia Burch on educational technologies (EdTech) has focussed on the values, institutions and symbols that undergird its increasing uptake in schools. There is of course the promise of personalization, adaptive learning and potentially innovative pedagogies, but also the values assumed around privileging data and making numbers central to educational governance. We highlighted the institutional complexity in which typical EdTech interventions unfold as well as the evolving role of teachers in making sense of all this. There is comparative work too that highlights how some philanthropic organisations add to how EdTech is imagined for pedagogical reforms.
WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FUTURE RESEARCH PLANS?
I am really looking forward to collaborating with, and learning from the inspiring work of colleagues here. My next project brings together my research on well-being and EdTech. Post covid-19, there is an increasing consensus on making both well-being and EdTech central to educational reform. There is a large-scale, policy level promotion of well-being through educational technologies. For example, UNESCO, OECD, the World Economic Forum, and governmental bodies including the European Council have released recommendations around it. Mobile based well-being apps are just one part of the offerings. Other technologies are being utilised to offer interventions such as Affective Tutoring, wearable bands that monitor moods, heart rate etcetera. At the same time we know from a lot of research (and personal experience) some of the dangers of digital technologies for well-being. My main interest is to explore the possibilities of flourishing, care, and inclusion created via technology and digital mediums.
Participation from target groups in research is rapidly becoming common practice. Although working with the target group can improve the quality of the research and has many advantages, there are also some challenges. In this blog Franca Leeuwis, project lead of the In Kaart register, explains how the register was developed. Additionally, she reveals what the stakeholders learned during this process.
Please continue reading to find out more about In Kaart.
In Kaart (www.inkaart.org) is a new register for children and adults with (suspected) ADHD, autism, DCD, dyslexia, an intellectual disability or a visual disability. Except for people with visual disability, this group is increasingly named as ‘neurodivergent’ or ‘diverse in development’, with possible disabilities or talents being determined in interaction with the broader environment. Parents can report about their children if they notice that their child is developing differently from other children. These broad inclusion criteria reflect the goals of the register. We want to gain a better understanding of functioning and life trajectories of neurodivergent people and people with visual disability. By including different groups, we will be able to study similarities but also get a clearer view on how these issues are distinct. Our set up additionally provides databases for subgroups to be studied, so if a researcher is interested in, for instance, young children with an intellectual disability and ADHD, they can submit a data request to the In Kaart steering group and if granted, work with this data. Our first data request will be handled soon and addresses the positive aspects of ADHD and other developmental issues.
For us, it was pivotal to work together with the people we want to include in In Kaart in developing the register from the beginning, and we are still actively collaborating with them. Carlo Schuengel initiated the idea for In Kaart and the register is set up from Viveon, the academic collaborative centre of s’ Heeren Loo and VU. Being embedded in structural collaboration between stakeholders made it rather self-evident that this should also be how In Kaart would work. Our steering group consists, next to researchers from different universities and departments, of representatives of our target groups.
The Netherlands Autism Register (NAR, KNOP VU) also was a blueprint for how we set up the In Kaart register. Not only have we learned from and instilled the technical format of the NAR but Sander Begeer (the founder of NAR) has shown us how to work with his target group. Modelling, after all, is a great way to learn. NAR additionally showed us how valuable their participants consider the feedback the NAR sends them. Therefore, we included this feature as well. Participants of In Kaart will receive personalised feedback about their data compared to the group (participants of In Kaart) and compared to themselves over time. They will also receive regular updates about (research) results.
HOW WE DEVELOPED IN KAART IN COLLABORATION WITH OUR PARTICIPANTS
Participants are represented in our steering group for structural input and collaboration. Additionally, we created groups of participants at the beginning of In Kaart to have in- depth discussions about specific topics and we will work together with them during the rest of the project. Furthermore, we are in constant interaction with participants through lobby-and interest groups. Following are some examples of the information participants shared in these interactions and how that shaped our register. Participants made clear what they struggled with most so we could make sure these domains were covered in our questionnaires and will continue to be in the future. They explained how each developmental issue comes with its own set of difficulties so we made sure to address specific questions for each group in our register. We joined in discussions about language around disorders/problems/diversity and how this can differ between people but also within people over time, depending on a complex set of variables, so we can understand why not everybody is on board with one term for the whole group. We are currently still debating our terminology, which also fuels our way of thinking about disorders and developmental issues. They gave us clear feedback on our website, questionnaires and also raised important issues concerning accessibility.
Participants expressed how they appreciated talking about these subjects in a group of people who could literally relate. Daan Slagman, a member of our steering groups puts it as follows;
‘It is very valuable to me to participate, as a person with DCD, to the In Kaart steering group. In Kaart is meant to be a register for both participants and researchers and I find it important to voice the opinions and experiences of the participants. It is fulfilling to see that I am giving valuable input and my opinion matters, especially for the adult participants that I, amongst others, represent.’
PARENTS IN BALANCE (OUDERS IN EVENWICHT)
In Kaart strives not only to focus on the individual with the developmental issues, but to understand development and caregiving within context. Therefore the Parents in Balance-project was a very fitting first project to be facilitated through In Kaart. Parents in Balance was itself initiated by parents with long-term care needs, in close alignment with the core values of In Kaart. Parents in Balance focusses on burnout-related thoughts and feelings and resilience. The project is rather unique in that the PhD-candidate, Nathalie Patty, works in a team with the project lead, Karen van Meeteren, who is expert-by-experience as a parent of a child with cerebral palsy.
THINGS WE LEARNED
Working with our participants is one of the great joys of my work. As with all things that you put effort in, it takes time. When starting a project that includes working with your target group we would highly recommend to reserve generous amounts of time. Some other things we learned and found useful were; make the relationship with these new colleagues reciprocal. Of course, you need to pay them in some way (there is a lot of debate about this, see for instance (doi: 10.17294/2330-0698.1975). Also, when your target group gives feedback, make clear how this feedback was handled. As with all input you get from colleagues, not everything can be used. Give information on why decisions are made. Finally, we would recommend not only asking your target group for input on certain aspects of the project, but also have people structurally be part of groups where decisions are made. That way, they can choose themselves when their input is valuable and relevant and they are involved in all aspects of the project.
TO CONCLUDE
Working with our target group has shaped our register and our way of thinking. As researchers we do our best to study situations and people as objectively as possible, however in many cases the topics we study can be personal and hit close to home. Working with the target group could therefore be an opportunity to learn more about how we relate to our research and how this research relates to us. For me personally, as a mother of a child with developmental issues, this has been very valuable.
Are you interested in joining In Kaart as a participant and filling out your first online questionnaire? Welcome at: In Kaart: formulieren
Questions about the data, working together on research or otherwise? Please contact In Kaart through Franca: f.h.leeuwis@vu.nl
“Moving from Scratch to a textual programming language can be a big step for kids. Hedy makes the transition easier!” - Felienne Hermans
Felienne Hermans is a full professor at Vrije University, (Faculty of Science, Computer Science) and also teaches computer science in secondary education. She is the creator of the Hedy programming language that helps children take their first steps in textual programming languages.
Please continue reading to find out more about Hedy.
WHY PROGRAMMING?
More and more schools in the Netherlands offer programming education. There are several reasons why programming education is important. The world is becoming increasingly digital, and apps play a major role in everyone's lives. Just look up a recipe on YouTube or order groceries quickly with your phone. However, students only learn the consuming side of software in this way, they are little concerned with making in the digital world. If students know the basic blocks of programming, they can also better think about what the digital world should look like. There is also a serious shortage of programmers and programming education at an early age can help to stimulate interest in the field, especially for students who may not be exposed to it at home, e.g. in families without a computer.
BLOCKS ARE A GOOD START
When students start programming, primary schools often do so initially with a block language, such as scratch. Such blocks languages Scratch are a good way to help children take their first steps in programming, because they do not use complicated codes, you can simply click blocks together and create programs that work immediately. Although block languages are easier to get started with, there are also setbacks. Felienne says:
“WHEN I STARTED TEACHING MYSELF IN THE UPPER YEARS OF PRIMARY SCHOOL AND THE LOWER YEARS OF SECONDARY EDUCATION, I NOTICED THAT STUDENTS NO LONGER WANT TO USE SCRATCH AT A CERTAIN AGE. THEY THEN THINK THAT SCRATCH IS NOT SERIOUS AND SEE IT AS SOMETHING FOR PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN, WHICH THEY ARE CERTAINLY NOT! AT THAT POINT, STUDENTS GET EXCITED TO LEARN TEXTUAL LANGUAGES LIKE PYTHON OR JAVASCRIPT BECAUSE THEY SEE THEM AS MORE MATURE, POWERFUL, AND REAL.”
LEARNING LANGUAGES IS DIFFICULT
Stepping from Scratch to Python is quite big. For something relatively simple like counting to 10, a child should type this:
for i in range(1,11):
print (i)
“THAT'S A LOT OF CRAZY CODE LINES TO REMEMBER AND A LOT OF WAYS TO GET IT WRONG. A WRONG SPACE CAN CRASH PYTHON WITH A CRYPTIC ERROR CALLED INDENTATIONERROR. EVEN IF CHILDREN WERE MOTIVATED TO LEARN TEXTUAL LANGUAGES, I SAW THAT THIS COULD LEAD TO FRUSTRATION. AND THAT IS NOT SO STRANGE OF COURSE! RESEARCH ON COLLEGE-LEVEL STUDENTS LEARNING TO PROGRAM SHOWED THAT EVEN GOOD STUDENTS MAKE SYNTAX ERRORS IN 50% OF PROGRAMS. THEN IT IS NOT SURPRISING THAT OUR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS HAVE TROUBLE GETTING PYTHON PROGRAMS TO WORK CORRECTLY”.
HEDY: A GRADUAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
Inspired by the way we teach language, Felienne Hermans created Hedy: a gradual programming language. Hedy consists of a number of levels, each with a few new commands. For example, in the first level you can easily print something to the screen with print:
print hello everyone!
Hedy's print statement in level 1 is a lot simpler than Python, requiring students to enclose the text in both parentheses and quotation marks. Programming concepts are introduced step by step. Level 7, for example, introduces so-called loops or loops that allow you to repeat code, but without complicated brackets and commas.
EACH LEVEL IS A LESSON
Hedy is available for free at www.hedycode.com and can be used in the browser just like Scratch. At the moment there are 18 levels available in Hedy and each level not only contains new commands, but also with built-in teaching materials to get started at every level. Each level takes about 45 minutes, and if students create an account, they can save and share their programs with each other and with the teacher. Students can also make drawings using the so-called turtle with codes. Because students can immediately make something real and fun, it gives the “dot on the horizon” an idea of where programming could take them.
HEDY GOES FURTHER!
While almost all textual programming languages have keywords in English, such as “for” or “repeat”, Hedy can be used in any language. Currently 47 different languages are supported, including Spanish, Arabic, Simplified Chinese and Hindi. Felienne:
“BECAUSE WE THINK IT IS IMPORTANT THAT ALL CHILDREN CAN PROGRAM, HEDY IS ALSO WELL SUITED FOR CHILDREN WITH A VISUAL IMPAIRMENT. HEDY'S TEXTUAL OUTPUT CAN BE READ OUT AUTOMATICALLY, AND YOU CAN RUN THE CODE WITH A HOTKEY SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE THE MOUSE.”
References:
1. https://www.hedycode.com
Anouk Zuurmond is a new LEARN! Member, who has a background in Literature and Philosophy. In the past, she has published on Hannah Arendt’s philosophy and its value for educational discussions, and Michel Serres’ pedagogical thinking. In this interview, Zuurmond talks about her work as a Philosopher of Education, and discusses the outline of a book for which she has received funding by the ‘Lira Fonds’, with the aim to publish academic research for a larger audience in Dutch.
Please continue reading to find out more.
COULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND AND SAY HOW THAT LED YOU TO BECOME SPECIALISED IN PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION?
My background is in humanities, particularly in philosophy and literature. I used to work as a teacher in philosophy; later on I became part of a teacher training institute. It was during my work as a teacher trainer when I realised that I really missed something in the curricula of the teacher training institutes. Eventually, I discovered it was my own personal background that I felt was missing, namely the philosophical aspects of working in education. The curricula were focused solely on classroom management and didactics, completely omitting the more fundamental questions.
‘What is the role of education? What is the role of school in society? What do we aim for when we educate our children?- These kinds of topics are hardly addressed in the teacher training curricula’
Because of that, I became interested in the overlap between philosophy and teacher training and started working on a course myself. I successfully developed and implemented a course on Philosophy of Education at the teacher training institute. Next, I started working at the University of Groningen as a coordinator of a track called Ethics of Education. This is a track where philosophy and theory in general, like history and law, come together to look at educational dilemmas from a multidisciplinary perspective. I really appreciated the fact that these educational dilemmas were complex socio-political and moral dilemmas which we were able to work on with students. As a result, I really grew into liking the topic of philosophy of education, specifically the moral dilemmas concerning education and upbringing. All things considered, you could summarise my background as combining philosophy and teacher training to later finding my way into philosophy of education.
SINCE THEN, HAS THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION BECOME MORE PROMINENT IN THE TEACHER TRAINING CURRICULA?
It is part of the curriculum, but it is not compulsory. Nonetheless, I am really happy that it is still part of the program. I consider it a blank space in teacher training curricula that these fundamental societal issues on how we view education are hardly ever addressed. It almost seems like we lack the appropriate language to talk about these issues.
Ironically, when the coronavirus pandemic began, all of the sudden everybody started having philosophical conversations about education. That made me realise that there is a huge interest in the topic, and a huge urgency for philosophy of education. During the pandemic, the discussions concerned topics like the goals of education, as well as those relating to privacy. For instance, we suddenly had to address all sorts of moral dilemmas of teachers who were able to see inside the rooms of students. Furthermore, there were issues with monitoring of students during exams, which had a problematic bias in the system towards implicit racism. That is to say, during the pandemics, all sorts of moral dilemmas came up. They were really pervasive and discussed all over the media, and I realised that you need to have a certain language to know exactly what is being talked about. By that I mean talking about quality, justice and morality, and being aware that this is a philosophical discourse which needs to be addressed. Unless we equip teachers with this specific type of reasoning used in such a discourse, we will run into serious problems.
HAS ANYTHING CHANGED SINCE THE PANDEMICS? HAS THAT BECOME SYSTEMATISED IN ANY WAY?
Not specifically I think, but I do believe that the urgency of expanding our language about education has been observed lately in the last few years. Especially when it comes to all the dilemmas during the covid crisis, I do think there was a change in the public discourse on how to deal with these issues. But it doesn't really translate into practice, such as courses, changes in curricula and let alone the learning goals that are being rephrased for teacher training.
On the other hand, I witnessed that students find it easier now to understand what philosophy of education is. This in turn makes it easier for me to talk to them about philosophy of education, as it is no longer an abstract way of theorising about the goals of education, but rather it is prominent that it has to do with specific problems that students deal with on a daily basis. What is more, you can deal with them from a very technical point of view. On the contrary, the issue of what we do with data, privacy and racism has not been addressed properly ever since.
HOW WOULD YOU THEN DEFINE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION?
I think philosophy of education is a very broad field, even though it seems narrow if you look at the number of academics working in that field in the Netherlands. If I were to describe it, I think it can be best explained by saying that philosophy of education addresses all sorts of issues and subdivisions that are present in philosophy in general. To give an example, when it comes to political philosophy, you can tie it up to education and ask what is the righteous system, or what is equality in education or equality of opportunity of education, which are all political issues.
If you tie it up to morality, you can investigate how to deal as a teacher with certain moral issues that appear in class, but also how to deal with online proctoring, which is also a moral issue.
When it comes to philosophy of technology, it can be translated into education as well, by asking about the issues of why we allow Google in our classrooms, or why we never address the ways in which data is collected in all sorts of learning systems that are easily adopted in class.
Thinking along the lines of epistemology, one could ask what we agree on as knowledge, why we want to translate this specific knowledge or how to deal with relativity, and so on.
‘I believe that by looking at the subdivisions of the large domain of philosophy, you can tie it up to all sorts of educational issues, which will allow you to get a grasp of what philosophy of education is in essence.’
WHAT ELSE DO YOU FOCUS ON IN YOUR RESEARCH?
