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Corona is niet weg, en de gevolgen van corona voor leerlingen al helemaal niet. Corona beïnvloedt het onderwijs en de kwaliteit ervan nog steeds in grotere mate dan we hadden gehoopt én verwacht. Studies op basis van het Nationaal Cohortonderzoek Onderwijs, waarin er ieder half jaar opnieuw gekeken wordt naar de stand van zaken met betrekking tot coronavertragingen in het basisonderwijs, laten bijvoorbeeld zien dat er grote vertragingen zijn opgelopen tijdens de pandemie, en dat die nog niet zijn ingehaald.

De wereld kampt al twee en een half jaar met de gevolgen van COVID-19. Tijdens deze periode werden scholen en leerlingen geconfronteerd met schoolsluitingen, afstandsonderwijs en lesuitval. Welke consequenties heeft dit gehad voor de leergroei van verschillende typen leerlingen in het schooljaar 2021/2022 in Nederland? En hoe verhoudt zich dat tot de leergroei in het schooljaar 2020/2021? Zijn de verschillen tussen leerlingen groter of juist kleiner geworden? In deze factsheet kijken we naar de landelijke cijfers voor de Cito-vaardigheidsscores van leerlingen bij de domeinen begrijpend lezen, spelling en rekenen-wiskunde.

De wereld kampt al 2,5 jaar met de gevolgen van COVID-19. Tijdens deze periode werden scholen en leerlingen geconfronteerd met schoolsluitingen, afstandsonderwijs en lesuitval. Welke consequenties heeft dit gehad voor de leergroei van Nederlandse leerlingen, en vooral: hoe verschillen die consequenties naar het opleidingsniveau van de ouders? We maken de balans op. In deze factsheet kijken we naar de landelijke cijfers voor de Cito-vaardigheidsscores van leerlingen bij de domeinen begrijpend lezen, spelling en rekenen-wiskunde. Deze factsheet gaat alleen over leerlingen die bij de start van COVID-19 in de middenbouw zaten (in groep 3, 4 en 5), omdat we hier kijken naar de leergroei over een periode van 2,5 jaar. Deze leerlingen zitten nu dus in de bovenbouw.

De wereld kampt al twee en een half jaar met de gevolgen van COVID-19. Tijdens deze periode werden scholen en leerlingen geconfronteerd met schoolsluitingen, afstandsonderwijs en lesuitval. Welke consequenties heeft dit gehad voor de leergroei van Nederlandse leerlingen in het schooljaar 2021/2022 en hoe verhoudt zich dat tot de leergroei in het schooljaar 2020/2021? In deze factsheet kijken we naar de landelijke cijfers voor de Cito-vaardigheidsscores van leerlingen bij de domeinen begrijpend lezen, spelling en rekenen-wiskunde. We volgen hier geen leerlingen door de tijd, maar kijken naar de leergroei in een bepaald schooljaar, van leerlingen die in dat schooljaar in de groepen 4 t/m 7 zitten.

Deze technische toelichting hoort bij de vijfde reeks factsheets die het NCO heeft uitgebracht in oktober 2022 over de leergroei in het primair onderwijs (PO) naar aanleiding van de COVID-19-crisis. In deze factsheets is gekeken naar de invloed van 2,5 jaar COVID-19-crisis (met twee perioden van schoolsluitingen naar aanleiding van de COVID-19-crisis in het eerste jaar, veel lesuitval en een verlengde kerstvakantie in het tweede jaar) op de groei in vaardigheidsscores (“leergroei”) van leerlingen op drie domeinen: begrijpend lezen, spelling en rekenen-wiskunde.

