Over the past forty years, scholars have been studying students' choice of higher education programmes to unravel the complexity of the choice process. Recent studies have shown that students may commit to a programme, i.e. they make a choice to enrol in that programme, when they find a programme that attunes well with their interests. Students…

Pupils' subject choices at the level of secondary education critically determine the tertiary fields of study that they can pursue. This study used multinomial logistic regression models to investigate the extent to which the final report card grades of ninth-grade students predicted their choices of subject combinations at the senior general…

This study focuses on teachers' group decision making during Dutch allocation meetings. A previous interview study showed that teachers question the objectivity of decisions due to negative interaction experiences and a lack of structure during these meetings. To characterize the structure and interaction of these meetings, 33 student allocations…

The accuracy of students' relative comprehension judgments when reading texts is typically rather low. This has been ascribed to students grounding their comprehension judgments on cues that are not diagnostic of their actual comprehension level. Asking students to complete causal diagrams--a diagramming scaffold--before judging comprehension has…

Making better decisions typically requires obtaining information relevant to that decision. Adolescence is marked by increasing agency in decision-making and an accompanying increase in impulsive decisions, suggesting that one characteristic of adolescent decision-making is a tendency to make less-informed decisions. Adolescents could also be…

A cornerstone of inclusive education is teacher's readiness to respond adequately to different educational needs of students in their diverse classroom. Differentiated instruction, referring to the process by which teachers carefully monitor students' needs and progress, and adapt their instruction according to these differences, is a means to…

In this qualitative case study we examined the impact of a specially-designed classroom intervention for a group of 15-16-year-old Dutch biology students' use of values in contemplating five socioscientific issues in the human-nature context. The students worked in small groups to support various aspects of their morality. An ethical matrix was…

In the Netherlands, the implementation of mandatory procedures in which prospective students do a final check on their initial higher education program choice (so-called matching procedures), were introduced to improve student-program fit. We argue that prospective students who lack feelings of fit with the program during these matching procedures…

This autoethnographic paper is part of a special issue trying to answer the question "How to design or choose languages for programming novices?" I will describe how my programming language Hedy was created, how the initial design goals were formed, how my perspectives on learning and teaching changed along the way, and how Hedy changed…

Informed study decisions are pivotal for student retention in higher online education. A self-assessment prior to enrolment has been proposed as a promising approach to enable informed decision-making and to build resources for retention. To determine whether such a self-assessment affects the decision-making process as intended, thorough and…

Recent studies have shown that students' interests are decisive in making a substantiated higher education choice, yet do not indicate how students decide which interests they aim to pursue. This study aimed to find the considerations students have when weighing interests and higher education programmes. Thematic analysis was applied to uncover…

Regular physical activity (PA) contributes to lifelong health and well-being. Adolescents in the Netherlands do not engage in sufficient PA, leading to serious health risks. The purpose of this study is to inform PA-enhancing strategies. This paper offers a unique method for analysing students' perspectives about opportunities for PA in their…

Secondary school students in the Netherlands already face future-oriented decisions about their educational careers, which are expected to be informed by their interests in specific vocations or occupations. However, vocational interest assessment tools generally do not account for the possibility that students are interested in multiple…

Previous work suggests that adolescents are still refining acoustic-phonetic cue use in clear-speech perception. This study shows adolescents' immature perception of reduced speech, in which speech sounds are naturally deleted and merged within and across words. German adults and 16-year-olds listened to either German reduced or unreduced (few or…

The ways in which educators talk about diversity, and specifically about linguistic diversity, reflect underlying beliefs about language in society and influence teaching practice. Semi-structured interviews with 55 high school teachers in the Netherlands were analyzed qualitatively in order to identify teachers' discourse patterns related to the…