For the last four years, I was involved in a research project where we studied critical thinking in vocational education, i.e. the MBO in the Netherlands. The great thing about the project was that there were philosophers of education involved, but also educational scientists, teachers and teacher trainers. So we had a real multidisciplinary approach. In the project, we looked at the role of critical thinking in citizenship education. We analysed the policies of the Dutch government that concern citizenship education in vocational education through a very critical lens. We also argued for interrelating of critical thinking in vocational training and the so-called Bildung. On top of that, we designed educational materials for teachers focused on critical thinking and looked at how that works in the classrooms to try and map how students improved their critical thinking abilities.
WHAT WERE THE GOALS OF THIS PROJECT?
One of the goals of the project was to make sure that the students were allowed to think freely during citizenship education. It means that they are not being trained to think about societal issues from a certain perspective, like from an empathy-based perspective, or to think that there is a moral standard that you need to achieve by following this education.
The main focus of that project was to make sure that students remain autonomous in the citizenship curriculum. We did that via allowing critical thinking to play a pivotal role in the curriculum. We did that from a philosophical point of view, by arguing in favour of history and the importance of pedagogical autonomy in education.We realised that the combination of educational scientists working together with philosophers on such an abstract concept like autonomy in education has worked out very well. Furthermore, we wrote an article together, where we had a philosophical and historical introduction, and which we translated later on into more specific dialectical tools on how to work towards autonomy in education.
DO YOU CONSIDER IT IMPORTANT TO BE ABLE TO TRANSLATE THE IDEAS OF EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY INTO PRACTICE?
Yes, I believe that building bridges between educational philosophers and scientists is really crucial. As a philosopher, you need to be informed about empirical data; you need to talk about something and not just about abstract concepts. Empirical information is thus really important to address as a philosopher. But I also think that as an empirical scientist you need to be aware that the concepts you are using have philosophical meaning. It is important to be aware of the choices you make and your own presuppositions in talking about such concepts.
This is also what I have observed here at the VU. What I like about this department is that there are people working on issues that are also of interest to me, but from yet another perspective, such as the sociological or educational science perspectives. Here, people seem to be really interested in building those bridges with more philosophical approaches. I feel that this department is also quite open to interconnecting agendas and seeing the value of these connections.
YOU ARE CURRENTLY ALSO WORKING ON A BOOK. COULD YOU SHARE WITH US WHAT THE MAIN SCOPE OF YOUR BOOK IS AND THE STORY BEHIND ITS FUNDING?
The funding for the book is quite an interesting arrangement, because it comes from an organisation that usually works with writers and journalists, and not necessarily with academics. The idea behind the founding is that they think that in academia there are far too many publications in English, whilst what we are addressing in our studies should be of interest to people also from the outside. The funding is therefore made for researchers who want to bring their research to a larger audience.
For that reason, the book I am going to write will be rather short and entirely in Dutch. The concept of the book came into existence as I was doing work on different philosophers, such as Ayn Rand, Simone Weil and Hannah Arend. I realised that all three of these thinkers address how we should position schools in society. The general question I am going to ask in the book is quite a provoking one, namely: why don’t we turn schools into businesses?
To answer that question, I will line up the perspective of all three philosophers. Ayn Rand is a philosopher of Laissez-faire capitalism and a proponent of privatisation. It is really interesting to read her text and to see what the arguments are from a right wing political standpoint for increasing privatisation, or for completely cutting the state off from the educational system. I am looking at her work to find out what the arguments are and to show that these arguments still have repercussions in current day discourses on the role of education in society.
Then, I am going to look at Hannah Arendt, who claims that schools should have a special palace in society without any interference of politics and commercial interests. I am going to explain that in our society we can hardly ever gain a position where an educational institution exists in a state of a so-called void. There is always some political and commercial interference.
Next, I will turn to Simone Weil, who is a philosopher focusing on how we could educate people in a working position. Weil had a very ideal strive towards educating people working in factories- she emphasises the importance of working together with labourers, factories and educational institutions to educate factory workers on the significance of knowledge and their emancipation and autonomous thinking skills.
IS THERE A SPECIFIC CONCLUSION THAT YOU ARE WORKING TOWARDS?
Simone Weil has inspired me to find a balanced approach to how we can work together with businesses and other parties to make sure that we educate our students, but at the same time remain in a position of autonomous and critical thinking about the institutes we are working with. That is the overall argument that I am working towards.
Imagine this: you recently graduated as a nurse, and have been working at the department of internal medicine for a few weeks. Today you work an evening shift and when you enter the room of one of your patients, you notice his clinical condition has seriously deteriorated and immediate action is necessary. You call for help and within a short time the room is filled with other nurses and physicians. Obviously, all these professionals are skilled and trained in their own profession, but you, as a new nurse, question yourself how to work within this ad hoc composed team in this stressful situation. You try to do what you can, but afterwards you have an unsatisfactory feeling about the collaboration. It really could have been better, resulting in better quality of care.
This is not a fictional situation, but something nursing students experience in real-life: a sense of incompetence when it comes to interprofessional collaboration in stressful situations. To help students to overcome this feeling, which may stem from a lack of knowledge, skills and attitude, might ask for a different approach in designing their education. This is the focus of my PhD, and I base the following tips and insights on the basis of my research work.
Acknowledging stress and its consequences
First, the what, when and how of stress could be more acknowledged in the nursing curriculum. What is stress, and what are potential causes? When exactly do you perceive stress? And how does stress influence the performance of you as an individual and as a team?
The shortest way to describe stress is as a dynamic interaction between a person and the environment, where a whole range of events in the environment can lead to the onset of stress. Think of non-functioning equipment, but more interesting: the lack of knowledge when it comes to your fellow team members. Can I trust them? Are they experienced enough for their task in the team? And how should I communicate with a physician that I have never met? Can I speak up to her or him? Questioning these things while you must perform at your very best in a stressful situation might lead to a feeling of stress. Not necessarily what you need at these moments.
Experiencing a feeling of stress in an already stressful environment (such as the above-mentioned rapidly deteriorating clinical situation of your patient) might shift your attention from your task to more irrelevant or distracting factors. Interpretation of information might be more complex, and executing a technical task such as inserting an IV suddenly feels like an impossible task. Communication with others becomes difficult, due to differences in professional background, existing hierarchies, or because of a change towards one-way communication where there is not much room to speak up.
The need for a representative learning environment
Training with attention for the what, when and how of stress, should take place in a learning environment that is as realistic as possible. In such an environment, students must execute certain technical skills, but simultaneously concentrate on making decisions, be aware of what happens around them, and interact with others in sometimes complex social dynamics. And not unimportant: cope with potential experienced stress.
To design such a learning environment, asks for more than just realism: students need a safe place where it is okay to make mistakes, where there is plenty of time to develop personal and professional roles when it comes to collaboration in stressful situations, and where teachers acknowledge that the learning environment itself can already be stressful for some students. In short: psychological safety and attention for the person behind the profession is of great importance and should form the backbone of any learning environment.
Before the winter break, we sat down with Dr. Anouk Wouters, who had just returned from a research stay at University College London. In this interview, Anouk addressed the topic of admission policies for medical schools in the Netherlands and England, considered their costs and benefits and discussed the potential focus of future research in the field of selection and admission procedures for medical studies.
WHAT WAS YOUR MAIN MOTIVATION TO VISIT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON?
There were several reasons, but mainly to supervise a PhD student. I am an assistant professor in the field of research and education. Secondly, I am part of the Motivation for Lifelong Learning program within LEARN!. My research topics are mainly focused on selection and admission procedures for medical studies, including the issue of diversity and inclusion. For almost a year now, I have been supervising a PhD student at University College London. She is doing research on stakeholder perception on contextual admissions, which are a way to increase equity in medical school admission procedures.
WHAT ARE THE ADMISSION PROCEDURES FOR MEDICAL SCHOOLS BASED ON IN THE NETHERLANDS?
The Netherlands has a history of lottery-based admissions for medical studies. To give an example, we currently have about 4 applicants for each spot for medical studies here at VU, meaning there are 350 places and over a thousand applicants. For a long time, students in the Netherlands were admitted based on a lottery, which was weighted for GPA. Later on it was thought of as unfair, because in a lottery there was a chance that the high achieving students would not be selected and admitted. The lottery-based system was gradually changed to a selection-based procedure. There was also a time period when we had both the lottery and the selection at the same time, but now we have selection-based admissions only.
HAS THE SELECTION-BASED SYSTEM PROVEN TO BE MORE EFFECTIVE SO FAR?
This is interesting, because this is what I was focusing on in my own PhD together with a group of other researchers in the Netherlands. What we all saw was that selected students sometimes outperform the lottery admitted students, but the differences are very small, meaning that the gains of this system are barely noticeable. Together comes the fact that a lottery is a simpler solution, as it requires less time and effort as compared to such an intense procedure like selection.
DO YOU HAVE ANY HYPOTHESES ON WHY THIS MIGHT BE?
Especially in medicine, we rarely have any issues with performance. Drop-out is also almost never a problem. Even back in the days of the lottery-based admission system, the performance level was always high, meaning there was simply not much room for improvement once it was changed to selection.
At the same time, however, there were concerns about how using selections would impact student diversity. Currently, I am also supervising Lianne Mulder, one of our PhD students, who has found that since we have made that change to selection, student diversity has decreased. Diversity in terms of gender has been a problem since a while, as there are way more females than males in medical schools. Another important factor is the socioeconomic background- we have observed that the wealthier the students, the higher their chances of being admitted. Furthermore, ethnic minorities have much lower odds of admission, which impacts what the student body looks like. Consequently, there is a lack of representativeness of the patient population that the current students and future doctors will serve. What makes the issue even more complex, is that in order to reach a representative student population, some directed efforts are needed. However, in the Netherlands it is not allowed to take into account the barriers that some students have had to overcome throughout their education pathway which may have influenced their admission process for medical studies.
ARE SIMILAR ISSUES REGARDING ADMISSION POLICIES PRESENT IN ENGLAND?
Yes, there seem to be the same issues, but in England it is allowed to take the disadvantages students may face into account, such as their socioeconomic background. Medical schools there acknowledge that some students will have less opportunities to obtain higher scores in pre-university education, which is what they are trying to account for in the selection procedure by considering the differences between students based on their socioeconomic background.
HOW DOES THAT WORK IN PRACTICE?
One way to do it is contextualised admissions which I have mentioned before. What those entail is that when students apply for medicine, if based on their background they can be deemed as underprivileged, then with the implementation of that procedure, there will be certain requirements in terms of previous academic performance. For that group of students these students the requirements will be lower, because it is acknowledged that they didn't have the support and resources to obtain the higher grades like the students with a higher socioeconomic background.
IS THE PHD STUDENT YOU ARE SUPERVISING ALSO FOCUSING ON A COMPARISON BETWEEN THE POLICIES IN THE NETHERLANDS AND ENGLAND?
Not really, for now her study is focused on the context of those policies and how different stakeholders perceive these contextual admissions. Accounting for the stakeholders’ opinions is an important factor to consider, because it is evident that despite those policies, some students still can’t reach the educational goals they have. The system is not working perfectly in England. The same goes for the Netherlands- it is important for making such policy changes to understand how the stakeholders perceive them. For instance, there are ongoing discussions about the change from lottery to selection in the Dutch parliament. There are certain concerns that selection, similarly to the lottery, has undesirable consequences. Those concerns are present even though it was because of the public opinion that these changes happened in the first place. This again shows how important for such policy changes and healthcare it is to be fully accepted by the stakeholders. And that is what we are looking at in her research- how stakeholders perceive these contextual admissions, together with the opinion of prospective students and the already selected ones. On top of that, we investigate the opinions of those involved in policy-making, as well as in the execution of the admission processes, which gives us a whole range of stakeholders. What is more, in England there are some very prestigious universities and the less prestigious ones. While the very prestigious schools can be very selective, the others aren’t. That is why we have to make sure to include people from different ranges of universities.
WHAT WAS THE GOAL OF YOUR VISIT APART FROM THE SUPERVISION?
The supervision was the main point of my visit, along with attending a seminar organised by UCL together with Sciences Po. Apart from the attendees from these two universities, there were a couple scholars from Germany and me representing the Netherlands. We had a chance to discuss our own research and to see if we could collaborate altogether in the future on research in selection and diversity. During the seminar, I witnessed that societal influences and responses to changes such as the admission system (like ours from lottery to selection) are quite similar across these countries. What we all noticed was that in this context, the response to these changes has to do with how people want to protect the status quo, which is usually a situation in which the privileged want to secure their prosperity. And when that is challenged, like in the case of the Netherlands wanting to change back to the lottery-based selection, it is those same people that are concerned the most.
We saw lots of commonalities in this respect across all four countries- we saw the same things happening, especially the urge to protect the privileged. It was very insightful for me, because normally we all just focus on the context of our own country and don't pay attention to the fact that the problem we are facing may be universal.
IS THE RESEARCH LANDSCAPE DIFFERENT IN ENGLAND THAN IN THE NETHERLANDS, ALSO IN THE CONTEXT THAT WE HAVE JUST DISCUSSED?
When it comes to my topic which is selection diversity and equitable admissions, because of the fact that practice is so much different from the Netherlands, so is the research. For instance, in England they get to study policies like the ones we just discussed, meanwhile in the Netherlands we are not even allowed to have such policies implemented. This makes the focus very different, which for me is very interesting to see, mostly because what they already have in England is what we hope to achieve with our research in the Netherlands. Moreover, it is fascinating to see what consequences such policies have in a country that has already implemented those, like England.
DID YOU WITNESS ANYTHING THAT ALREADY WORKS WELL IN THE NETHERLANDS BUT COULD BE IMPROVED IN ENGLAND?
Yes, especially at the conferences I have noticed that people are alway curious to hear about our findings regarding the lottery-based system, as it is something unique. I know that in many countries they also struggle with diversity and effectiveness of selection procedures, so they all at some point think ‘shouldn’t we just use the lottery?’. Since the Netherlands has already done it, together with a large body of research on its effectiveness, that is what other countries like England find so interesting.
Furthermore, what we see in our research is that the applicant pool is not that representative of the general population. The problem in the Dutch context is that already at the age of 11 or 12 we know that socioeconomic and migration background can play a role in the advice given to students concerning which school track to follow in the future. It is important to emphasise that this is actually the level that should be targeted and where we could make the most significant changes. Unfortunately, as medical schools we don't have much influence on that.
In England on the other hand, you have the issue of huge differences between public and private schools, already at the level of primary and secondary education. In fact, 80% of all medical school students come from only 20% of secondary schools, which are often some very specific private schools. That is what I think both England and the Netherlands have in common- already at the level of primary and secondary education the students are placed in tracks which makes some of them better equipped to end up in higher education, especially medical schools.
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY SHOULD BE STRESSED THE MOST IN FUTURE RESEARCH IN THIS FIELD?
Definitely more international collaboration, more comparative studies and more socio-political influence on the policies in question. These are the things I would like to see being studied in the near future in order to get a more holistic view on how education is viewed across countries.
Furthermore, I have witnessed a common mindset of people who claim they understand the need for equity in schooling, but at the same time want excellence. What is more, they perceive the relationship between these two as a trade-off. It is important to realise that if you invest in diversity you will not lose quality. In fact, it will most likely be the opposite; there is a whole line of research proving that investing in student diversity leads to better quality.
Next, there are a lot of studies focusing solely on the individual when choosing candidates for medical schools. A lot less is talked about what kind of healthcare workforce we actually need and how we can improve the educational climate and the work environment by making sure it is diverse and inclusive. This is where the focus should be.
Ola David is a PhD candidate who visited LEARN! at the end of 2022 to get guidance and support on her research. In this interview, we discussed her motivation for choosing the VU for her visiting scholarship as well as the details of her PhD project.
COULD YOU PLEASE INTRODUCE YOURSELF AND TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND?
My name is Ola David and I am a PhD candidate. My research is focused on education decentralisation in sub Saharan African (SSA) countries. I became interested in decentralisation reformations because of my experience as an education adviser within the UN system. I see first-hand how reforms that revolve around education development are advocated at a high level within the UN, however, I am curious to know how such reforms translate into day to day decision-making practices; especially at lower levels of implementation where they are expected to wield the most impact. To some extent, the research emerging from SSA is not clear on what is attainable through the agency of stakeholders, what their decision-making practices look like and how it may or may not be linked to the desired education outcomes. This is why I am exploring education decentralisation through the lens of the stakeholders who are at the core of implementing decentralisation at lower levels of decision-making. I think that fairly sums up what my PhD research entails.