De wereld kampt al 2,5 jaar met de gevolgen van COVID-19. Tijdens deze periode werden scholen en leerlingen geconfronteerd met schoolsluitingen, afstandsonderwijs en lesuitval. Welke consequenties heeft dit gehad voor de leergroei van Nederlandse leerlingen? We maken de balans op. In deze factsheet kijken we naar de landelijke cijfers voor de Cito-vaardigheidsscores van leerlingen bij de domeinen begrijpend lezen, spelling en rekenen-wiskunde. Deze factsheet gaat alleen over leerlingen die bij de start van COVID-19 in de middenbouw zaten (in groep 3, 4 en 5), omdat we hier kijken naar de leergroei over een periode van 2,5 jaar. Deze leerlingen zitten nu dus in de bovenbouw.

After more than a year of COVID-19 crisis and the school closures that followed all around the world, the concerns about lower learning growth and exacerbated inequalities are larger than ever. In this paper, we use unique data to analyse how one full year of COVID-19 crisis in Dutch primary education has affected learning growth and pre-existing inequalities. We draw on a dataset that includes around 330,000 Dutch primary school students from about 1,600 schools, with standardized test scores for reading, spelling and mathematics, as well as rich (family) background information of the students. The results show a lower learning growth over a full year for all three domains, varying from 0.06 standard deviations for spelling to 0.12 for maths and 0.17 standard deviations for reading. Furthermore, we find that the lower learning growth is (much) larger for vulnerable students with a low socioeconomic background. This implies that pre-existing inequalities between students from different backgrounds have increased. These results are quite alarming and suggest that distance learning could not compensate for classroom teaching, although it prevented some damage that would have occurred if students had not enjoyed any formal education at all.

The COVID-19-pandemic forced many countries to close schools abruptly in the spring of 2020. These school closures and the subsequent period of distance learning has led to concerns about increasing inequality in education, as children from lower-educated and poorer families have less access to (additional) resources at home. This study analyzes differences in declines in learning gains in primary education in the Netherlands for reading, spelling and math, using rich data on standardized test scores and register data on student and parental background for almost 300,000 unique students. The results show large inequalities in the learning loss based on parental education and parental income, on top of already existing inequalities. The results call for a national focus on interventions specifically targeting vulnerable students.

After more than one and a half years of the Covid-19 crisis and the school closures that followed around the world, concerns around decreases in learning growth and exacerbated inequalities are larger than ever. The discussion in this policy paper is based on analyses with unique data that are used to show how one and a half years of Covid-19 crisis has affected learning growth and pre-existing inequalities in student achievement in Dutch primary education. Underlying these analyses is a dataset that includes more than 30% of Dutch primary school students from about 1,900 schools, with standardised test scores for reading, spelling and mathematics, as well as detailed background information about the students and their families. The data show a lower learning growth after one and a half years for reading, maths and spelling in the lower grade levels, compared with similar periods before the Covid-19 crisis. We find a slightly higher learning growth for spelling in the higher grade levels. Furthermore, the data show that the decreases in learning growth are notably larger for students with low parental socioeconomic status or income, and for students from single-parent households

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools in the Netherlands were forced to close twice. While education continued online, the first evidence suggests that pupils experienced a decrease in learning growth during the school closures. Therefore, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Science and Culture provided funds to set up remedial teaching programmes to minimize this decrease in learning growth. Unique data from primary school pupils in the Netherlands on standardized test scores is combined with information about the content and participation in remedial teaching programmes. This preregistration proposes a difference-in-difference design to analyse whether participation in remedial teaching programmes minimizes the decrease in learning loss. Furthermore we will analyse who gets selected into the remedial teaching programmes, who benefits the most from the programmes and which characteristics of the programmes yield the best results.

