In the Dutch stratified secondary educational system, schools vary in how many tracks are offered. While the tendency in the Netherlands is for schools to become smaller, a relevant policy question is whether multi-track school settings promote equality of educational opportunity. Comparing single-track schools at the pre-university and…

The formation and maintenance of friendship closeness is an important developmental task in adolescence. To obtain insight in real-time processes that may underlie the development of friendship closeness in middle adolescence, this preregistered experience sampling study [ESM] investigated the effects of social media use on friendship closeness.…

This research addresses the relationship between the learning style and the students' career choice close to finishing secondary education in Spain. The study was carried out with a sample of 590 participants from the province of Valencia in Spain. The learning style was determined using the "Honey-Alonso Learning Styles Questionnaire."…

Social communication and executive functioning challenges as well as co-occurring anxiety/depression may make acquiring the skills needed to manage daily life tasks difficult for diploma-track autistic youth, thus limiting their participation in adult roles. This study describes the associations between executive function, social communication…

Motivation and self-concept count among the educationally most relevant factors and the evaluation of many educational interventions requires their valid measurement. The present study examined the psychometric properties of a shortened version of the Students' Approaches to Learning questionnaire measuring 10 distinct motivational and…

The article deals with the structural conflict between academic and vocational postcompulsory secondary education involving the negative selection to vocational education. The conflict is treated from the historical perspective with the aim of explaining historical factors and social mechanisms that have contributed to the persistence of the…

In recent decades, higher education has experienced a massive expansion worldwide, which has often been linked to increasing higher education diversification. New sectors and new types of institutions emerged with this massification process to offer more diversified types of advanced training. At the same time, this expansion was often embedded in…

Across democracies, education predicts electoral participation and political interest. Here, German students on the pre-vocational and pre-academic educational tracks are compared to show how these differences emerge, and thus indicate how they can be addressed. In a Preliminary Study, a large dataset (3747 participants) revealed that there is a…

This article bridges the literature on educational inequality between and within families to test whether high--socioeconomic status (SES) families compensate for low cognitive ability in the transition to secondary education in Germany. The German educational system of early-ability tracking (at age 10) represents a stringent setting for the…

A vast amount of research is devoted to identifying factors that predict early school leaving. However, there is no simple explanation because the results show that young people leave education prematurely for various reasons, such as their level of school involvement, their background characteristics and different school systems. This article…

Business education has come a long way, from its roots in vocational education; and is now becoming an essential part of the school curriculum. As its significance continues to be recognised, business education needs to respond to dynamic changes and to be future oriented. This paper first discusses the relationship between business education and…

PISA test data from 2000 to today have shown Germany's education system is one of the most inequitable within the OECD, with high correlations between student background and achievement outcomes. Scholars have identified the highly differentiated school structure, which tracks students as young as 10 years old, as a central cause. This scholarship…

This study examined the performance of English learners (ELs) taking the ACT® test with testing supports, as compared to ELs and non-ELs taking the ACT without supports or accommodations. Contextual factors were also explored, including high school experiences and demographic characteristics such as low-income and first-generation college student…

We analyze the subtle mechanisms at work in the interaction between families and schools that underlie social inequalities at the transition point from elementary school into secondary-school tracks in Berlin, Germany. We do so by combining quantitative data from a large-scale survey and assessment study (N = 3,935 students and their parents) with…

It has been established since the 1960s that tracking yields negative consequences for students in lower tracks. As this research has been carried out mainly in the USA and UK, the effects of tracking have been demonstrated in systems of within-school tracking mostly. However, in many European countries--such as Belgium (Flanders)--tracking is…