WHAT METHODS ARE YOU USING IN YOUR RESEARCH?
Currently, I am conducting a review of literature using framework synthesis. Since the conceptualization of education decentralisation is underdeveloped within the context of SSA, I developed a conceptual framework for the review using relevant sensitising concepts. The framework was used as a scaffolding device for opening-up the literature for synthesis and for coding the data obtained from the studies included in the review.
Upon completion of the literature review, I intend to conduct a policy analysis. I am going to focus on a specific education decentralisation policy implemented in Lagos -state Nigeria. Policy document analysis generally relies on data obtained from documents and accounts of people. My methodology will involve deconstructing the data obtained from those two sources. This will allow me to clarify what the policy initially intended, and what was actually implemented in practice.
Next, I will move on to the empirical aspect of my research. My intent is to gather qualitative data from school principals in Lagos- state, Nigeria. My research will explore their perspectives about their decision-making practices within the context of education decentralisation. I will be conducting interviews in order to obtain richer data that will offer better clarity specifically on the autonomy they have to make decisions and their practices.
DO YOU ALREADY HAVE AN IDEA ABOUT A POLICY THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO FOCUS ON?
My empirical research will focus on exploring the aftermath of the World Bank decentralisation project initiated in Lagos State Nigeria. The reason why I want to analyse that specific policy is because it is often referred to as a benchmark for other education decentralisation efforts in Nigeria. I believe it would be helpful to see first hand what the strengths of the policy were both from the analysis of the implementation framework and the perspective of core stakeholders who were involved in the implementation.
WHAT IS THIS PROJECT ABOUT?
The World Bank project was implemented in Lagos State Nigeria as an effort to implement education decentralisation. Policies were developed to enable school districts to become autonomous. The districts were allowed to make decisions related to the financing, management and organisation of schools, as well as the way teaching and learning environments are regulated. In this regard the schools were able to make tangible decisions that could actually impact the teaching and learning quality.
It was a real game changer for schools, since many school functions were previously centralised at a state level, under the direct supervision of the state commissioner of education.
WHICH PARTS OF THE PROJECT YOU HAVE JUST DESCRIBED ARE YOU WORKING ON HERE AT THE VU?
I have come here to work on my literature review, to present my work and to get some feedback. I had an opportunity to spend a whole day working with Melanie Ehren and Marjolein Camphuijsen. Based on their feedback, I have been able to further develop the conceptual framework and refine the methodology based on the focus of the research questions.
WHAT MADE YOU CHOOSE THE VU FOR YOUR VISITING SCHOLARSHIP?
It was mostly Melanie’s expertise in education and school governance, I always knew I wanted to do something concerning systems of decision making, so the VU was a perfect place for me. Melanie Ehren has been an excellent supervisor and provided me with great guidance, which really helped me to move forward with my work. My visit to the VU gave me the mental space to focus on my work and to immerse myself in an academic environment. I really enjoyed coming to campus everyday, because there was no distraction. The visit really shifted my perspective when it comes to research- it is mostly the attention that I started paying to the smallest details of my work. It helped me realise that those seemingly little details about my work are my intellectual contribution to research.
AS YOUR VISIT AT VU IS SLOWLY COMING TO AN END - WHERE ARE YOU GOING NEXT?
I am on my way back to the US but I already have plans to come back to Amsterdam in March, 2023. The visiting scholar opportunity was great for me, it was something that I always wanted to do, but couldn’t because of the pandemic. On this particular visit I didn't have much time to go sightseeing and to really discover the city, as there were too many work-related things I wanted to accomplish. When I come back, I intend to explore the city and life in Amsterdam a bit more.
INCREASING INEQUALITY
In many countries, COVID-related school closures affected already disadvantaged students most in their opportunities to learn and progress. In the Netherlands, the Inspectorate of Education raised the alarm over how the pandemic is leading to further inequality, with alarming numbers of students leaving primary education without the basic skills in arithmetic, reading and writing. As in many countries across the world, the Dutch government is developing new policies to address learning loss from COVID and ‘build back a better system’. These policies include funding for schools to organize targeted support for students in need (e.g. tutoring, remedial teaching) with further investments for schools serving a disadvantaged population. In addition, a government-wide investigation is now underway to better understand the root causes of educational inequality and how to make the education systems more responsive to policies addressing those root causes.
A DECENTRALIZED SYSTEM AND A COORDINATED APPROACH
Improving education from the top is not an easy task, given the highly decentralized nature of the education system in the Netherlands and the value placed on school autonomy. The OECD describes Dutch schools as having the highest autonomy internationally. Freedom of education has been the backbone of Dutch education for decades, and is a core value for many policymakers and practitioners working in education.
A more centralized and coordinated approach is, however, crucial to reduce inequality, given that differences in learning opportunities and outcomes often lie outside a school’s span of control. Examples are of parents’ free school choice, which leads to highly homogenous schools with a concentration of social, behavioural and learning problems in some schools, or the early tracking in secondary education which tends to disadvantage children from poorly educated and/or migrant backgrounds. Various studies have mapped out the causes and consequences of the high inequality in the Dutch system with one clear message: this is a complex problem because of its multidisciplinary nature (spatial, social, economic inequalities interact and reinforce each other) where any type of measure to improve education will have multiple outcomes, a high level of interconnectedness, and non-linear outcomes. The high complexity requires a coordinated approach that goes beyond individual interventions or programmes, but where the goal is to change how the whole education system operates to reduce inequality.
WHERE SHOULD WE START WHEN TRYING TO ADDRESS HIGH INEQUALITY?
Ideally we want a set of interventions that have a multiplier effect where their collective impact on reducing inequality is greater than the sum of single activities. As good teachers and high quality teaching are the backbone of any education system, this is where we should start:We need to ensure that all school have sufficient high-quality teachers.
However, the Netherlands faces a large teacher shortage that will only become bigger in the future. Predictions are that secondary schools in 2023 will have a shortage of more than 1000 teachers with a further estimation of a shortage of 2600 fte in 2026, due to retirement. Certain subjects (Dutch, German, French, ICT, Mathematics, Science etc) will be particularly affected in the future, while schools in some urban areas in the country are already in constant crisis management to fill vacancies. Approximately 12% of primary schools in the large cities (e.g. Amsterdam) have permanent vacancies as teachers are moving to more affordable places to live and work.Even when a sufficient number of teachers enters the profession (which is unlikely given current student numbers on teacher education programmes), many of them leave due to high workload and stress, a lack of support and too much responsibility when starting to teach, an unsupportive school environment with too few opportunities for career progression and lack of communication with colleagues and school leadership. An average of 31% of beginning teachers in secondary education tend to leave teaching within five years of graduation.
CONTRADICTORY MEASURES
The Ministry of Education has tried to increase the number of teachers by allowing schools to hire unqualified teachers while they train to be teachers on the job, but these teachers seem to be particularly prone to exit the profession. It’s also worth questioning this strategy for the message it sends to the profession at large: how should we understand the nature and status of teaching when we allow anyone with a degree in Higher Education to be a teacher? The Inspectorate of Education reports that an average of 7% of primary schools have unqualified teaching staff and this has detrimental consequences for the instructional quality and children’s learning outcomes. The OECD TALIS report also indicates a sharp decline in the status of the teaching profession in the Netherlands. This may well be an important factor in shortages, as low status affects the potential to recruit sufficient high quality teachers. By reducing entry requirements, we unintentionally lower quality standards as well as the status of the profession.
Unfortunately, past policies have seen more of such inconsistencies, such as the introduction of a professional register which provides entry barriers but also increases the administrative workload of teachers without necessarily improving the overall quality of their work.
WHAT CAN WE DO TO INCREASE THE NUMBER OF HIGH QUALITY AND QUALIFIED TEACHERS?
Various studies look at the types of interventions that can help build a strong and sufficiently large body of teachers. Here is a summary of the top 6:
And one final take-away message: policies and measures need to be coherent and well-aligned in both aiming to increase quality and quantity; compromising on either will not reduce inequality in the long term.
In this study (published in Scientific Reports), we estimated the impact of different types of screen time (watching, socializing, or gaming) on children’s intelligence. The novelty of our study was that we accounted for the confounding effects of both genetic predispositions and socio-economic backgrounds. Only a few studies so far considered socio-economic status (household income, parental education, and neighborhood quality), and no study had accounted for genetic effects. Genes matter because intelligence is highly heritable. If unaccounted for, these factors could confound or mask the true impact of screen time on children’s intelligence. For example, children born with a certain genetic background might be more prone to watch TV and, independently, have learning issues. The lottery of genetics is a major confounder in any psychological process, but until recently this has been hard to account for due to heavy costs and technological limitations.
We analyzed 9855 children from the USA who were part of the ABCD dataset with measures of intelligence at baseline (age 10) and after two years. At baseline, time watching (r = − 0.12) and socializing (r = − 0.10) were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence (standardized β = + 0.17), meaning that the children who played more video games at age 10 has the highest gains at age 12. Socializing had no effect. And, unexpectedly, watching videos also benefited intelligence (standardized β = + 0.12), contrary to prior research on the effect of watching TV. Broadly, our results are in line with research on the malleability of cognitive abilities from environmental factors, such as from school interventions and the Flynn effect.
Junlin Yu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, Helsinki University, will be visiting LEARN! from mid-June until mid-July to work together with prof. Nienke van Atteveldt and dr. Tieme Janssen. During his stay, he will give a live seminar to the LEARN! audience to discuss some of his publications discussed in the interview below.
BEFORE YOUR CURRENT POSITION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI, YOU COMPLETED YOUR PHD AND MPHIL AT THE UNIVERSIY OF CAMBRIDGE. COULD YOU TELL US ABOUT YOUR WORK THERE?
I am intrigued by the phenomenon that boys lag behind girls academically in many countries. Obviously, girls’ underachievement is still an important issue in the global south, but in the more developed countries, we see that boys are underachieving in schools. My PhD research focused on how gendered motivational patterns contributed to gender gaps in school engagement and achievement.
My PhD research uncovers two motivational pathways in boys’ underachievement. The first - an academic pathway - concerns that boys are more often found in fixed mindset motivational patterns. They tend to see their ability as innate, view effort as pointless, and disengage from school. The second - a social pathway - concerns boys’ greater preoccupation with their social image. Academic effort is considered uncool and, as a result, leads boys to withdraw effort from school. Both of these pathways contribute to boys’ disengagement and underperformance in school. However, these results mask a complex picture: in reality, not all boys underperform, and not all girls do well in school.
In a third study, I identified the specific groups of girls and boys who underperformed in school. To do this, I used latent profile analysis to investigate how students acted out their gender roles in school. The results show that problematic academic mindsets and social goals that we discussed earlier did not apply to two thirds of the boys who had more flexible ideas about gender. At the same time, signs of low engagement and achievement were apparent in a sizable group of girls who conformed to the traditional gender norms. By identifying the specific groups of girls and boys who fall behind, this study challenges the simplistic, binary view of the gender gap in schools.
AT YOUR CURRENT POST-DOCTORAL POSITION, YOU ARE STUDYING HOW STUDENTS' GROWTH MOTIVATION (GROWTH MINDSET, MASTERY GOAL) IMPACTS LEARNING. HOW DOES THE GROWTH MINDSET VS A FIXED MINDSET AFFECT STUDENT LEARNING?
Like many other motivation researchers, I am interested in studying motivation as an independent variable, that is, how it influences students’ engagement and learning. However, I also study motivation as a dependent variable–an important educational outcome in and of itself. In my current research, I am looking at how environmental influences such as the school contex and teacher practices can influence students’ motivation to improve, including growth mindset.
Carol Dweck proposes that people can think about their intelligence or ability in two ways. Some people view their ability as largely fixed, whereas other people view their ability as malleable. This is based on her earlier work on attribution theory where personal attributes are either fixed and uncontrollable or malleable and controllable. A large body of work has found that students with a stronger growth mindset tend to be more resilient. They bounce back from failure more quickly, are more engaged and persist in the face of difficulty. As a result of such adaptive motivational patterns they also perform better in school compared to those with a fixed mindset.
My recently published study looks at the association of students’ growth mindset with teacher beliefs, teaching practices and the broader school climate. In this study, I used the Finnish data from the OECD Study on Social and Emotional Skills. I selected the elementary school students sample because they are taught by one teacher for different subjects so it is easier to tease out the influence of teacher beliefs and teaching practices compared to secondary school students who have different subject teachers.
What I found is that students reported a stronger growth mindset when their teachers used more guided inquiry practices. Guided inquiry represents a middle ground between traditional teacher-directed instruction and student-led discovery learning. Students have the autonomy to explore and discuss their own ideas but, at the same time, teachers provide a lot of scaffolding and guidance to the students. The result suggests that when students make progress autonomously, they may experience a sense of effectiveness and believe that ability can be improved.
I also found that students reported a stronger fixed mindset when teachers differentiated tasks based on studuents’ abilities. This is interesting because we often talk about differentiation and individualized learning at school. It appears that there are nuanced differences between effective and ineffective differentiation practices. When teachers engage in ineffective, unsophisticated task differentiation practices, they may unwittingly communicate their expectations that certain students are more able than others.
At the school level, an emphasis on the value of social-emotional development was linked to a stronger growth mindset among students. This is interesting because as students progress from primary to secondary education, there is an increasing emphasis on their academic performance and a decreasing emphasis on their social-emotional needs.
I also looked at within-class ability grouping and school-wide ability tracking and how they might influence students’ mindset. However, I did not find significant effects. It seems that ability grouping and teacher practices are intertwined: for example, when teachers teach an ability-grouped class, they tend to use more direct instruction. It becomes difficult to disentangle the effects of the grouping from instructional style. I touch upon these ideas briefly in the paper concluding that grouping, as an organizational tool, might not be directly linked to student mindset but potentially affects teacher expectations and practices. In the next step, I plan to conduct cross-national comparisons to better understand which classroom and school factors are consistently linked to growth mindset across cultures and which are more culturally specific factors.
In the LEARN! seminar on July 5th, I will also be discussing one study which shows that students' mindsets can create complex motivational systems that influence students’ learning. Based on existing research, one might assume a straightforward relationship between students’ mindsets and goals: students with fixed mindsets pursue performance goals, and students with growth mindsets pursue mastery or learning goals. Instead, I found that students form complex motivational profiles: students with the same mindset may enact it differently through their goals. I found a group of growth mindset students who simultaneously pursue high mastery goals and high performance goals. Thus it seems like growth mindset students are more able to coordinate mastery and performance goals at the same time and do as well as and sometimes even better than purely growth oriented students in school. In addition, I have identified a group of fixed mindset students who have low levels of performance goals and disengage from their education. A recent study by a PhD student in prof. Nienke van Atteveldt’s lab has replicated these mindset profiles in a Dutch sample, which is quite encouraging.
WHAT WILL YOUR WORK FOCUS ON DURING YOUR STAY AT LEARN?
I will be working with prof. Nienke van Atteveldt and dr. Tieme Janssen. As part of their research, they have conducted a growth mindset intervention which improved student achievement. Since my interest is in how the learning environment may influence student mindset, I will be working with them to look at the contextual moderators of growth mindset intervention. Sometimes even if we deliver a growth mindset intervention, students may encounter very different messages in their broader school environment and daily interactions with school teachers. One of my hypotheses is that students who receive the growth mindset intervention are more likely to perform better when they also have a supportive classroom environment compared to others.I will be working with existing data and looking at for whom and under what conditions the growth mindset intervention works.
WHY THIS INSTITUTE FOR THE VISITING STAY?
It is all about shared research interests. I have met both Nienke and Tieme previously at conferences and know that we have similar interests. I have never worked with randomized control trials before but I have expertise in classroom-based research. So I believe this would be complementary and a great opportunity to collaborate.I am hoping to learn from their extensive research programmes on students’ growth mindset. I also hope that this experience will help me develop a network, independent of my current PI’s network. I look forward to meeting other researchers who are doing interesting work at the LEARN! Institute.
