In the 1980s and 1990s in the Netherlands, as a reaction to the growing number of non-Christian pupils at Christian schools, religious education and religious development became issues for debate. At some schools, it was the exclusiveness of the Christian tradition that dominated, and at others it was the inclusiveness. Another group specialised…

In the Netherlands, national assessments at the end of primary school (Grade 6) show a decline of achievement on problems of complex or written arithmetic over the last two decades. The present study aims at contributing to an explanation of the large achievement decrease on complex division, by investigating the strategies students used in…

Despite clear European and Dutch policies about media education, there is currently no media education curriculum in Dutch schools. A survey among preadolescents (n = 257) in six primary schools in the Netherlands included questions regarding media access, fears, risks, parental mediation of television and the internet, and the need for media…

The assessment of so-called depth of word knowledge has been the focus of research for some years now. In this article the construct of deep word knowledge is further specified as the decontextualized knowledge of word meanings and word associations. Most studies so far have involved adolescent and adult second language learners. In this article,…

Breznitz (2006) demonstrated that Hebrew-speaking adults with reading disabilities benefited from a training in which reading rate was experimentally manipulated. In the present study, the authors examine whether silent reading training enhances the sentence reading rate and comprehension of children with reading disabilities and whether results…

The goal of the present study was to examine the precursors of verbal working memory in 52 children with cerebral palsy with varying degrees of speech impairments in the first grade of special education. Following Baddeley's model of working memory, children's verbal working memory was measured by means of a forced-recognition task. As precursors…

In some Dutch elementary schools, the average performance of students over several years is significantly below the level that could be expected of them. This phenomenon is known as "underperformance." The most important identifiable weaknesses that go along with this phenomenon are that (a) learning material offered at school is…

Using data from 1,373 households participating in the 2005 Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey, this paper examines the characteristics of educational donors in comparison with other types of charitable donors and with nondonors. Charitable giving is quite common in the Netherlands, but there is no established higher education advancement…

Background: In preschool and primary education, pupils differ in many abilities and competences (giftedness). Yet mainstream educational practice seems rather homogeneous in providing age-based or grade-class subject matter approaches. Aims: To clarify whether pupils scoring initially at high ability level do develop and attain differently at…

Previous studies based on population cohorts born at least 35 years ago, have reported appreciable childhood cognitive deficits for twins. We compared longitudinal IQ scores from approximately 188,000 singletons and some 6000 twins who went to primary school in the Netherlands from 1994 to 2003. In addition, we used a family-based design in which…

The purpose of the present study was to explore Dutch spelling development throughout the elementary grades. Two issues were considered (a) dimensional structure over time, and (b) rate of change. Whether the rate of change differs depending on gender, ethnicity, or word reading skill was examined in particular. A pseudolongitudinal dataset with…

The present study examined teacher attitudes toward dyslexia and the effects of these attitudes on teacher expectations and the academic achievement of students with dyslexia compared to students without learning disabilities. The attitudes of 30 regular education teachers toward dyslexia were determined using both an implicit measure and an…

This research was designed to examine how factors within young children's environment (e.g., school factors, neighborhood) contribute to explaining peer victimization. The sample comprised 2,003 children (between 4 and 5 years of age) from 98 classrooms in 23 elementary schools in the Netherlands. Teachers were asked to complete a questionnaire on…

Children (5 and 6 years old, n = 30) at familial risk of dyslexia received a home-based intervention that focused on phoneme awareness and letter knowledge in the year prior to formal reading instruction. The children were compared to a no-training at-risk control group (n = 27), which was selected a year earlier. After training, we found a small…

This paper reports a study aimed at revealing special-educational-needs pupils' learning potential by means of an ICT-based assessment including a dynamic visual tool that might help pupils when solving mathematics problems. The study focused on subtraction problems up to 100, which require "borrowing". These problems, in which the value…