Equal opportunities in educational transitions
Eddie Denessen, Floris Burgers and Eric Robbers of Radboud University have been awarded a €600,000 grant from the NRO for their research project “From heterogeneity to high quality: The effects of different forms of detracking on learner development”. This project promotes educational equality in secondary education by investigating detracking in secondary schools. In detracked classes, pupils with different educational track recommendations learn together during the first years of secondary school. The research focuses on how different schools organise en design detracked classes and how this affects the development of different learners. The project aims to identify principles through which detracked classes maximally stimulate development and contribute to equal educational opportunities. This should help schools make informed choices about differentiation and curriculum development in the context of detracked classes. A PhD student and a post-doc will be appointed with this grant. The research will be conducted in cooperation with schools in South-East Gelderland and will start on 1 December 2024.
View the grant here (in Dutch)
School en Omgeving: Outcome-oriented research in educational practices
Eddie Denessen, Floris Burgers and Lineke van Tricht from Radboud University have been awarded a €200,000 grant from the NRO for their research project, School and Environment: A Multiple Case Study on the Effectiveness of Interventions on Pupils. Several Dutch schools provide a special programme that offers learners extra educational programmes after school, such as culture classes, study support or extra sports lessons. This programme is called ‘School en Omgeving’. The programme mainly runs in schools with many pupils with fewer opportunities and is one of the interventions through which schools work on equal educational opportunities. The research project looks at how schools design their ‘School en Omgeving’ programmes and what specific goals they pursue in doing so. Through surveys and focus groups with participating learners, it examines how the various interventions in the programme contribute to equal opportunities and other goals. This project helps schools to better align programmes with objectives and provides insight into the extent to which School en Omgeving contributes to educational equality. The study started on 1 November 2024.