Scholars report that the students' interest in STEM declines and suggest to approach them earlier. This case study with the convenient sample of seven primary school students investigates the students' view of science and scientists and examine the following research questions in the Dutch lower secondary school context: (1) What are young…

Inquiry-based working contributes to teacher professionalization and educational improvements. This article presents the key findings of a qualitative case study carried out in three primary schools in the Netherlands. That study focused on the inquiry-based working of school boards, school leaders and teachers, with the goal of better…

Principals (policy makers) have debated the progress in U.S. student performance for a half century or more. Informing these conversations, survey agents have administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math and reading in 160 waves to national probability samples of selected cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. This study is the…

This study examines whether teachers are able to apply the principles of autonomy support and structure support in designing digital problem based learning (PBL) tasks. We examine whether these tasks are more autonomy- and structure-supportive and whether primary and secondary school students experience greater autonomy, competence, and motivation…

Notwithstanding dramatically low levels of professed religiosity in Western Europe, the religious school sector continues to thrive. One explanation for this paradox is that nowadays parents choose religious schools primarily for their higher academic reputation. Empirical evidence for this presumed denominational advantage is mixed. We examine…

Giving feedback during active learning is an important, though difficult, task for teachers. In the present study, the problems elementary school teachers perceive and the beliefs they hold regarding this task were investigated. It appeared that teachers believe conditional teacher skills, especially time management, hinder them most from giving…

The purpose of this study was to identify and validate subtypes of peer status by integrating preference and popularity into a single framework. Person-oriented analyses were performed among 3,630 children and adolescents of different cohorts in primary and secondary education. In the young age groups (Grade 3/4 to Grade 7), three clusters were…

Using self-report questionnaires, a survey among 606 Dutch primary school children aged 10 to 12 years examined relationships among social support, gender, victimization, and depressive feelings. Hierarchical regression analyses confirmed that victims and bully/victims would report more depressive feelings than uninvolved children. There was no…

To enable improvements in school health promotion, this paper examines associations between the number of health-promotion issues addressed by primary school teachers in the Netherlands and factors thought to influence this behavior. The main factors studied are context characteristics and constructs of attitude, social influence, self-efficacy…