The one thing that I have learned from my doctoral research journey is nothing but to wait. Wait for your participants to respond to your request, wait for your research results, wait for the golden ‘moments’ when writing just flow like water, wait for your paper to make sense to your readers, wait for professors to respond to your emails, wait for your paper to get accepted, wait for the spring and summer. The list could go on. Waiting is an endless activity. These ‘waiting’s’, as I have also mentioned in my research, are not the absence of actions but the opportunities to think, reflect, and focus on building something new (not entirely in a materialistic way). It also reminds you to value the importance of little pause in your life (see more about ‘Waiting’ in Basnet et al., 2020).
During my research, I have got the opportunity to enjoy plenty of these little ‘waiting’ moments. Every research interview conducted provided me a chance to sit down and listen to new narratives, experience new realities, and new lived lives. Until now, I had conducted research with Nepalese individuals only. However, I recently got the opportunity to work with Dutch individuals (mainly students) as well. There was one moment during this research, where I watched and listened to a white participant and found myself thinking: ‘my life would have been much easier if I had been born white.’ After finishing the interview with the participant, I got my little ‘waiting’ moment where I suddenly realised how I have generalised and homogenised the ‘white’ as a ‘privileged’ group.
The discourse surrounding ‘white privileges’ emphasizes the fact that being born ‘white’ has its advantages. I had the assumption that ‘white individuals’ have the same privileges and have uniform opportunities. But, not all white individuals are homogenous, nor do they suffer or experience the opportunities equally because they have diverse and multiple identities, as do the people of the global south. During my research interviews with the Dutch students, I noticed that the experiences and differences among the Dutch students are palpable. Often Dutch students (mainly from the minority group) mentioned that the ‘real’ Dutch (white skin and blue eyes) do not consider ‘them’ Dutch.
During several interviews with the students, I also encountered common reluctance to refer to themselves (here I am referring to the students with minority backgrounds) as ‘Dutch-Dutch’. At the same time, students who considered themselves ‘Dutch-Dutch’ were often found to attribute ‘other-Dutch’ students' access to education, their failures and opportunities based on their skin color, limited financial resources, cultural preferences, Dutch language fluency/accuracy and their clothing choices.
How long do these ‘other-Dutch’ need to wait to be fully accepted as ‘Dutch-Dutch’?
Edward Said (1987) conceptualised the historical relationship between the West and the East also as the Occident and the Orient. In Said’s Orientalism, knowledge about ‘us’ and ‘them’ is constructed through the practice of power (Said, 1987). The notions such as cultural preferences or obligations, limited financial resources, language barriers, clothing choices, and others found in the conversations with the ‘Dutch-Dutch’ students were purely part of the European imagination of the ‘Orient’. These notions are the product of Orientalism or part of Orientalist perspectives wherein knowledge and power were created through existing European hegemony. The perspectives show that the differences constructed between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are situated in the historical relationship between the Orient (Dutch ethnic minority group in the Netherland) and the Occident (the white-blue-eyed Dutch). The dichotomies constructed by the Dutch students during the interviews and my own against the ‘white Dutch’ as ‘us’- inferior (Orient) and ‘them’- superior (Occident), speak about the stereotyping that we have adopted in our lives about each other. There is a need to encourage students to challenge these binaries and discourses at an early stage of their educational journey.
As an ‘outsider’-researcher in the Netherlands, the experience of conducting interviews with Dutch students, especially around identity, marked the actual internalisation of my role as a researcher.
ARE WE WITNESSING A GLOBAL RISE IN CONTRACT CHEATING?
A growing number of studies has tried to get a sense of how prevalent contract-cheating is. Based on a systematic review of the academic literature, Newton (2018) has estimated that one in seven graduates around the world might have engaged in contract-cheating, which constitutes 31 million students worldwide. Newton (2018) however noted we need to interpret these estimates with caution, as numbers are likely to be underreported.
Part of the problem in estimating the scale of contract cheating is that it is difficult to detect. Originality-detection software such as Turnitin, PlagScan and Urkund is often ineffective, as contracted assignments tend to contain original content and are often well-written and well-referenced (e.g. see Lines 2016). Consequently, in attempting to get an idea of the number of students engaged in contract-cheating, most research consists of self-report studies, which ask students whether they have ever paid a third-party to undertake work for them. Concerns however exist about whether self-report methods are reliable techniques to get a sense of “undesirable” behaviors such as academic misconduct (Newton, 2018). Studies with an experimental design indeed suggest self-report studies might result in underestimates of commercial contract cheating usage (Rigby et al., 2015).
Other ways of getting a sense of the prevalence of contract cheating are to look at the supply-side of the practice. In many countries, custom essay websites have proliferated and a significant informal “gig economy” has emerged. By reviewing the financial status of the ‘Essay Industry’, Owings and Nelsen (2014) estimated that the industry has ‘annual revenues somewhere upward of $100 million with estimated minimum profits of $50 million.’ While it remains difficult to say how many students are engaged in contract cheating and how many commercial contract cheating services are in operation, the growth of the supply side indicates the practice of contract-cheating might be widespread.
WHY DO STUDENTS ENGAGE IN CONTRACT CHEATING?
One key question that emerges from the acknowledgement that there might be substance to claims by media actors and policy makers about contract cheating being ‘on the rise’ (Newton, 2018, p.7) is why this would be the case. With regards to this question, the academic literature highlights a number of student motivations to engage in contract cheating, which include a lack of confidence in one’s own skills, a lack of satisfaction with the teaching and learning environment, disengagement with courses or assignments, a lack of understanding of assessment requirements, external pressures (including times pressure and performance pressure), a lack of understanding of academic integrity principles, as well as the perception that other students are cheating. Moreover, research highlights a number of personal characteristics might play a role. It appears male students, younger students, and students enrolled in lower levels of study, are more likely to engage in contract cheating. Some studies have also documented that second language students might be more likely to use contract cheating services.
What can we do about contract cheating?
In order to protect academic standards, quality and integrity, and to limit the influence of contract cheating in higher education, a number of suggestions have been offered which could be considered by policymakers as well as higher-education institutes:·
While some of these suggestions might not be able to eliminate the opportunity to engage in contract cheating entirely, they might reduce the motivation to do so. In deciding how to respond to contract cheating practices, Walker and Towley (2012) recommend policymakers and higher education institutes to ‘avoid moral panic and remain focused on supporting honest students and good academic practice’. In other words, any response to contract cheating would likely benefit from making sure prevention and deterrence measures are developed in ways which support the intellectual community, promote good and trusting relationships between students and academic staff, and strengthen students’ academic skills.
Elsbeth Prins, from the Dutch inspectorate of education is an external PhD candidate at LEARN!, conducting her research as part of the EISON project. As part of her PhD studies, she will look at the financial supervision of educational networks. In this interview, Elsbeth introduces her work and discusses her plans.
CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT YOUR ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND?
I completed my Master's degree in technical business administration at the University of Groningen. Following my studies, around the year of 2000, I started working as an internal auditor in the financial services industry. However, because I missed the academic life while working as an auditor, I completed another degree in cultural studies as a hobby and two postgraduate degrees in controlling and IT auditing for work.
After working as an internal auditor for ten years, I took management positions in financial departments. Then, several years ago, I transitioned into education because I wanted to work on something with higher relevance to society. Thus, I trained as a school administrator, but I decided to work for the inspection instead since school administration turned out to be too operational for me, and I wanted to use my auditing experience. For the last two years, I have been working for the Dutch inspectorate of Education, where I was offered to participate in the EISON program with the possibility to do a Ph.D. At the time, it seemed to me like a perfect way to combine work and research. However, I have not yet found the right balance between the two. I think readers will also recognize that urgent tasks overshadow less urgent ones, even if they are important, like working on the outline of your research.
CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT THE EISON PROJECT?
The EISON project - which stands for external and internal supervision arrangements for organizational networks addressing complex societal issues - is a cooperation between academics and several inspectorates: education, healthcare, social housing and safety. The object of the research is the supervision of networks.
Networks are organizations that can work together and achieve more working together than they can achieve by themselves. Within the education field, we are looking at networks for inclusive education that are supervised (or evaluated) by the inspectorate of education. These formal networks are mandated by legislation and include both mainstream schools and schools for special education who receive funding to provide support for children who need this. The network (coordinated by a separate authority) needs to allocated budget to schools to ensure all children in the region receive the support they need; where possible in a mainstream school. The EISON study will look at how inspection and supervision of networks can contribute to this goal. As my area of expertise is in finance, my research will focus on the financial aspects of supervision, the financial decisions made within the network, and the effects of these decisions on network effectiveness.
WHAT IS THE ADDED VALUE OF STUDYING THE FINANCIAL STRUCTURES AND INCENTIVES OF NETWORKS?
Financial structures of networks are an interesting and much under developed area of work, but money is a key driver for how partners in a network collaborate; particularly where budgets are limited, partners in a network need to decide which areas of work to prioritize and this will have a big effect on the outcomes of the network.
Other interesting aspects of network finances concern rules and regulations. For example, the money meant for education must not be spent on care. However, for teachers working with students who need extra support, teaching and care are two sides of the same coin, making it challenging to find the proper funding. Thus, the network organizations are confronted with the fact that they may need to offer specific arrangements in terms of funding that may be a mix of education and care. The problem is that they are not allowed to do so by law.
WHAT DO YOU WISH TO ACHIEVE WITH YOUR PH.D. PROJECT?
I hope my work has practical value to society rather than simply expanding the body of knowledge. I expect policymakers to use my project to improve policies concerning the financial management of networks. Additionally, it would be good to improve the work of the inspectorate, such as how external inspection can build on the internal accountability structures in networks.
HOW DO YOU THINK THE NEXT FEW YEARS WILL LOOK LIKE DOING A PART-TIME PH.D.?
It is an extra challenge as a part-time Ph.D. student to dedicate the time to Ph.D. work. Some of my other colleagues have told me they spend one day per week at the university so that they meet people and devote their time exclusively to their Ph.D. work. This sounded like a good idea, but of course, the pandemic has prevented this. One other colleague who was doing her Ph.D. had to stop due to the high demands of her job at the inspectorate. So that is also a warning for me that time management will be a big challenge for the next few years.
CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT THIS WORK AT THE INSPECTORATE?
At the inspectorate, I supervise several research projects. One of these projects concerns the financial surplus that boards have, where they are not spending their lump sum funding in the designated year. Some school boards have underspent their allocated budgets for more than ten years with large sums in the organization’s bank account. Two years ago, we tried to come up with a formula for how much money the boards need to have in reserve, and we figured out that a lot of the boards were not spending enough on education. My job as an inspector is to monitor this surplus money and stimulate the board to spend it. Here, too, you can see the same mechanism at work where decision-making around money is involved. What is very remarkable is that the networks for inclusive education that I have discussed above are also considered very rich. They receive a lot of money, and they are not spending it.
Dr. Antonina Levatino is currently in the middle of a visiting scholarship at LEARN!. She works at the French Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris and at the Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she researches the link between the internationalization of higher education, skilled migration, and student mobility. In this interview, Dr. Levatino introduces her current projects and future plans.
YOUR RESEARCH HAS MAINLY FOCUSED ON THE INTERNALIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION, SKILLED MIGRATION, AND STUDENT MOBILITY. COULD YOU PLEASE ELABORATE MORE ON THIS LINE OF RESEARCH?
Yes, of course. I have been working specifically on the link between transnational higher education and the mobility of students and graduates. Transnational higher education refers to any teaching or learning activity in which students are based in a different country than the country where the institution providing the education is located. An example is an English university that has campuses in China or Malaysia and offers degrees in these countries so that people can obtain an English degree without going to England. In this sense, it is different from student mobility because, in this case, the educational services and programs are moving, and students can get a foreign degree without having to go abroad. Because of this, it has been argued that for countries that open their education market to foreign providers, transnational higher education could represent a way to convince students to stay in the country, constituting a potential solution for the “brain drain” problem. But the issue is very complex. What we see is that transnational higher education is increasingly important. However, we know very little about the effect of the mobility of university programs on the mobility of students and graduates because empirical evidence is scarce. This is why I have dedicated time and effort to research this. The results of my research so far show that transnational higher education does not seem to be a substitute for international student mobility.
Instead, we are seeing the emergence of a two-tier international higher education system where studying abroad is still considered more prestigious compared to studying “offshore” through transnational education. It follows that the two types of international education absorb different segments of students. I also found that being enrolled in transnational higher education favors the creation of ties with people from the country of the education provider and enables access to important information about that country. This might increase the desire to go abroad after graduation and make the realization of this desire easier. If we consider these results, transnational higher education is far from a solution to brain drain and might even increase it.
YOU WERE ALSO INVOLVED IN TONI VERGER’S WELL-KNOWN REFORMED PROJECT; AN INTERNATIONAL STUDY ON PERFORMANCE-BASED ACCOUNTABILITY. COULD YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT IT?
Yes, ofcourse. On the one hand, the REFORMED project analyzes how and why school autonomy with accountability reforms are being adopted and re-contextualized in different countries. On the other hand, the project explores policy enactment processes at the school level. This second objective has been based on data from a big survey conducted in several countries among school principals and teachers and interviews with school actors. I have been mostly involved in this second strand of research within the project. More specifically, I have been in charge of designing and coordinating the survey, and I am currently involved in the analysis of the survey data collected and in their triangulation with the qualitative information coming from the interviews. The aim is to explore, among other things, the determinants of the external accountability pressure experienced by school actors, the emergence of undesired behavioral effects (cheating, cream-skimming practices, etc.) and the strength of extrinsic rewards, which are more and more foreseen by accountability reforms, in motivating school actors. Apart from that, within the framework of the project, I am also currently collaborating with a colleague to explore the link between school autonomy, external accountability, and innovation, specifically analyzing the Italian case.
ANYTHING ELSE YOU ARE WORKING ON?
Apart from what I already mentioned, I recently became one of the coordinators of the IMISCOE Standing Committee “Education and Social Inequality.” IMISCOE is the most important European network of researchers in the field of migration, integration, and diversity studies. So, within the Standing Committee, our current goal is to advance critical theoretical discussions on issues of social inequalities in education, transitions in education, the labor market, and the integration of refugees and asylum seekers into the education system.
WHAT ARE YOUR FUTURE PLANS?
I hope to have time to continue doing my research on transnational higher education and how it has been changing higher education and student mobility flows worldwide. Also, since last year, I have been a member of the Management Committee of the COST Action ENIS (European Network on International Student Mobility: Connecting Research and Practice) that will last for the coming five years. Within this project, we are investigating inequalities in access to international student mobility and the social and cultural integration of international students in the countries of destination. Finally, within the framework of the work of the IMISCOE Standing Committee, with the other coordinators, I will seek to strengthen the issues of discrimination and racism in formal and informal education.
When we use the word ‘school’ we often assume to have a similar view of what this means: in its most basic form a building with classrooms of students and a teacher. This ‘grammar of schooling’ has been in place for decades and tends to include the grouping of students for purposes of instruction where teachers’ work is defined vis-à-vis groups of students and how they are progressed through school on the basis of assessment outcomes and/or age.
Underlying these visible structures, we however find a vast variety in practices and views of what it means to educate children, how to organize a school and the meaning of a school. Those involved in schooling – students, parents, teachers and school leaders- may have different views of their school, conceptions of their role in the school, and the values of schooling. Such views, often expressed in metaphors provide an important means to access what people think, but also to understand their actions. Mills et al. (2017) for example argue that how we choose to act is (also) a function of how we construct conceptions of what we are and what we are trying to do; and when certain metaphors gain prominence in the minds of a majority of people in an organisation or domain, they will over time transform into social or organisational values instead of only representing individual values or beliefs.
As teachers have an important role in improving learning outcomes and school life more broadly, their metaphors are particularly relevant to understand the functioning of a school. How they understand their profession and their work, the views they have on how students learn and the learning process provide an important lens to learn about and explain everyday school life.
In our interviews with teachers in four high and four low performing schools in South Africa we found references to four metaphors and particularly to school as a family and factory:
METAPHORS ARE CONTEXT-SPECIFIC
The choice of metaphor is however highly contextual rather than representing a predetermined and fixed mindset about the purpose of schooling. School staff who for example work in deprived areas where children come to school unfed would emphasize the nurturing of learners; in communities which have high levels of conflict and violence tend to see these conflicts transpire into the school context to reflect a warzone metaphor.
