Ilja Cornelisz

Public-private partnerships in education

This insightful book brings together both academics and researchers from a variety of international organizations and aid agencies to explore the complexities of public private partnerships as a resurgent, hybrid mode of educational governance that operates across scales, from the community to the global.

Does educational privatisation promote social justice

Social justice in education refers to the expectation that the education system provides fairness in its access to opportunities and results. Proponents of educational privatisation believe this would not only open up opportunities for those that otherwise are restricted from attending good schools, but that it would also improve overall efficiency in the education system through pressures of market competition. This article first provides a framework for analysing a quasi-market in education and for considering the potential effects of privatisation. It then applies this framework to the Netherlands, a school system premised completely on choice where two thirds of the schools are privately sponsored. We conclude that the Dutch system, thanks to a series of policies and regulations in place, performs relatively well on social justice, when looking at freedom of choice and overall productive efficiency. However, for equity and social cohesion, despite clear policy efforts, the privatised system seems to undermine social justice for certain groups in the population. The dilemma observed here is that some private benefits of education must be compromised to achieve greater equity and social cohesion. It is an open question whether policy makers are willing to make such tradeoffs.

Relative Private School Effectiveness in the Netherlands: A Reexamination of PISA 2006 and 2009 data

An ongoing question is whether private (religious) schools provide better education than public schools. This study re- addresses this issue, using PISA 2006 and 2009 data for the Netherlands and three different methodologies. Overall, there is no consistent pattern. Results based on ordinary least squares and propensity score matching suggest private school attendance is positively associated with mathematics achievement, but only for PISA 2006. Instead, the results generated by an instrumental variable approach are very unstable. A thorough understanding of selection processes in Dutch education, and better data, seem necessary for future empirical work on this matter.

Student Engagement with Computerized Practicing: Ability, Task Value and Difficulty Perceptions

A prerequisite for low-stakes activities to improve learning is to keep students engaged when confronted with challenging material. Comparing a personalized and non-personalized version of computerized practising, this study experimentally evaluates the relationships between student effort and ability across different dimensions of task perceptions. Students practise longer when the task is perceived to be not too difficult. Students assigned to a personalized version of the tool have a lower success rate while practising, but this does not translate to differences in practice intensity, task perceptions, or summative test scores. In a personalized practising environment, perceived interest and usefulness both have the potential to promote engagement, albeit in different ways. Students with a lower level of subject-specific ability find the tool more interesting and, particularly, consider the non-personalized tool difficult but useful. Instead, in the personalized condition, it is the group of students with higher prescores who value the tool as relatively useful. These results indicate that more students will remain engaged with adaptive practising if software takes into account such differences. Multiple approaches and algorithms may thus be necessary to optimally adapt practising to individual learners.

Free School Choice and the Educational Achievement Gap

In the Netherlands, school choice is free and all schools are equally funded by the government. We measured distance from home to school as a proxy for the selectivity of choice and used characteristics of the nearest school to explain the choice of a school other than the nearest school. Almost 89% of all pupils in the 4 largest cities do not select the nearest school. Native Dutch pupils tend to prefer a school with lower percentages of nonwestern migrant students and a higher mean school SES and exam score. Immigrant students tend to choose a school with higher percentages of nonwestern migrant students.

TEACHER CHARACTERISTICS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON STUDENT TEST SCORES: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

It has become widely accepted that teachers are important in facilitating student learning. Hundreds of empirical studies have tried to explain differences in student performance by evaluating the impact of particular teacher characteristics. Yet, this topic has not been the subject of a systematic review for more than 10 years, even though most of the empirical evidence has emerged over the past decade. This study provides an up-to-date review, drawing on empirical findings from several countries and distinguishing between acquired and sociodemographic teacher characteristics. This review confirms the existing consensus that subject-related degrees and knowledge, and not general teacher certifications, are positively related to student performance and particularly so for Masters degrees in math and science. A new insight is that recent findings point out that teacher experience continues to contribute to student test scores throughout a teachers career, instead of merely the first few years. An important future research avenue would be to examine which mechanisms can explain these teacher characteristic effects.

“Investigating the relationships between online activity, learning strategies and grades to create learning analytics-supported learning designs.”

Learning analytics offers the opportunity to collect, analyse and visualise feedback on learning activities using authentic data in real-time. The REFLECTOR project was used to investigate whether there are correlations between students learning strategies, their online activity and their grades. Information about the learning strategies was obtained using the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire. The grades and the online activity of students for two pilot courses was collected from the log data of the learning management system. Analysis of the collected data showed that there are moderate correlations to be found, for instance between metacognitive self-regulation, documents that are related to planning and grades. The pilot sessions taught us that there are practical issues with regards to data storage location as well as data security that need to be taken into account when learning analytics is integrated into existing learning designs. Overall, the project results show that a close relationship between learning analytics and the learning design of courses is urgently needed to make learning analytics effective.