Dit onderzoek had tot doel te onderzoeken in hoeverre de sociaaleconomische status en thuissituatie van leerlingen van invloed zijn geweest op het effect van één jaar covid-19-crisis op de cognitieve ontwikkeling van leerlingen in het basisonderwijs. Met behulp van een grote dataset (N=±450.000 leerlingen) zijn de effecten naar sociaaleconomische status, gezinssituatie en geslacht geanalyseerd. Leerlingen hadden gemiddeld 0.17, 0.15 en 0.08 standaard afwijking minder cognitieve groei tijdens het COVID-19-jaar dan in diezelfde periode in de jaren ervoor, wat overeenkomt met een schoolverzuim van 3 tot 7 weken. Het effect van de COVID-19-crisis is groter voor leerlingen met een lage en gemiddelde sociaaleconomische status en groter voor leerlingen die uit eenouder- of grote gezinnen komen.

This report presents a baseline study for the Randomized Controlled Trial which is designed to evaluate the effectiveness of two e-learning modalities for improving school leaders’ leadership skills in Rwandan secondary schools. Rwanda experiences a wide range of educational challenges in terms of financial constraints, absence of proper school infrastructure, abrupt change in language of instructions from Kinyarwanda to English in primary education, lack of availability of qualified teachers, high pupil-teacher ratio and increasing dropout rates among students, particularly in case of secondary education.

In this report, we present an evaluation of a Continuous Professional Development (CPD) training programme for school leaders, delivered in an e-learning modality. Randomization into one of the two modalities took place at the sector level. In the first modality (the trainer-led group) trainees are guided by a trainer from the University of Rwanda - College of Education. In the other modality (the peer-led group) trainees were guided through different activities by their peers, with only occasional involvement of a trainer. The Diploma Programme on Effective School Leadership consists of four modules: (1) Overview of school leadership and working with parents and the wider community; (2) Creating strategic direction for the school; (3) Managing the school as an organisation; and (4) Leading learning & leading teaching.

We conduct an RCT that estimates the impact of a Certificate Programme on Educational Mentorship and Coaching on the prevalence and quality of induction activities in Rwandan primary schools. To this end, School Based Mentors (SBM) and tutors of the pre-service Teacher Training Centre (TTC) are enrolled in the Certificate programme. Mentors are active in the primary schools of the first intervention group. Tutors from the pre-service TTC additionally monitor the situation at school in the second intervention group. Results indicate a significant increase in teachers’ participation in induction activities in both intervention groups compared to the control group. Further, we estimate positive effects on non-cognitive outcomes of teachers, who participated in the induction activities between March and November 2019. Largest effects are found for emotional exhaustion, teacher efficacy, and work-related needs satisfaction. ispartof: EVALUATING A CERTIFICATE PROGRAMME ON EDUCATIONAL MENTORSHIP AND COACHING LEADING TO INDUCTION ACTIVITIES FOR NEW TEACHERS IN RWANDAN PRIMARY SCHOOLS status: Published online

Empirical studies investigating the impact of private voucher schools on student outcomes have focused on a number of mechanisms, including productivity and competitive effects. Arguably, the possibility that these voucher schools may provide greater variety, in terms of education options or tracks remains an understudied area. This paper exploits the rapid expansion of private academic and vocational track schools in Sweden, to address this question. We uncover new evidence that the introduction of private voucher schools induced greater vocational education participation, and not simply a substitution of public for private vocational schools. In effect, private school penetration lead to a switch away from academic tracks, including both science and social science, in favour of vocational options. We then ask what impact inducing greater participation in vocational education had on short- and medium-term outcomes, including GPA, on-time graduation from high school, university participation and field of study at university. We discuss other possible mechanisms, including changes in peer and teacher quality.