Across the schools we see that the use of metaphors varies by specific professional roles, the socio-economic, ethnic and religious background of the school population, and the performance of the school.
METAPHORS ARE NOT UNIQUE CONSTRUCTS
The four metaphors are also not unique constructs to describe a school organisation, but rather need to be considered collectively to appreciate how staff view their school and particular characteristics of the school. Staff have different images of, for example the decision-making and communication style versus the teaching and learning culture in the school, as well as how different metaphors may be employed to convey relations with parents, learners and colleagues. Teachers for example referenced a high level of standardization of their teaching where they are following a prescribed lesson plan to meet basic external standards (factory metaphor), but ignore these strictures at other times to play and care for their children, or to offer extended learning opportunities for children to grow and mature (family metaphor). Sometimes the high level of standardization (befitting the factory metaphor) is mentioned as a way to prevent conflict and create stability and is sometimes also considered in the best interest of learners growth and development (fitting the family metaphor). Understanding the metaphors teachers use and why they use them provides an important pathway to change and to enable a strong teaching profession.
Dr. Or Dagan is a clinical psychologist and an attachment researcher, currently in the role of a visiting fellow at the LEARN! Child Rearing program. In this interview, Or discusses his research on attachment to two parents versus the single child-mother attachment. Additionally, he shares the findings of his research and future goals of the project.
CAN YOU TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND?
Thinking back, I have always been interested in what makes some people emotionally suffer. I studied Psychology and Philosophy for my undergraduate degree in Israel, and continued to pursue my master’s in Philosophy. I focused on existential philosophy and philosophy of science and wrote a book on how science- being a human conduct- is as absurd as human life. In short, I argued that in the same manner that humans wish to live forever while knowing they are only mortal, science strives to find an ultimate truth while being fully aware that it will never reach such a destination. In the process of writing this book, and delving into the writings of great existential thinkers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, I have gained a major insight that has stayed with me since then and has driven my clinical and research interests.
I realized that human suffering stems from a constant state of “lack” that is inherent in being alive and conscious. As soon as we are born, we devote an extreme amount of energy to fulfill all kinds of physical and psychological needs, such as the need for oxygen, nutrients, warmth, and protection. With time, we become aware of our lacks and the constant need to fulfill them. If those needs- especially emotional ones such as feeling attended to and cared for - are inconsistently fulfilled or unfulfilled altogether, they can lead to suffering.
But not all suffer equally. I thus became interested not so much in what makes us suffer- after all, being alive often bring about suffering just by the mere fact that we constantly lack emotional needs while being aware of them. Rather, I was interested in who is there with us and for us to help us deal with such suffering as a potential explanation to why some people suffer emotionally more than others. I realized that in order to better answer this question, I should get closer to real-life suffering through working with patients who deal with mental health problems.
I went on to pursue my doctoral degree in clinical psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. During my studies, I was drawn to attachment theory and research, which emphasize the role early experiences with our primary caretakers play in our emotional difficulties. I came to realize that attachment theory fit well with the questions that interested me. Attachment theory highlights the human attempts at fulfilling an inherent need for emotional support and the emotional difficulties that may arise when such attempts fail.
CAN YOU BRIEFLY EXPLAIN WHAT ATTACHMENT IS AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Attachment is an evolutionary-based behavioral and emotional system that was first articulated, as we know it today, by John Bowlby. The attachment system is designed to endow us with an instinctual tendency to seek support at times of need from a specific group of close others. This is an extremely important instinct to be born with, since we are “thrown” into this world without any capacity to stay alive for long.
We need to ensure physical and emotional proximity, or to be “attached,” so to speak, to our caregivers in order to survive and to learn through repeated interactions with them about our environment to independently navigate it. Generally speaking, when parents are available and responsive to children’s distress cues, children derive a sense of safety from being in proximity to their parents when facing distress. The learned expectation of parental availability at times of need fosters trust that parents will be there to support us should we need them. It also allows for exploring whatever we want to do away from our parents with the confidence that if we fail or find ourselves struggling with something, we can always go back to a secure base and be effectively soothed, and then safely continue with our lives.
But of course, whereas we all have a strong tendency to seek support from others at times of need, some of us don’t receive it. When parents respond insensitively to children’s distress, such as ignoring the child’s plea for help or not being consistently and emotionally available in such circumstances, children are likely to develop insecure attachment patterns. They develop expectations that a wiser and stronger parent will not be available as a secure base, and they are left with a significant “lack”- the lack of felt security, support, and confidence in their ability to deal with life difficulties. As a result, their behaviors are less likely to gear towards a free exploration of the environment, which itself limits their ability to live fulfilled lives.
WHAT LED YOU TO RESEARCH ATTACHMENT TO TWO PARENTS VERSUS THE OFTEN-RESEARCHED SINGLE CHILD-MOTHER ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIP?
As I was working on my dissertation, looking at how attachment security decreases the otherwise strong association between early life trauma and accelerated cellular aging in young adults, I met a prominent figure in the attachment research field, Dr. Avi Sagi-Schwartz from Haifa University in Israel. As we began to chat about our research interests, Avi directed my attention to the fact that the agreement about the importance of multiple caregivers in the developmental trajectories of children, very little research has been conducted to assess the joint effect of mothers and fathers on children’s outcomes. The little research that was conducted used relatively small sample sizes, which is statistically problematic since it does not allow for robust conclusions about the findings that these studies yielded.
I got excited about researching early attachment networks to mothers and fathers since it brought me full circle to my interest in human emotional suffering. At least in traditional Western two-parent families, I thought, understanding the quality of early relationships to both parents is understanding the lenses through which children learn about dealing with life difficulties and about whether and to what degree they can emotionally rely on others to support them when dealing with such challenges. Not developing a strong belief, based on repeated experiences, in the ability to effectively solicit emotional support from our parents, may explain why some of us emotionally suffer more than others. Studying an attachment relationship with only one parent is simply overlooking half of the story. So Avi and I decided to first map the problem of not conclusively knowing and not thoroughly researching the joint effect of attachment to mothers and fathers on children’s socioemotional outcomes, and proposed new theoretical models to propel systematic research towards answering this unresolved question.
After publishing a couple of papers on the subject, I collaborated with leading attachment researchers, Drs. Carlo Schuengel and Marije Verhage from the Faculty of Behavioral and Movement Sciences, Clinical Child and Family Studies, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and established the Collaboration on Attachment to Multiple Parents and Outcomes Synthesis (CAMPOS).
Through such international collaborations, we combined previously collected data from multiple sites across the globe on children’s attachment relationships with both their mothers and fathers and on children’s mental health and cognitive capacities. So instead of individual small datasets, we have compiled one large dataset, which allows us to simultaneously analyze data on many children and their parents- more than 1,000 child-mother-father triads- and be more confident in the conclusions that we derive from the findings.
CAN YOU TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT THE FINDINGS THAT YOUR TEAM HAS COME UP WITH THUS FAR?
We thus far analyzed the data to assess two developmental outcomes. The first was children’s mental health. We found that children with two secure attachment relationships with mother and father had significantly lower chances of experiencing anxiety and depression symptoms compared with children who had one insecure attachment to mother or father, and children who were insecurely attached to both parents. Interestingly, we found similarly elevated mental health symptoms that children who were insecurely attached only to mothers compared to those who were insecurely attached only to fathers, suggesting an equally important role that mother-child and father-child attachment relationships play in children’s mental health outcomes.
We also looked at children’s language competence, and we found similar results to the ones we found with mental health outcomes. That is, language skills increased with more secure attachment a child had. Children with two secure attachments had the highest scores, then came children who were securely attached to only one parent, and last came those with two insecure attachments. Here, too, we found an immaterial difference between mother-child and father-child attachment relationships as predictors of language competence. Together with recent findings showing that language competence variability predicts individual differences in behavioral problems, it is becoming clearer how beneficial it is for children to develop a secure attachment with both mothers and fathers.
WHAT ARE THE FUTURE STEPS IN THE PROJECT?
At the moment, we are in the process of analyzing outcome data that will allow us to better understand the predictive power of attachment networks to mothers and fathers on children’s effortful and inhibitory control, emotion regulation, and social competence- all of which have been shown to increase the long-term vulnerability to mental health problems. Another future avenue I plan to pursue is a recruitment of a large birth cohort, potentially in collaboration with multiple research laboratories around the world, and follow children longitudinally so to better understand the influence of early attachment networks to mothers and fathers on the stability and change in mental and physical health problems. Such research design will also allow for tapping on potential mechanisms that contribute to such developmental trajectories.
Laboratory learning and instructions
A laboratory is a complex learning environment in which students often have to deal with an overwhelming amount of written and verbal instructions about the functioning of instrumentation, safety, underlying theory, and input from the experiment itself (Agustian and Seery, 2017).
So it takes some streamlining to have students handle all this. At the same time, we also want them to think critically and to solve problems themselves.
Laboratory instructions affect how students approach their laboratory assignments. It has been noted often that step-by-step instructions, sometimes called cook-book or traditional instructions, that guide students through an experiment have limited learning effects (Kirschner, 1992). These kind of instructions can often lead to situations in which students only start to think about the meaning of the laboratory activity when they are writing their assignment reports.
Recently it emerged from a meta-analysis of studies on guided inquiry instructions that, among other things, more specific guidance during inquiry assignment results in higher quality students’reports than inquiry learning that is guided by moren open instructions (Lazonder and Harmsen, 2016). I think this is rather unsurprising as with more specific guidance the students are better informed on what is expected from them or what they are assessed on.
Therefore, in our study, we wanted to look at how instructions affect students’ critical thinking while they are conducting a practical assignment and not at the quality of the final reporting.
Recognize critical thinking by surprise
To recognize critical thinking in the students, we wanted the them to encounter something during the experiment they had not expected beforehand, but where it would be relatively easy for those who thought critically about the meaning of their data to notice this ‘hidden trap’ and propose a correct way of analysing the data. However, students who are not concerned about the meaning of their experimental data either fail to notice the apparent discrepancy between their experimental data and the models they had learned about or are not bothered by it. This can be interpreted as an indication of a lack of critical thinking during the inquiry assignment.
Investigation of preparation
The research goal of our study was to find out whether the preparatory phase of the practical assignment would influence the students' critical thinking. We made a direct comparison of two different, but equally comprehensive, designs of pre-laboratory activities that we implemented in parallel in four chemistry classes of senior-year secondary school students. These we named paved road- and critical thinking pre-laboratory activities. Both forms of activities are based on elements that are often recognizable in educational practice to prepare students for laboratory work. For the design of the critical thinking condition and defining the levels for critical thinking, we were further inspired by a large-scale study into the critical thinking among physics students during lab work (Holmes et al., 2015).
With the paved road pre-laboratory activity, students were making pre-laboratory questions that guide them through the design of the assignment. These questions focused the students on the research question and how the presented experimental method is well suited to answer the research question. With the critical thinking pre-laboratory activity, students investigate the same pre-specified research question but they were making their own design for the experiment according to given criteria for a good experimental set-up and provided information (hints). The amount information available for making the experimental plan in the critical thinking condition was identical to the provided information for answering the laboraboratory questions in the paved road condition. So the main difference between the two conditions comes down to the way in which the students process the information offered prior to the practical.
Two cohorts
We conducted the study two years in a row with Dutch senior year high school students. In the first cohort, we were mainly surprised by the haphazard comments made by students in paved road condition about their measurement data. As a result, more than half of the students in the paved road condition were classified in the lowest critical thinking level. In the critical thinking condition of the first cohort, a few pairs opted for a completely different experimental approach, in which they were highly determined to understand the meaning of their measurement data, but did not clearly encounter the hidden trap.
To avoid a similar situation the next year, the cohort 2 students in the paved road conditions were focused more on the research goal and in the critical thinking condition they were given more direction for the set-up of the experimental plan, relative to the students in cohort 1.
Direct comparions
As a result we observed that more students in the paved road condition interpreted their measurement data with more depth. This may be interpreted as that the level of research reached in inquiry learning is largely a function of the direction given in the guidance. However, the direct comparison of the paved road and critical thinking conditions on the contrary, showed that for both cohorts students in the critical thinking condition expressed more independent critical thinking when evaluating their measurement data. They more often noticed the unexpected observation and were more often trying to understand and clarify it, instead of waving it away.
Critical thinking is not easy to evaluate in a study: you can only measure it when it really comes down to critical thinking. The effect that laboratory instructions have on the critical thinking of students is probably always there (and we have experienced that with other laboratory assignments in other classes as well). When students experience automony they are more determined to solve problems or unravel surprises. It is therefore a good idea to take this into account in the future when designing instructions, even if there is no hidden surprise in the assignment.
The article is accepted for publication in Chemistry Education Reseach and Practice and can be read here. (https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2020/rp/d0rp00020e)
Examining the effect of lab instructions on students' critical thinking during a chemical inquiry practical.
Marion E. van Brederode, Sebastiaan A. Zoon and Martijn Meeter
Dr. Rashmi Kusurkar, the leader of the LEARN! research program 'Motivation and Lifelong Learning' describes the evolution of her research department and her future goals.
COULD YOU TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND?
By background, I am a medical doctor. I studied medicine in India. I specialized in physiology. I taught for a few years in India and moved here because my husband was offered a job in Amsterdam. In India, I also completed a fellowship in education because I was teaching full-time. At that time, I had many questions about the teaching-learning process. That's how I got into a fellowship program in education and conducted small research projects.
I had many questions and answers. It was not possible to do a Ph.D. in India at that time. However, I used to do a lot of faculty training. So, I was involved in faculty development courses, but I wanted to do research.
When I was teaching, I had questions about why students who come into medical education with the same motivation perform differently. Why do some people do well, and some people who seem to know a lot do not do well. And why does motivation differ between people? These were questions I did not have answers to. So, when we moved to the Netherlands, I looked into a Ph.D. opportunity in education. I found one in UMC Utrecht and chose motivation as my topic. The title of my thesis was "motivation in medical students," which looked into what motivates students for medicine and how it influences their academic performance and learning.
When I was doing my Ph.D., I also started looking at the level of motivation and quantity of motivation. Within one year, I had two articles published, which should have made me very happy as a Ph.D. student. But I was not very happy because it did not help me answer the questions that I had during my practice. I was dissatisfied with the track I had taken. So, I went back to the literature and looked into motivation theories. I stumbled across self-determination theory. Self-determination theory mainly looks at the type or kind of motivation: why do we do what we do? It focuses more on the qualitative aspect of motivation and not its quantity. When I looked at the theory, I was able to identify and understand everything that was happening around me from the point of view of the theory. So, I decided to use self-determination theory as the primary framework for my thesis.
As I already said, I mainly wanted to look at the relationship between motivation, learning, and performance during my teaching days. So, I had two studies on motivation and learning performance. I included UMC Utrecht and VUmc students in my thesis. I wanted to have application-oriented papers which teachers/educators could use immediately in their teaching-learning sessions. So, within my thesis, I also looked at using insights from my research for practice.
HOW DID YOUR CURRENT RESEARCH DEPARTMENT COME ABOUT?
During my Ph.D., I had two supervisors, one of them was Gerda Croiset, who moved to VUmc in the first year of my Ph.D., that's why I could also include students from VUmc in my thesis. As I was finishing my Ph.D., she said they did not have a group working on research in education at VUmc, and offered me to come along and start a group there. So, that's how I started working at VUmc.
Setting up a group yourself is fun and challenging, and I liked it. I started with two Ph.D. students: one Ph.D. student came from the National Federation of Universities, NFU (they wanted more research on selection). The other student was part-time from our institute who got FTEs from her daily job; she was in nursing education. So I started with the two of them, and over the years, I have grown the program.
WHAT ARE THE CENTRAL THEMES OF YOUR RESEARCH?
The theme of my program is developing students for life. It is about stimulating students to be intrinsically motivated so that they are constantly learning from the practice and are ready to invest, dedicated to learning, and continuing professional development. That is what we call developing students for life. It is the main umbrella theme which covers all the research we conduct. I have three research lines within this theme. The first and the most prominent line has everything to do with motivation as a variable, the outcomes it influences in education, and the variables that affect motivation: motivation, learning, academic performance, professional behavior, professional identity. I also look at the background characteristics that influence motivation. So, everything that has to do with motivation comes in that line.
