Orthography is considered to be a major problem in Dutch education, since many pupils don’t seem to be able to master orthographic rules, even after years of education. In educational literature it is argued that the problems related to spelling are caused by approaches that focus more on rules of thumb …

Much research has been done into the relationship between students’ motivation to learn and their basic psychological needs as defined by the self-determination theory (autonomy, competence, relatedness). However, few studies have explored how these psychological needs relate to different types of maladaptive …

Learning mathematical thinking and reasoning is a main goal in mathematical education. Instructional tasks have an important role in fostering this learning. We introduce a learning sequence to approach the topic of integrals in secondary education to support students mathematical reasoning while participating …

School–family partnerships may contribute to students’ academic achievement. This is particularly relevant at schools in urban neighborhoods where children are at greater risk of educational disadvantages. Unfortunately, at urban schools (especially at urban secondary schools), barriers between the school …

Particularly in urban schools, school–family partnerships can contribute to a student’s academic achievement and reduce educational disadvantage, regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background. Based on the recommendations of a former explorative field study (also published in this issue), conventional …

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate which instructional approach to literature teaching in Dutch upper secondary education would be appropriate for fostering students’ insight into human nature, including their insight into themselves, fictional others, and real-world others.

Teaching strategies are implemented in every classroom, no matter if at a primary or secondary school. Researchers have already had a look on different teaching strategies and how those can be used in the everyday classroom at schools. However few researchers have had a look at the effects of various …

Teacher beliefs have been shown to play a major role in shaping educational practice, especially in the area of grammar teaching―an area of language education that teachers have particularly strong views on. Traditional grammar education is regularly criticized for its focus on rules-of-thumb rather …

This research project aimed to find an answer to the central research question of “how can the overall quality of teachers and their teaching methods in Dutch secondary education improve using the Finnish secondary education model as example?”. The purpose to finding an answer to this question was for …

Special relativity theory (SRT) has recently gained popularity as a first introduction to “modern” physics thinking in upper level secondary physics education. A central idea in SRT is the absolute speed of light, with light propagating with uniform speed relative to the reference frame of the observer. …