In this paper we analyze the effect of involving parents in human capital investment. We study the effect of a parental app on student effort in a digital homework practice tool, and its effect on subsequent human capital development. The randomized field experiment includes more than 2000 7-9 grade students of 2 schools and we specifically focus on different socio-economic status (SES) groups. The results indicate that parental involvement via an app positively affects effort and human capital development of 7th and 8th grade students, but not of 9th grade students. The positive effects are mainly driven by low-SES students and are larger for males.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a discrete choice experiment (DCE) on the competencies of potential information technology (IT)-retrainees. The results give insights in the monetary value and relative returns to both soft and hard skills. Design/methodology/approach The authors apply a DCE in which the authors propose seven pairs of hypothetical candidates to employers based in the municipality of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. These hypothetical candidates differ on six observable skill attributes and have different starting wages. The authors use the inference from the DCE to calculate the marginal rates of substitution (MRS). The MRS gives an indication of the monetary value of each skill attribute. Findings Employers prefer a candidate who possesses a degree in an exact field over a similar candidate from another discipline. Programming experience from previous jobs is the most highly valued characteristic for an IT-retrainee. Employers would pay a candidate with basic programming experience a 53 percent higher starting wage. The most high-valued soft skill is listening skills, for which employers are willing to pay a 46 percent higher wage. The results of this paper show that both hard and soft skills are important, but not all soft skills are equally important. Originality/value The results on the returns to skills provide guidelines to tailor IT training and retraining programs to the needs of the business environment. A key strength of this paper is that the authors have information on the preference orderings for different skills and kinds of experience.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of an intervention of formative assessments with a clicker-based technology on anxiety and academic performance. We use a randomized experiment in physics education in one school in Dutch secondary education. For treated students the formative assessments are operationalized through quizzing at the end of each physics class, where clickers enable students to respond to questions. Control students do not receive these assessments and do not use clickers, but apart from that the classes they attend are similar. Findings from multilevel regressions indicate that the formative assessments significantly reduce anxiety in physics, and improve academic performance in physics in comparison with a traditional teaching. Furthermore, a mediation effect of anxiety in physics on academic performance is observed. In sum, this implies that an easily to implement technique of formative assessments can make students feel more at ease, which contributes to better educational performance.

This paper provides a meta-analysis of microeconometric evaluation studies on the effectiveness of active labor market policies. The analysis is built upon a systematically assembled data set of causal impact estimates from 57 experimental and quasi-experimental studies, providing 654 estimates published between January 1990 and December 2017. We distinguish between the short and longer term impacts in our analysis; at 6, 12, 24, and 36 months after program start. After correcting for publication bias and country-specific macroeconomic characteristics, subsidized labor and public employment programs have negative short-term impacts, which gradually turn positive in the longer run. Schemes with enhanced services including job-search assistance and training programs do not have these negative short-term effects, and stay positive from 6 until 36 months after program start.

This paper shows how parents’ perceptions of parent–teacher relationship practices differ between different types of schools with respect to children’s special needs and the socio-economic status of these children. Using a questionnaire, we compare parents’ views from two special education schools, two at-risk schools serving low SES-children, and two mainstream primary education schools in the southern part of the Netherlands. The theoretical framework is based on Epstein’s Model of Parental Involvement. The results illustrate that parents and teachers in special education and at-risk schools are very much accustomed to ‘two-way communication’, in contrast to mainstream schools, and that this is valued highly by these parents. Furthermore, teachers in special and at-risk schools are more familiar with interacting with parents, involve them more in decision-making and more often co-ordinate homework practice with parents.

We estimate preferences for school tracks in upper secondary education in Hungary. We consider travel time, school SES composition, school level (in terms of peer quality) and school quality (in terms of added value). We find that students have stronger preferences for school SES composition and school level, rather than school quality (which may be harder to observe). Furthermore, these preferences vary between high and low ranked schools, indicating students use heuristics in the process of compiling their ranked preference list.

Wages are a composite measure of the return to education and the return to work experiences. Work experiences are often defined as workers who gain experiences on-the-job. However, work experiences can also be part of a study curriculum in vocational secondary education. We estimate the return to in-school work experiences by comparing the Heckman selection model and the Rubin matching model. First, we show that students with in-school work experiences earn +16% more in the first years of labour than their theoretical peers. Second, we indicate that both empirical models do not appropriately deal with censored observations in the presence of an informal market. Including information on a set of censored observations increases the effect to +22%.