Along the way, I wanted to research ethnic minority students, their motivation, and why their performance is lower than the ethnic majority students.
We tried to look at it through the lens of motivation, and it became a powerful thesis. Ulviye Isik, my Ph.D. student, graduated on that topic.
During Ulviye’s research, many things came to light. We started getting interested in the topic of diversity and access. So, diversity and access became my second line of research. We also got external funding, and it became more and more important. Now, we have a solid second line that comes from many external finance/research grants. Within this line, there are different subtopics. We look at diversity not only as a different ethnic background but also in terms of gender, socioeconomic status, lower education background of the parents, and so on. For us, diversity is more diverse than ethnic origin. All the projects we have under diversity and access fall into this line. We have a huge project going on right now. PhD student, Lianne Mulder, works on how we can select students to get a student population that is representative of the society or the patient population. We are looking at developing widening access criteria for admission into Health Professions Education (HPE). Suppose you have a student from a non-traditional background: not of Dutch origin with highly educated parents, parents already in the medical network, and high socioeconomic status. How can you ensure that non-traditional students also get the opportunity to study medicine? We looked at the hurdles they face for entering health professions education and what we can do to ensure they are represented in our medical student population. That is our biggest project on diversity right now. I lead this research line along with Anouk Wouters, an assistant professor in my team, who has completed her Ph.D. with me. Anouk got a Comenius grant for the Buddies Breaking Barriers project. From her thesis, which was on selection and motivation, we have found that high school students without a traditional background sometimes think that because of the selection procedure, they will never get through the selection procedure. There is thus selection happening at their own level, called self-selection, preventing them from even applying. So, to investigate this further (and that's how we got the NRO grant on widening access, the work that Lianne Mulder is doing), Anouk decided to set up a Buddy program for students in their first, second, third years. She coupled them with high school students from nontraditional backgrounds. She offered training sessions for them, as well as informal meetings. They got support on preparations required for selection and the types of selection programs we have - creating the network that the nontraditional students miss. Comenius funded the first year of the buddy program. Now, we are implementing it with our own budget, as an extracurricular activity. In my diversity line, we intensely focus on immediate societal implications. Since 2012, when I started the group, we have significantly grown: from two Ph.D. students to six Ph.D. students who have already graduated from the group and, currently, to 12-13 students registered with me, in different phases of their Ph.D. trajectory.
I have arranged my group in a pyramidal shape. Earlier, it was just the Ph.D. students and me. Now, I have assistant professors who take care of some of the daily supervision, and I have freed up my time to get more funding, network and focus on applications of the research and knowledge dissemination to the society.
FOCUS ON HEALTH PROFESSIONS. WHY IS THAT?
We were always a health professions education research group, but we have made it put more emphasis on it over the years. We had one person from pharmacy who graduated from our group. I have someone from midwifery, and I have someone from nursing.
The focus is on health professions because I come from health professions education and a medical center, VUmc, employs me.
The field has changed over time. Initially, the field was focused on medical education. However, over the years, there has been a proper shift of the field to health professional education, an entire field of its own, with its independent journals. The health professional educators form a different group within higher education. The reason why medical education became health professional education is that you are learning competencies and skills. Additionally, students work inter-professionally, so it is beneficial to learn from one another. Therefore, we should not restrict ourselves to medical education but also include other professions in health in all we do so that we can learn from each other.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEDICAL EDUCATION AND OTHER TYPES OF HIGHER EDUCATION?
In health professions education, you get very motivated people, and a lot is expected from a student in terms of being a self-directed learner. You not only train yourself for building knowledge but also to become a professional. This is what makes health profession education different within higher education. The movement that you see in the field is that earlier, we were all talking about training to become a doctor, but now a core part of the training has become building professional identity. So professional identity building and professionalism are very strong components of health professions education, and it is becoming even stronger.
IN WHAT WAYS IS YOUR RESEARCH APPLICABLE IN PRACTICE?
Even when I did my thesis, I wanted immediate practical applicability. So I wrote papers on practical applications currently used in tutor training.
Funding agencies like the NWO require that there has to be a substantial societal impact from research, the giving-back-to-the-society component. I think it is essential to do that. So, over the years, I have started investing time in creating materials or raising awareness or doing things that are oriented not only toward researchers and academics but also the society. One example would be the workshops for stimulating student motivation that I converted into E-learning videos and put them on Youtube so that it is not just teachers who can use the knowledge, but also the parents. I did not restrict myself to giving the workshops to specific people, but I made it as open as possible so that anyone could access it and learn from it.
As I said before, I had an application-oriented paper titled "twelve tips for stimulating students' intrinsic motivation in the classroom." That was a scientific paper. Unfortunately, not everyone can access a scientific paper and read it. So, two years ago, I converted that paper into an infographic. I made a poster out of it and put that on our website. I also shared it with people as study material.
The concern with applicability was always prominent in our research, but we used to publish application papers within our academic and scientific journals. Now, we have moved toward also letting people from non-academic circles benefit from our work. We try to orient ourselves. The Buddies breaking barriers is an entirely implementational project. It has a high giving-back-to-the-society component.
WHAT HAVE BEEN THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF YOUR RESEARCH TEAM SO FAR AND WHERE DO YOU SEE YOUR RESEARCH GOING IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS?
People define achievement differently: the number of papers you publish and funds you can secure. To me, it is more important that, as a team we stand for something. For example, everyone knows that we are the group that works on Self-determination theory in Europe. Being that entity, I think, is an achievement. As a group, we are known for our motivation and self-determination theory in health professions education. That is an achievement to me.
This year is significant for me because we have gained much recognition as a group now and I get invited to forums where I can contribute. Amsterdam UMC has me appointed on the Steering Committee of diversity and inclusion. That is a very big appointment, not in the sense that I get paid for it, but it is a position in which I can create impact. I sit in the committee and give feedback from the perspective of being a person with an ethnic minority background. I am investing more in impacting what happens in society so that I can bring in this point of view and fight for this cause.
Why do we not see ethnic minority people in academia or the healthcare work force? 30% of our students are from ethnic minority backgrounds, but it is majorly white if you look at our work force. So, why does this happen? This is a societal problem, and I can do something about it through this group.
It was hard for me to fulfill all the expectations the institution had from me when I was on a career track. This is because I come from a different cultural background, I have a different way of looking at things and handling myself, but I was expected to fit into the image of a Dutch academic. The main change required was about being visible as a person/academic. In my culture we believe that if you do good work, visibility follows organically. But, in the Dutch culture, an academic is expected to actively create visibility. Although I believe that my own way of conducting myself as an academic was effective, I made changes that helped me in actively building visibility. I found my own way of doing this while still remain authentic, which is important to me. I always thought once I am in the academic crowd, I can fight for change, not from outside the group.
The group that I am working with right now on Diversity and Inclusion consists of people who want to have an employ-friendly policy on diversity and also have the influence to enact the suggested changes. Because Amsterdam UMC is the biggest hospital in the NL after the merger of VUmc and AMC, bringing about change at this level can trickle down to other hospitals. In this I can combine my research and experience to bring about change.
In the coming five years, I want to impact diversity and inclusion issues and not only in my institute but also at the Amsterdam UMC level and other UMCs. For example, with the widening access criteria study, what we are doing is we are developing a widening access policy for all health professions education to guide selection procedures.
Another project that I am doing right now focuses on the effects of assessment on motivation. I want to bring about a point of view of designing innovative assessment systems that can stimulate students' intrinsic stimulation instead of stimulating extrinsic motivation, making them learn only for the exams.
Introduction
Within the ARETE consortium (see: www.areteproject.eu), we believe that education for youth around the world can be improved by incorporating new technologies into existing curricula. More specifically, Augmented Reality (AR) can be beneficial to enhance students’ educational experience and learning. AR is an innovative technology that enables users to augment the physical reality with additional layers of digital sensory information (e.g., animations) through a mobile device. In one of our projects, we focus on improving primary school students’ social emotional learning by embedding AR into behavioral lessons as part of the Positive Behavior Interventions & Supports (PBIS) framework (see: www.pbis.org). In this blog we highlight some of the research & development steps taken towards embedding AR into PBIS.
Positive Behavior Interventions & Supports (PBIS)
PBIS is a schoolwide approach focused on improving students’ self-regulation and behavioral management skills. PBIS schools define a small set of school values that promote a safe and healthy school environment. Schools choose the values that they deem most important (e.g., respect, responsibility, and safety). These school values inform the development of behavioral expectations for students (and school staff!) to adhere to in all school settings. Lessons are then designed to help students learn the expected behavior at school in a positive way following guidelines that are backed-up by both theory and practice. By teaching students about expected behavior in a structured way, behavioral problems are decreased, and a positive social learning climate is facilitated.
Augmenting PBIS with Augmented Reality (AR)
We believe that AR solutions can augment education in the PBIS framework by allowing students to both learn expected behavior through digital modeling and to practice desired behavior in a digital environment. Learning and practicing expected behavior through AR, is timely, aligns with students’ experiential world, and stimulates learning in a playful and gamified manner. As an example of modeling of desired behavior through AR, imagine a student standing in front of a water tap in a school restroom. The student scans a marker (e.g., a QR-code) on or near to the water tap with their mobile device. The water tap is enriched on this device with additional layers of visual information modeling the correct hygienic and behavioral rules for the behavioral expectation “I wash my hands with soap”. Students can repeatedly view the modeled behavior—from different viewpoints—on their mobile device in the real-life environment. As an example of practicing with desired behavior through AR, imagine a digital multi-user experience for the behavioral expectation “I greet others”, in which students can digitally greet each other’s digital characters (avatars) in a real-time environment. Practicing desired behavior in a digital environment allows students to firstly learn (especially more sensitive) desired behaviors in a safe environment before applying them in real-life.
Research & Development of the ARETE PBIS-AR Application and Curriculum
As PBIS schools determine their own school values and develop their own behavioral expectations and lessons, there are no pre-existing universal behavioral expectation matrices we could use for developing and designing our PBIS-AR application and accompanying curriculum. In an intense research and development process—suffering from delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic—we developed a universal behavioral expectation matrix, serving as the base for our PBIS-AR application and package of AR-compatible behavioral lessons.
We originally planned to execute focus groups with teachers to gain insight into the most important content in terms of school values and behavioral expectations. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us into a contingency plan. We first collected behavioral expectation matrices of a large set of schools in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. After deduplication and reduction, we only maintained those behavioral expectations that were present in multiple matrices in multiple countries. We were still left with a gargantuan matrix. To further reduce and validate the obtained data, the PBIS in Europe (PBIS-E) questionnaire study was executed in the first half of 2021 in a sample of primary school teachers and students (aged 9-12 years) in the Netherlands, Italy, Lithuania, and Portugal.
The PBIS-E study resulted in a final shortlist of 15 behavioral expectations. Starting from this shortlist of behavioral expectations, Dutch primary school teachers were recruited for a lesson design study in the second half of 2021. In a structured lesson design process, small teams of teachers worked together with PBIS-experts to plan, develop, and evaluate nine behavioral lessons around the top-rated behavioral expectations. All lessons were designed to enable tailoring to the educational needs of students within a particular classroom setting, while following a universal lesson plan. The developed lessons were then bundled into a behavioral lesson package including an instruction manual (see Table 1 for an overview).
In the coming months, the behavioral lesson package—without the inclusion of AR solutions—will be pilot-evaluated in a small set of grades 4-6 PBIS primary school classrooms in the Netherlands and Italy. The main aims are to gain insight in how the developed lessons are received by students and teachers, as well as in how effective the lessons are in improving students’ executive functioning, social and emotional skills, and social climate relationships. Concomitantly, the AR solutions to be embedded within the PBIS-AR application are being developed by teams of AR content specialists and visual design experts. After these final steps in the research and design process are taken by the end of this school year, we will be ready to evaluate the effectiveness of embedding AR into education within the PBIS framework in a randomized control trial study in the school year of 2022-2023.
Exciting times are thus ahead of us in the coming months and years! Keep your eyes peeled for the developments within the ARETE project by subscribing to the ARETE twitter account (https://twitter.com/ARETEH2020)!
We sat down with dr. Ina Koning, who has recently become part of the Child Rearing group at LEARN!, to discuss her motivation to join the Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences at Vrije Universiteit, as well as to talk about her work on adolescent substance abuse and parental intervention.
Please continue reading to find out more about the focus of her studies and future research plans.
COULD YOU TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND?
I started working at Leiden University as a teacher in 2003; then in 2006 I began my work at Utrecht University, where I stayed for seventeen years. In September this year, I started my work at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and I can say I am already fully invested: I am a lecturer, I coordinate two courses and I supervise master students.
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE MAIN FOCUS OF YOUR RESEARCH THROUGHOUT THE YEARS?
My research has three main areas of interest: adolescent substance abuse, digital media use and preventive intervention.
My initial focus was on preventive intervention, targeting adolescent onset of drinking. Together with my colleagues, we investigated the effect of different types of interventions, such as parent- or student-only, as well as a combination of these two. It led us to some very insightful findings, namely that targeting either parents or students alone isn’t effective- you should target both of them at the same time. That is also what we find across several other topics of our research- multicomponent interventions are usually more effective than the single component strategies.
From there onwards I continued my research in substance use and prevention and the role of parents in adolescent drinking behavior. At some point I broadened my scope to digital media use, which since then became one of the main topics I do research on.
WHAT ASPECT OF DIGITAL MEDIA USE DO YOU ADDRES IN YOUR RESEARCH AND HOW DO YOU TARGET IT?
Our focus is on the problematic aspects of digital media like addiction. Social media use in itself isn't harmful to most users. However, there are particular groups of young kids who are involved in a problematic way of using it, which causes them to get into trouble.
We measure it with addiction-like symptoms, similar to the ones used to diagnose the Internet Gaming Disorder. It is a more objective way of measuring social media use, because the IGD is an already recognized addiction- it is even contained in DSM-V. Before turning to this method, we did some studies based on self-reports, which turned out to be highly problematic. Large groups of participants tend to underestimate their social media use, and the others overestimate it. There is only a small proportion of youth who can report it correctly, thus we tend to rely on symptom-measurement methods instead.
WHAT WA THE MAIN REASON WHY YOU DECIDED TO TRANSITION TO VU AFTER SEVENTEEN YEARS OF WORKING IN UTRECHT?
It was the level of commitment and investment in research from a whole variety of perspectives that was really noticeable at VU. After 17 years I had made a decision to switch; it was a tough one, because I was part of Utrecht University for such a long time. But I really felt that at VU more emphasis was put on the intervention part which I also focus on in my research, as well as the tight connection between theory in research and practice.
WOULD YOU SAY THAT THE POSSIBILITY TO APPLY THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS OF RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE IS SOMETHING YOU PERSONALLY VALUE A LOT?
Yes, and I always try to do that. I always try to maintain a connection between theory and practice, as well as to connect with the stakeholders that are relevant to my topic of research. To give a recent example, I am currently conducting a community based intervention- a quasi-experimental trial, where I develop an intervention which is established on a needs assessment done beforehand. What it means is that I first talked to all of the different stakeholders in that community, and only then was I able to decide on the desired outcome. I try to take into account all the different factors which were identified by the stakeholders as relevant in the outcome along with their needs.
BESIDES DOING RESEARCH, DO YOU EVER HAVE OPPORTUNITIES TO ACT ON SMALLER INITIATIVES THAT RELATE TO THE AREA OF YOUR STUDY?
Quite a lot actually. For example tonight I am going to be a guest in a podcast on the topic of digital media use in connection with education and mental health, which is initiated by teachers from a number of Dutch high schools. The teachers record their own podcasts on topics that are relevant to their students and communities.
If I can, I always contribute to this type of initiative. I try to make connections with the stakeholders in different ways, also by translating my findings and the knowledge back for the target group. I find it important to translate the scientific knowledge into the kind of knowledge that they could understand easily.
ARE THERE ANY NEW PROSPECTS THAT BECAME FEASIBLE TO YOU BY JOINING VU?
It is related a bit to the content of my research. In Utrecht I was working with an interdisciplinary social sciences group, where we focused on adolescents only. What I am hoping to achieve here at VU and LEARN! is to include a broader range of developmental phases; not just adolescence, but also childhood, to then see how parents can already engage in internet-specific parenting behaviors at that age. It is really important, because that type of behavior doesn't start at the age of 12, it starts way earlier. Hence, I am mostly looking forward to focusing on younger age groups and to see how their parents could be engaged and what kind of strategies are effective for them.
