The HEPS Tool for Schools provides ideas, guidelines and suggested techniques to help schools in their development of school policy on healthy eating and physical activity. There is growing evidence that a comprehensive whole school policy on healthy eating and physical activity can lead to better academic outcomes of pupils as well as promoting…

Self-evaluation is supposed to be a valid, reliable and easy-to-use instrument to commit professionals to external quality assurance. The writing of a self-evaluation report is the first step in most higher education accreditation systems all over the world. Research on accreditation in the Netherlands and Flanders shows that professionals…

Dutch prevocational secondary schools are reforming their educational programmes to make them more competence-based. This reform has substantial implications for the roles played by teachers. Yet, little empirical research has been conducted on teachers' processes of competence development in vocational settings. This study explores teachers'…

There are lots of definitions of quality, and also of quality in education. Garvin (1984) discerns five approaches: the transcendental approach, the product-oriented approach, the customer-oriented approach, the manufacturing-oriented approach and the value-for-money approach. Harvey and Green (1993) give five interrelated concepts of quality as:…

Networks aiming for fundamental changes bring together a variety of actors who are part and parcel of a problematic context. These system innovation projects need to be accompanied by a monitoring and evaluation approach that supports and maintains reflexivity to be able to deal with uncertainties and conflicts while challenging current practices…

The HEPS Inventory Tool aims to support stakeholders working in school health promotion to promote high quality interventions on healthy eating and physical activity. As a tool it provides a step-by-step approach on how to develop a national or regional inventory of existing school based interventions on healthy eating and physical activity. It…

This study uses data on support and contact in 4,055 parent-child dyads drawn from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study to test explanations of reporting discrepancies, which focus on sources of bias and inaccurate reporting. Contrary to the generational stake hypothesis, parents' reports are not characterized by a general positive bias. Consistent…

This article discusses large-scale assessment of change in student achievement and takes the study by Hickendorff, Heiser, Van Putten, and Verhelst (2009) as an example. This study compared the achievement of students in the Netherlands in 1997 and 2004 on written division problems. Based on this comparison, they claim that there is a performance…

In a controlled multiple case design study, the development of a therapeutic relationship and its role in affect regulation were studied in 6 children with visual disabilities, severe intellectual disabilities, severe challenging behavior, and prolonged social deprivation. In the 1st phase, children had sessions with an experimental therapist…

School quality care has become important in many Western countries and a number of high quality school self-evaluation instruments has been developed and implemented to support this activity. However, little is known on the critical success factors for the use of school self-evaluation instruments. From this longitudinal study into the use of a…

Supporting student teachers in learning to teach is a collaborative effort by mentor teachers, teacher education supervisors, and student teachers. Each of the participants appraises effort and progress in learning to teach from different perspectives, however. This study explores how practice lessons are assessed by multiple raters. Teacher…

Developing and using a design for teacher portfolio assessment is a complex process including several components: the domain to be assessed (the teacher competences), the content standards or criteria, the portfolio format, the completion of the format (by teachers) with content, and the scoring of the portfolios (by raters). For a portfolio…

How much do returns to education differ across different natural experiment methods? To test this, we estimate the rate of return to schooling in Australia using two different instruments for schooling: month of birth and changes in compulsory schooling laws. With annual pre-tax income as our measure of income, we find that the naive ordinary…

Structural equation models are commonly used to analyze 2-mode data sets, in which a set of objects is measured on a set of variables. The underlying structure within the object mode is evaluated using latent variables, which are measured by indicators coming from the variable mode. Additionally, when the objects are measured under different…

Multiple and specific learning criteria were used to examine the predictive validity of the Learning Style Questionnaire (LSQ). Ninety-nine students in a college of higher learning in The Netherlands participated in a naturally occurring field study. The students were categorized into one of four LSQ dimensions, namely, Activists, Theorists,…