This paper explored the effects of in-class-level differentiation by making innovative use of an interactive whiteboard (SMARTboard) on math proficiency. Therefore, this paper evaluates the use of SMARTboard in class, in combination with teacher training, using a randomized field experiment among 199 pre-vocational students in seventh grade in the Netherlands. During 6 weeks, students in the intervention group participated in math classes in which the SMARTboard was used to apply level differentiation. The teachers of these classes received a specific training (Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge [TPACK]) in using the SMARTboard in class. Control classes were taught by teachers without the training, who did not use the SMARTboard in class. The results showed that level differentiation in class, which was possible because of the efficient use of the SMARTboard, significantly increased math proficiency with 0.25 points.

This paper describes a dataset with data from three individually randomized educational technology experiments on differentiation, formative testing and feedback during one school year for a group of 8th grade students in the netherlands, using administrative data and the online motivation questionnaire of boekaerts. The dataset consists of pre- and posttest scores for each experiment, as well as background information on the students, such as gender, age, ability, grade repetition and neighborhood characteristics. It also includes motivation of students. The dataset, or parts of it, could be interesting to use in future studies, focusing on effects of the use of educational technology, for comparison with similar and/or slightly different experiments, and for studies such as meta-analyses or replication studies, especially given the individual experimental setup.

In this paper we develop a malmquist productivity index for public sector production characterized by the influence of environmental variables. We extend johnson and ruggiero (2011) to the more general case of variable returns to scale to further decompose the malmquist productivity index into technical, efficiency, scale and environmental change. We apply our model to analyze productivity of dutch schools using 2002–2007 data. The results indicate that the environment influences the productivity index as well as the technical, efficiency, scale and environmental change components. We see that schools with a moderate classification of environment have the highest productivity numbers. In line with expectations, schools with the worst environment also perform worse and would perform better with an improved environment.

Human capital theory is based on the idea that workers possess a combination of skills that can be made productive in the labor market. According to human capital theory, differences in the levels of human capital in the workforce explain differences in wages and employment rates. Involuntary unemployment occurs when the supply of human capital in the workforce is not tailored to the corresponding demand by employers. This problem arises when the demand for human capital has changed, for instance, due to technological advancements. This mechanism is especially relevant in the field of information technology (IT), where new technologies are introduced rapidly, shifting the demand for skills in the IT sector.As a general policy instrument to combat involuntary unemployment, governments around the world invest in different kinds of labor market programs that are categorized under the umbrella term of active labor market policy (ALMP). The goal of these programs is to improve the labor market outcomes of the participants, including employment rates and earnings. The motivation behind ALMP is to achieve this goal through human capital formation. After participating in the ALMP, the human capital of the participants should be more tailored to demand than before participating. Human capital theory predicts that when ALMP improves the human capital of the participants, this in turn leads to improved labor market outcomes, such as employment rates and earnings.In undertaking an analysis of human capital theory and labor market policy, this PhD thesis has four objectives. The first is to determine what makes ALMP effective. The second objective is to identify the skills and abilities that employers seek when recruiting new IT personnel for retraining. The third objective involves estimating the determinants of enrollment, study success and dropout in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in higher education. The final aim is to evaluate the effectiveness of a specific IT retraining program in the Netherlands, which is an ALMP set up in co-operation between the public and private sectors and is specifically aimed at highly educated workers.

Formative assessments are interventions in education that provide information on the extent to which subject matter is mastered. Although formative assessments are widely used, many teachers do not find it easy to organise them in their lessons. To support teachers in this, they can use student response systems (SRS), whereby students answer multiple-choice questions posed by their teacher in class. Although there has been much research into the effects of formative testing with SRS, there is still a lack of evidence as to why learning is affected. The studies in the thesis show that feedback in a formative assessment with SRS affects pupils' anxiety, motivation, metacognitive awareness and learning performance.