ARE THERE ALREADY SOME PROJECTS THAT YOU ARE LOOKING FORWARD TO BEING INVOLVED IN?
There are some projects concerning digital media use which I am taking along with me from Utrecht. We have a large longitudinal study going on about digital media use in a family context. We have examined 200 full families, that is parents and children, to get a better insight into the situation on a family-level and to find out how parents can supervise their kids and effectively guide them in safe social media use.
Apart from that, there is a new study which was just granted two weeks ago. Together with my colleagues, we will investigate social media use among families with kids who have developmental and learning disabilities. Until now, most studies have been conducted on normative samples, which underrepresented the kids who have developmental struggles. That is why we want to focus on these groups of kids and then see what is the meaning of digital media use for them, and how that differs from the normative sample. In the context of parental supervision, we also want to investigate the differences in how these two groups of parents deal with the issue. That is actually one of the projects that I am really looking forward to.
"Purpose, Pressures, and Possibilities: Conversations About Teacher Professional Norms in the Global South" is the title of a recently released booklet, which brings together 14 interviews with 28 academics and practitioners. The interviews aim to explore the complex norms that influence the teaching profession in the Global South.
As Lant Pritchett, the RISE Research Director at the Blavatnik School of Government-University of Oxford, writes in the foreword: 'the future of humanity depends on accelerating learning progress in the developing world and that in turn almost certainly will require a massive shift in teacher norms. This book from introduction to the body of interviews to the synthesis essays is a great place to start the thinking about how that might just happen'.
The booklet features an interview with Melanie Ehren, a Professor in Educational Governance and the Director of LEARN! and Michael Woolcock, who is the Lead Social Scientist in the World Bank’s Development Research Group and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Together, they discuss how norms among teachers affect their practice and behavior. The entirety of the conversation can be found in Chapter 10 of the publication, which is titled 'On varied perceptions, gradual change, and how norms are nested in different levels of the system.'
The booklet was released as a publication of the RISE consortium.
You can access the PDF version of the booklet via this link.
In recent years, media debates in the Netherlands have highlighted how a rising number of schools have turned to privatized employment agencies in order to fill teacher vacancies. Politicians as well as teacher organizations have expressed their concerns about this form of private sector involvement in education, in part because of presumed cost inefficiencies as well as the potential impact on education quality and school governance. Gaining insight into the scale at which teachers are hired through privatized employment agencies forms an important first step towards understanding the impact of the employment industry on public education.
PRIVATIZED TEACHER EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES IN EDUCATION: POTENTIAL BENEFITS AND PITFALLS
Private employment agencies source teachers to schools. Instead of signing an employment contract with the organization where the teacher works (i.e. the school), the teacher signs a contract with a third-party (i.e. the employment agency). In convincing teachers of the benefits of signing such a contract, private employment agencies often refer to greater flexibility in working hours/days and higher pay, as well as the opportunity of working in multiple locations and spending most time on teaching tasks (thereby avoiding for example administrative tasks or other responsibilities that derive from being employed by the school itself). Towards schools, employment agencies emphasize the possibility of saving time and resources on teacher recruitment processes, while they ensure the ‘right fit’ is found. Overall, it has been argued that employment agencies, who claim to be able to quickly fill vacancies that require specific knowledge, can contribute to the continuity of education. Moreover, schools presumably enjoy greater flexibility in letting go of teachers when services are no longer needed.
Despite these potential benefits, the growth in the number of private employment agencies, often in contexts that face significant teacher recruitment and retention challenges, has sparked a heated debate about the potential pitfalls of private sector provision of teaching services. A number of scholars have pointed towards cost inefficiencies in hiring teachers via an employment agency, while also the limited influence of teachers on the conditions of employment has been highlighted. Concerns have moreover been raised about the potential impact of an increasing number of temporary teachers, who might be less involved in the school or motivated to embed themselves, on education quality and school governance.
ARE WE WITNESSING AN INCREASE IN RELIANCE ON TEACHERS SOURCED BY PRIVATE AGENCIES IN THE CASE OF THE NETHERLANDS?
While it is clear that increased involvement of the private sector in the provision of teaching services can have important implications for public education, a limited understanding prevails of the magnitude of current reliance on teachers sourced by private employment agencies, as well as of the precise consequences hereof. This limited understanding might relate to difficulties in gaining access to reliable measures on the scale of this phenomenon.
In the case of the Netherlands, different studies have attempted to get a sense of the size of the teacher employment industry. For example, De Wit, Stuivenberg and Van der Ploeg (2014) relied on a survey administrated to school boards in the Netherlands to estimate reliance on employment agencies by schools and school boards. In doing so, they showed that in 2014 the majority of all sampled school boards in the Netherlands had hired teachers through an employment agency, while most boards also anticipated increased reliance on such contract constructions in the near future.
More recently, a report administrated by the Ministry of Education, Culture & Science relied on data on the expenditures of school boards on teaching personnel. Based on a sample of school annual reports, the authors show an increase in school expenditure on temporary work. However, here it is unclear whether this is due to increased costs or an increase in the number of temporary teachers.
In a forthcoming study, we decided to rely on a large and nationally representative labor survey to depict developments in reliance on teachers sourced by private agencies. This survey is administered by the Central Bureau of Statistics Netherlands and follows approximately 111.000 individuals each quarter as of 2003.
A benefit of doing so is that we are able to estimate the frequency and share of temporary teachers in the Netherlands up to 2021, while not suffering from potential nonrandom sampling and using sampling weights to estimate population frequencies and shares. In doing so, we show that there is an upward trend in the number and share of temporary teachers until 2019. From 2019 onwards, the trend seems to stabilize or even move downwards. We can only speculate about what drives this initial increase and subsequent decrease in reliance on temporary teachers.
What’s next?Despite the uncertainty that remains surrounding the precise magnitude of current reliance on teachers sourced by private employment agencies, the different conducted studies indicate that the teacher employment industry has grown over time in the Netherlands. The potential implications hereof demand that future research into this phenomenon is needed. We however emphasize that such research would need to move beyond evaluations of the capacity of private agencies to meet demand and at least pay attention to the following questions:
Students often feel inadequately prepared for professional practice. They lack the ability to flexibly apply knowledge and skills to novel settings and to engage in independent problem-solving. Interestingly, in health professions education (HPE), students get quite some opportunities to practice flexibility and adaptation: they have to apply what they learned in school to a diverse range of practice settings, and have to find their way in the clinical teams they temporarily become a part of. But how can these transitions be turned form challenges into opportunities? In this blog, we will present the findings of a qualitative study about if and how students can make “boundary experiences” productive for learning in the context of nursing education.
LOOKING AT BOUNDARIES IN A POSITIVE WAY: THE THEORY
The boundary crossing perspective (see Akkerman & Bakker, 2011 for a review) considers “discontinuity” as a potential source of learning. Discontinuity occurs when boundaries, for example, between contexts or different professions, temporarily hamper ongoing action or learning. These boundaries can result in unexpected or even discomforting experiences that make people question why things happen in a certain way. Trying to re-establish continuity in ongoing action can result in learning through processes such as communication or reflection. Eventually, it can result in permanent changes of practice.
BOUNDARY EXPERIENCES IN NURSING EDUCATION: CHALLENGES
Nursing students follow a curriculum including theoretical training, skills training, and on-the-job training (clinical placements) in various practice settings. When students start a novel clinical placement, not only do they encounter practice that is different from their theoretical preparation in school but also from previous placements. On top of all that, students experience conflicting practices between clinical staff members within each setting. Differences include how nurses perform technical skills, how they communicate, how they plan and prioritize nursing care, and how they supervise students. Initially, these boundary experiences can leave students feeling inadequately prepared or confused about what is the right thing to do. Sometimes students are frustrated about diverging expectations or even indignant about the practice they witness. Putting too much effort into aligning expectations between parties involved in their training sometimes takes their energy away from true learning.
BOUNDARY EXPERIENCES IN NURSING EDUCATION: VALUABLE RESOURCES
In spite of some negative experiences, nursing students find ways to turn these boundaries into learning. Boundary experiences challenge them to engage in valuable critical discussions with their supervisors and other disciplines such as doctors or physiotherapists around the ward. These experiences help them value multiple perspectives and find out what kind of nurse they want to become. Students take for granted that previous acquired knowledge and skills are not directly applicable in each novel setting and are motivated to dive into local resources. Facing different supervision styles makes them aware of their own learning preferences and shapes future learning behavior. Throughout a clinical placement, students’ responses to boundary experiences progress from merely noticing differences and comparing practices to eventually trying to change things for themselves or others. Ironically, objects designed to connect theory and practice, such as portfolios or practice assignments, can create additional barriers as they are often understood differently across settings. Students are more likely to turn boundary experiences into learning when they are very keen on getting everything out of their placements or when they are struck by practice that seems unfair. The fear of a negative assessment or of not fitting into the team can keep students from discussing and valuing boundary experiences.
WHAT WE NEED
Flexibility and adaptability are prerequisites for navigating the complex landscape of practice. Students’ fresh insights about how settings and their staff vary should be used for their own development but also for practice improvements. However, students strive to meet assessment standards and to become by their supervisors and other staff. Therefore, HPE schools should create opportunities for reflection, preferably without formats or grading. Also important is the establishment of a culture of learning, rather than just emphasizing performance. Designing a set of learning aids that students can consult can help students navigate important boundary experiences and become mature health care professionals
Just before the summer holiday, we interviewed Rien Rouw –one of the members of the LEARN! advisory board and a strategic advisor at the knowledge unit of the Dutch Ministry of Education- about current topics on the Ministry’s strategic agenda. We talked about how these could inform our research agenda and what type of research is needed in each of these themes. Please find a brief summary below as an inspiration for your work.
The Ministry of Education has currently set four priorities areas for primary and secondary education:
In some of these areas there are already specific policies in place, while other areas are in the process of developing a policy agenda. Particularly for basic skills there are specific strategies in place to improve children and young people’s literacy and mathematics skills, as well as their digital skills and citizenship. The ministry has also outlined a policy to improve equity through school-community partnerships with further policies soon to be presented. Finally there are policies in place to reduce teacher shortages and improve teaching quality as well as ensure social safety in schools.
THE IDEA OF SCHOOL-COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS IS RELATIVELY NEW FOR THE NETHERLANDS. WHAT TYPE OF PARTNERSHIPS DOES THE MINISTRY HOPE TO PROMOTE?
The policy of School and Community is directed at areas consisting of coalitions of schools, youth services, sports clubs, and libraries which can select the activities that would benefit the schoolchildren in their area. This is where researchers could come to our aid: we would like to know whether coalitions are genuinely effective at enriching children's educational experiences through extracurricular activities. In this vein, with a coalition of frontrunners, we are launching research-based pilots of such interventions.
These partnerships should have a wide range of benefits that fall within the other policy areas, such improving basic skills, equity, citizenship but also ensure a more inclusive learning environment for students. As stated in our policy documents, "it is our ambition that all children and youngsters can be free to be themselves." The need for further measures to ensure inclusiveness comes from the fact that LGBTQIA+ students experience more psychological problems and are more frequently bullied than other students. Schools must create safe environments for all pupils, but some of our data and conversations with young people indicate that schools do not seem to succeed. They talk about being bullied or feeling disconnected from school when their experiences are not discussed or recognized. A safe school climate is a standard in the inspection framework, but given the autonomy of schools who can choose their own mission and vision, this is a difficult topic to address nationally. We have already seen some conflicts where tension exists between the freedom to express oneself as an LGBTQIA+ student and the Christian schools trying to suppress such expression. The inspection signals that this conflict violates the Dutch citizenship laws.
TEACHER SHORTAGES ARE ANOTHER MAJOR CONCERN FOR MANY SCHOOLS. WHAT IS THE MINISTRY TRYING TO DO TO ADDRESS THIS?
Even though the ministry has done a lot to combat this problem, the shortages are getting worse. Thus, the ministry is now exploring unorthodox methods to resolve this issue. Some of these methods would require us to leave the classical classroom model behind, organize the school differently, and make strategic use of digital tools. Before schools are ready for such extensive changes, we need to rethink how we teach and the types of methods and instructional strategies we are using. How can we organize schools more efficiently while ensuring high learning outcomes? There is a concern that when we start innovating and finding new models, that this is creating additional burdens on schools, but equally it could energize the school and attract more teachers. This is another fruitful area for research. We can ask what happens during significant reorganization: do schools suffer, or are they re-energized?
CONNECTING THE DOTS…
Finally, all these policies are interconnected and need to benefit the development of children in school through a whole-child approach. The whole-child approach entails exploring how all the policies we implement to promote basic skills, equity, safety, and well-being interact with one another and promote a more healthy child development. Research exploring such crossovers between interventions over an extended period of time would be valuable for the Ministry. We know that it is difficult to fund longitudinal research, but would encourage academics to use existing data repositories for longitudinal work. One example is the education monitor in Limburg, which has been following students from primary to higher education. Such longitudinal data can be highly informative to the ministry.
*The conversation between Melanie Ehren and Rien Rouw took place on 18 July and is part of a series of discussions to inform the strategy development of the institute’. For more information, please contact m.c.m.ehren@vu.nl.
We sat down with the newly appointed associate professor, dr. Chiel van der Veen, to discuss his work on dialogic classroom talk, play-based learning, and the development of children's social competencies. Please continue reading to find out more about his research and future projects.
AS SOME OF OUR READERS ALREADY KNOW, YOUR RESEARCH FOCUSES ON DIALOGIC CLASSROOM TALK IN PRIMARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION, PLAY-BASED LEARNING, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN'S SOCIAL COMPETENCIES (INCLUDING ORAL COMMUNICATION, THEORY OF MIND, AND SOCIAL STATUS). WHY THESE TOPICS?
It was a bit of a coincidence. I never planned to do research in the first place. During high school, I focused on science and technology and was planning to work in this area. But I was not a good student back then: I skipped classes and wasn’t really motivated. After some reflection, I decided to enroll in a teacher training program as a way to change the system from within. There, I was introduced to science, language learning, child development, and psychology. As it turned out, I was not too fond of this training either, seeing how it included many assignments and classes. I almost dropped out. Thankfully, I changed my mind after enrolling in a student group, which introduced me to the practice of science by way of journal clubs, visits to innovative schools and a student-assistantship. Eventually, I realized that working in schools and reading scientific articles was something I enjoyed and did well. Thus, I continued my academic journey by studying educational sciences and philosophy. Finally, a VU supervisor offered me a Ph.D. position exploring classroom conversations in early childhood education. The topic turned out to be very interesting. It was fascinating how honestly children conversed with others and how easy it was for them to take the perspective of another kid. Thus, I kept on researching classroom conversations.
WHAT IS DIALOGIC CLASSROOM TALK?
Classroom conversations vary on a continuum of monological to dialogical. Monological classroom talk is overly teacher-steered and based on reciting knowledge. On the other side of the spectrum is the dialogical conversation with open and authentic questions,group reasoning, sharing ideasand listening to one another. Although some researchers in the field of classroom conversation are focused on the topics of agreement and convincing within conversations, I am more interested in how understanding comes about.
WHAT DOES DIALOGIC CLASSROOM TALK RESEARCH LOOK LIKE?
In the seventies and eighties, researchers started to observe teachers using dialogic classroom talk to extract useful techniques and create models for other teachers to use. During my PhD, we weree on of the first in our field to conduct a quasi-experimental study on the effects of dialogic classroom talk. Nowadays, however, the research into dialogic classroom talk comprises mixed methods: large-scale quantitative RCTs with measures on the level of children and classroom observations.
HOW DOES DIALOGIC CLASSROOM TALK BENEFIT CHILD DEVELOPMENT?
In multiple ways. It is helpful for communication and language development. We also have some research that focuses on more specific learning outcomes. For example, we see that in classrooms, where teachers ask more open and authentic questions, students perform better even on standardized tests of English, Math, and Science. We also see changes that develop over more extended periods of time, such as a sort of transfer from these conversations to play-based activities in which students are more attuned to one another, ask more questions, and try to take the perspective of the other. In addition, we see some changes in the social climate in the classroom. But this is really preliminary and we need more longitudinal research to understand the mechanisms of this change.
HOW WIDELY ESTABLISHED IS THIS METHOD IN THE DUTCH EDUCATION SYSTEM?
I do not think it is very widely established. However, we have done some work to deliver it to teachers: we have written practice-oriented articles and given many workshops and conferences for teachers. As a result, there is quite a lot of interest in it. We see a lot of enthusiasm in teachers who want to implement this method throughout their entire curriculum. Interestingly, the uses of dialogic classroom talk are fairly varied: some teachers use this method to talk to parents or even teach at church schools.
WHAT IS THE MOST OPTIMAL WAY TO INCORPORATE DIALOGIC CLASSROOM TALK IN THE DAILY CLASSROOM LIFE?
There is no optimal way. The use of dialogic classroom talk is very much context-based. There are instances where dialogic classroom talk may be too difficult, such as when teachers struggle with classroom management. In general, we suggest that teachers build up a dialogic classroom culture by trying one or two techniques, recording, and observing themselves. An essential strategy for effectively implementing dialogic classroom talk is pausing after questions, which is necessary to support children's thinking. The underlying idea is that if a teacher is silent for 5 seconds after posing a question, every student has had the opportunity to think of an answer even if they are not vocally participating. It turns out to be a common misconception among teachers that they think they pause after questions when actually they do not (which they can see via video self-evaluations). What teachers appear to do instead of pausing after questions is to repeat the questions, sometimes using different words, or pose five or six additional questions. Such interaction patterns are important for teachers to monitor.
WHAT IS THE ADDED VALUE OF PLAY-BASED LEARNING IN MODERN EDUCATION?
Every kid plays. It is a cultural activity that we see everywhere In the setting of education, it is a context in which learning can take place. Some people think playing is something you do to relax after the hard part of learning. But I think these two can be combined. For learning to take place, it needs to meet certain parameters. First, in every play activity, there are some rules a child needs to follow. For example, if children are role-playing, they need to follow some social rules that are related to their role, e.g., a cook or shop owner and behave accordingly. But there are also degrees of freedom to perform these roles according to one's own motives, interests, imagination, etc.. These degrees of freedom constitute the second aspect of play: one can be a cook, but one can also come up with the specific dish one wants to cook. The third aspect of play is that there is always a high level of involvement on the part of the children.
For the play activity to be successful in the educational setting, teacher sensitivity and responsivity is required: a teacher must observe the play activity and know when to interfere to broaden or deepen the play. This is where learning can take place. What I would like to know next is how one assesses whether the play-based learning has an added value.
HOW DOES ONE QUANTITATIVELY OR QUALITATIVELY ASSESS WHETHER PLAY-BASED LEARNING SUPPORTS CHILDREN’S LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT?
A lot of research shows the benefits of play for child development. Needs a sentence. What you see in very young kids is they manipulate objects and are object-oriented. By doing so, children develop, for example, spatial language skills. As soon as children begin to build structures with objects, they learn words such as "before", "after", "on", "outside", etc. Object manipulation also benefits children's motor development. Evolutionarily, as a species, we need to play with objects in order to survive and to explore our surroundings. Later on, during child development, children become more interested in social relations and we can see an increase in role-play. Role-play supports children's language and social development, for example the development of their theory of mind. These benefits arise because, during role-play, a child relates themself to others, taking the perspective of the chosen role.
Together with one of my PhD students (Jannette Prins), we have compared role-playing outside, in a nature-based environment, to role-playing in a paved environment such as a schoolyard, with concrete, a swing, and a sand pit. What we see is that in a nature-based environment, children's play becomes richer, with the use of more complex language, and negotiation. A possible explanation might be that the nature-based environment is more conducive to creative play since it is much less fixed than the paved environment. For example, what a child can do with a sandpit and a bike is more or less fixed. But, on the other hand, discussing the function of a stick or stone found in the context of a play activity in a nature-based environment requires more negotiation.
Nowadays, play is under pressure from formal learning. People see play as a way to relax, whereas formal education is becoming more and more prominent even in young kids. Already at two years of age, school children need to complete assignments and tasks that take time away from playing. Thus, some researchers are worried that play as a context in which learning can take place will be taken over by more formal learning, prompting the research into the added value of play in children's learning and development.
WHAT OTHER FACTORS ARE THERE THAT INFLUENCE THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL AND ORAL COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCIES IN CHILDREN?
Social competencies and oral communication skills are multifaceted. For example, oral competencies include vocabulary, turn-taking, perspective-taking, and, more broadly, social-cultural skills, which are required to participate in today's society filled with polarization. The notion underlying my research is that supporting the r development of social and oral communicative competencies are necessary for raising the democratic citizens of the future.
In line with this notion, what I see in dialogical classroom talk is that it supports children in dealing with diversity and different perspectives. The same happens in play activities. But there are also other, less intuitive ways to promote social competencies in children, for instance, via listening and employing silence. Sadly, in today's classrooms, there is much more noise and appreciation of vocal participation. Of course, every student should have the opportunity to be vocal during class and share their ideas, but we should also emphasize the benefits of silence, which is an important practice that helps to understand the other.
WHAT (OTHER) PROJECTS DO YOU HAVE ON THE WAY?
There are a lot of projects on the way. My colleagues Femke van der Wilt, Anne de Bruijn, Martijn Meeter and I have obtained two grants of 350k each to evaluate some possibly effective interventions that can be used by primary schools to address the decrements in development and learning caused by the COVID-19 crisis. One project we have planned is an RCT evaluation of an intervention in early childhood education, especially focused on second language learners. The other project is an RCT evaluation of a program designed to support physical education in primary schools. I would also like to employ eye tracking in classroom talk research to see how teachers allocate their attention during dialogic classroom talk.
WHAT IS THE OVERARCHING GOAL OF YOUR RESEARCH?
Maybe I want to render educational sciences irrelevant. Ultimately, through research, we want to improve, optimize or innovate the educational practice to the degree where educational sciences would become obsolete. While we work toward this goal, I want to remind other researchers that educational sciences should maybe work in the service of the practice of education, and this service should also be reflected in how funds are allocated. I just hope that not too much money goes to educational sciences and is instead mainly directed at the practice of education, ideally to teachers in order to give them time and space to teach and improve their practice.
There is a slow uptake of clinical pharmacy practice in many middle to low-income countries and lack of motivation is one of the factors contributing to the scarcity of pharmacists in the wards. This study aimed to investigate the work motivation of clinical pharmacists and factors associated with it. The theoretical framework used was the Self Determination Theory, and the motivation of clinical pharmacy graduates across South Africa was assessed with a survey and follow-up interviews. Higher amotivation was found in participants not practicing in dedicated clinical pharmacist positions, and those not receiving additional financial benefits for clinical services. The interviews revealed that relatedness and autonomy are the most important factors for their work motivation. To support clinical pharmacists, measures need to be taken to reinforce their sense of autonomy and relatedness.
A NEW PUBLICATION BY LUCILLE CRAFFORD ET AL.
I am a joint PhD student, through Amsterdam UMC location Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Research in Education) and Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences in South Africa. My PhD focusses on the motivation and education of clinical pharmacists.
Recently, our first paper “Exploring Factors Associated with the Motivation of Clinical Pharmacists: A Focus on the South African Context” was published in Frontiers in Medicine. Why this topic? Motivation can be defined as the energy that drives an individual to accomplish a goal and positively influence work performance, whereas a lack of motivation has been identified as a key problem in human resources and delivery of quality healthcare services. Pharmacy practice in many middle to low-income countries has slowly transitioned from being product-focused to a more patient-focused clinical practice. Lack of motivation is one of the factors contributing to the scarcity of pharmacists in the wards however, little is known about their work motivation.
The theoretical framework for this study was the Self-Determination theory (SDT), which postulates that individuals have three basic psychological needs (BPNs), namely the need for autonomy, competence and relatedness. SDT has been applied effectively to examine what motivates individuals to work, however there is a scarcity of existing literature on work performance motivation and its determinants. Our study contributes to the literature by validating SDT in a target group that has not been studied before, and where motivation could be a key factor in establishing the success of clinical pharmacy.
"Motivation is a dynamic entity and controlled motivation can change into autonomous motivation and vice versa depending on the degree to which BPNs [basic psychological needs] are being met."
The motivation of clinical pharmacy graduates across SA was assessed with a survey, including the Academic Motivation Scale and follow-up interviews. This study found high overall motivation among clinical pharmacists. The combination of high autonomous motivation (generated from within or through personal endorsement), as well as high controlled motivation (generated from external or internal pressure or rewards) raises a concern, as this combination according to SDT, is associated with burnout. Burnout, again leads to possible professional consequences like higher chances of quitting the field of work, and an overall negative effect on professional well-being and advancement of the clinical pharmacy profession.
This study further shows that there was higher amotivation, or absence of motivation, in clinical pharmacists currently not practicing in dedicated clinical pharmacist positions, and those not receiving additional financial benefits for delivering clinical services.
The post-hoc interviews later revealed that relatedness and autonomy are the most important factors for their work motivation. Feeling competent is crucial for autonomous motivation, and those not in dedicated positions, cannot optimally fulfil their role, leading to diminished professional autonomy. Furthermore, the lack of collegial support explained how the quality of their motivation, through feelings of relatedness, depends on the work environment.
Motivation is a dynamic entity and controlled motivation can change into autonomous motivation and vice versa depending on the degree to which BPNs are being met. The study findings demonstrate the existence of controlled motivation in clinical pharmacists and shows how the current work environment is driving controlled motivation, more than autonomous motivation. To support clinical pharmacists, measures need to be taken to reinforce their sense of autonomy and relatedness, by respectively providing them with opportunities to participate in decision-making and encouraging positive interactions with management and cooperation with colleagues.
A work environment where BPNs are fulfilled stimulate the most optimal type of motivation. This could also provide additional positive outcomes, such as enhancing motivation for lifelong learning. Continuing professional development sequentially helps health care professionals keep up with their changing context, positively affecting the quality of health care provided. These implications could also be interesting for other low to middle-income countries with a slow uptake of clinical pharmacy services.
On June 8th, Dr. Theo Bakker defended his thesis titled Study Progression and Success of Autistic Students in Higher Education: A Longitudinal, Propensity Score-Weighted Population Study. In his thesis, Dr. Bakker explored the background and enrollment characteristics of autistic students, as well as barriers in their study progression, and ways institutions should address these issues. Dr. Bakker is currently a managing director of the Hague University of Applied Sciences and will take a role as a lector in learning analytics at the same university from January of 2023.
CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR ACADEMIC BACKGROUND AND WHAT LED YOU TO TAKING YOUR PH.D. POSITION?
I studied theology but later transitioned to business information studies, specializing in student administration systems. I became a team leader of the VU analytics team, analyzing study data to find patterns in student retention and study success. I applied these insights – first in my job at Deloitte Consulting – to see how I could predict the dropout of students in universities. During one of my talks presenting this work, I met Sander Begeer, and after a few meetings on the possibilities of the dataset we developed in my team, he offered me to do a PhD with him.
In my PhD I studied a complete, institutional dataset of 101 bachelor students of the VU between 2010 and 2016 with an ASD diagnosis that I could compare to 2,252 students with other disabilities and 24,794 students without disabilities, unprecedented in the literature. I was especially interested in looking at this group of students because I wanted to understand their unique challenges. Before my studies, there had only been 23 articles published in the literature worldwide, with in total 378 students.
YOU START YOUR THESIS BY DESCRIBING THE ENROLLMENT CHARACTERISTICS OF STUDENTS WITH AUTISM?
We wrote the first article to understand the differences in enrollment and the background characteristics of autistic students compared to their peers. We found that autistic students mainly were male, one year older than other students, more enrolled in STEM studies and more often followed a non-regular education path before entering the university.
The higher age and the irregular study path could be explained by the difficulties students with autism face in reaching the higher education level. For example, some autistic students drop out of high school and later take additional examinations - which can only be taken at 21 years of age - to enter the university. Thus, explaining the higher average age in this group of students. On the other hand, we also see autistic students who graduate from havo and finish the first year at a university of applied sciences to transfer to research universities.
An interesting thing to note was that students with autism prepared themselves better than their peers. This shows they are highly focused on their studies. They expected to spend all their time on their studies and spend less time in student associations or extracurricular activities. Autistic students can request academic accommodations, such as additional study time or quiet examination rooms. They will likely benefit from study accommodations earlier in their studies due to an early diagnosis.
Interestingly, autistic students did not differ from their peers in high school grades. They are just as clever as other students.
HOW DOES THEIR EDUCATION PROGRESS DURING THE FIRST YEAR OF THEIR STUDIES?
After balancing results using propensity score weighting, I found that the study pace is the same for autistic students as for other students. The only exception is that students with autism tend to fall slightly behind others around Christmas during their first year of studies. We think this dip in performance is because autistic students have difficulties adjusting their study techniques. Whereas other students learn from their mistakes and adapt to them more efficiently, we assume students with autism tend to stick to their methods but study harder. So the difference, in the end, is likely due to the other students increasing their performance through adaptation. Another possible explanation could be that Christmas is a busy period, leading to sensory overload in autistic students and preventing them from making progress.
Other variables where one would expect autistic students to differ - such as dropout - were not different between the student groups after balancing.
DO STUDENTS WITH AUTISM DIFFER IN THE STUDY PROGRESS IN THE SECOND AND THIRD YEARS OF THEIR STUDIES?
We found no differences in dropout after two or three years and degree completion. However, autistic students have more no-shows (absences from the exams) in the second year. To predict study success in the general student population, we usually look at the number of credits obtained in the first, second, and third years. However, autistic students’ number of no-shows in the second year is more predictive of success.
Thus, in general, students with autism demonstrate more withdrawal from their studies. The most exciting result of the third paper of my thesis was the failure to find significant differences between autistic students and their peers. The differences were small or absent entirely.
In the fourth paper of my thesis, I built several prediction models using machine learning to predict student success. I was interested in prediction accuracy and in factors that would be most important in these prediction models. I found it was easier to predict success for autistic students than for other students. This increase (called a ‘lift’) in prediction accuracy over the no information model was about 21% for decree completion after three years.
Additionally, the predictors of success in autistic students differed from those in the general student population. For the first year, the most important predictors were parallel programs and the date of application.
The chances of dropout were higher in students that followed parallel study programs, likely leading to overload. Additionally, the later the students with autism applied for their studies, the more likely they were to drop out.
In the second year, the most important predictor was age, with older students dropping out more often than younger students. Higher age indicates long-term academic challenges probably stemming from issues in earlier secondary education. Again, age was the most important predictor of success in the third year, together with the average math grade in high school; a higher grade in math is a proxy for IQ and academic fit, with higher chances of graduating in three years.
WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF YOUR FINDINGS IN TERMS OF HOW HIGHER EDUCATION SHOULD BE ORGANIZED TO BENEFIT AUTISTIC STUDENTS?
The consequences of my findings are helpful for student counselling. The most important thing is to ease the transition into university life by providing students with accurate information about what it is like to study at a university. The current focus of the university websites is to provide factual information to autistic students about academic provisions and coaching. However, information describing what it is like to have autism and study at the university is lacking - what are the experiences of other students, whether they study a lot, whether it is a good idea to disclose their autism, etc. The information for autistic students should focus more on the worries students with autism might have.
Another important aspect is the timeliness of informing students about their academic accommodations. Once students have requested help or disclosed their diagnosis on Studielink, it is essential to tell them whether they can get an academic accommodation as soon as possible. This can reduce additional stress experienced by autistic students.
In the first year of studies, we should pay attention to student motivations - to understand why some students with be late with their applications - and monitor students with parallel study programs. In the second year, it is essential to devote more attention to older students' executive and social skills. Finally, in the third year, it is necessary to promote best practices for completing the graduation assignment in time. This is what I call a stepped and stacked approach - beginning with broader scopes of assistance in transitioning to higher education and becoming more and more focused on specific aspects determining study success.
I believe my thesis demonstrates that the help that autistic students have benefitted from thus far has made it possible to arrive where we are now. Without these accommodations, we may have had a more pessimistic picture of their academic success. However, several improvements are possible.
Our next step will be to examine academic success in later years of education. Additionally, we would like to research students with other disabilities together with fellow researchers.