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IntroductionThe problem of LGBQIA-phobia has been extendedly reported as a problem that threatens the quality of life and well-being, particularly for trans and intersex individuals. Scientific evidence points at the high presence of this form of violence and discrimination during adolescence and youth, negatively affecting the prospects of the victims. At the same time, there is a lack of evidence on the role and potential impact of Youth Worker Networks involved in analysing gender-based violence and finding strategies to improve the situation of LGBTQIA+ youth.MethodsThis study has focussed on the reality of a network of youth workers through a mixed method approach belonging to a transnational project funded by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Program (REC) of the European Commission. The implementation of 160 questionnaires and 5 semi-structured interviews in 2022 with the training participants provides evidence on the social impact that networking and evidence-based training may have in tackling LGBTQIA-phobia in youth environments.ResultsThe findings of the current study show how the implementation of Youth Worker Networks can provide relevant results to achieve more respectful youth spaces toward diversity. The presence of traditional dominant masculinities together with the lack of quality training seem to be an important barrier for youth workers to fight against gender and sexual discrimination. In contrast, the professionals' motivation and the group potential and support of the network appear to be a significant strength in overcoming forms of violence and discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression in youth contexts.ConclusionsThe results indicate that the role of youth workers, the quality of the training

We evaluate whether a scalable online teacher professional development (OTPD) module that requires little time investment enhances students' financial literacy. Two randomised controlled trials were performed, with 1827 students, 53 teachers and 47 schools participating. The financial education programme on its own increased students' financial knowledge, but did not improve financial behaviour. Regarding the OTPD effects, we observed that students' knowledge scores did not significantly improve, but that behaviour scores were enhanced relative to students whose teachers did not receive access to the OTPD module. In comparison with students in the control condition, behaviour scores improved with 0.39 SD.

Behavioural economics has been argued to be a productive basis for decision support system (DSS) research. Whereas traditional economics assumes that individuals make decisions independently of others, behavioural economists have shown that humans tend to follow the crowd in their decisions (i.e., exhibit herding bias). However, the literature is silent on how convincing the information on the decisions of the crowd needs to be to elicit herding bias and on whether herding can be reduced (i.e., debiased) by presenting a warning message. This paper addresses both questions in the contexts of financial decisions that were guided by two DSSs in the form of simulation tools. In particular, we conduct a randomised controlled trial with 768 respondents randomly assigned to peer information. The results indicate that the intervention successfully elicited herding bias and that herding occurs when respondents are informed that at least 50% of other people made a particular decision. The results further show that a DSS in the form of a warning message is not sufficient to debias herding. In conclusion, these findings showed that individuals are easily influenced by erroneous peer information and that this effect is robust against debiasing using a warning message. Hence, DSS developers need to consider more intense debiasing strategies to overcome herding.

This paper introduces an innovative Bayesian machine learning algorithm to draw interpretable inference on heterogeneous causal effects in the presence of imperfect compliance (e.g., under an irregular assignment mechanism). We show, through Monte Carlo simulations, that the proposed Bayesian Causal Forest with Instrumental Variable (BCF-IV) methodology outperforms other machine learning techniques tailored for causal inference in discovering and estimating the heterogeneous causal effects while controlling for the familywise error rate (or, less stringently, for the false discovery rate) at leaves’ level. BCF-IV sheds a light on the heterogeneity of causal effects in instrumental variable scenarios and, in turn, provides the policy-makers with a relevant tool for targeted policies. Its empirical application evaluates the effects of additional funding on students’ performances.

Although a large body of literature has examined the effects of open government from a theoretical perspective, evidence on the empirical effects is still limited. This paper analyses parental response to an open government initiative consisting of the publication on a government website of school inspection reports. As an indicator of school quality, school inspection reports allow parents to make well informed school choices for their children. We employ a unique natural experiment in Belgium where schools are randomly selected for inspection, and online school inspection reports are the first and only source of objective quality data publicly available. This results in exogenous information shocks. Our findings indicate that information about school quality strongly affects school choice. After the publication, inspected schools experience higher enrolments, with effects driven by positively evaluated schools and rural schools. No differentiated response is observed by schools' socioeconomic composition. We interpret these findings as evidence that parents made extensive use of the government website on which school inspection reports were published.

Given the expected advantages for individuals and societies, financial literacy is high on the policy agenda in many countries. This paper reports the results from a unique survey conducted on a sample of 13–16-year-old students in five European countries, aimed at measuring and comparing their level of financial literacy skills. The results indicate significant differences in the level of financial literacy across countries that are interpreted in the light of the differences in the countries’ educational policies and experiences with financial education. The findings suggest that supra-national coordinated action is needed to guarantee better financial knowledge and safeguard economic stability in future crises. JEL-classification: I21; G53; O57; O16.

This paper develops a novel methodology to estimate in a dynamic setting the causal impact of a policy on efficiency. Classical efficiency techniques evaluate multidimensional performance but ignore the endogeneity issues in policy evaluations. We develop an indicator which accounts for the dynamic performance of the observations and for the possible correlation between the treatment status and the efficiency score. Besides, we propose a decomposition of the indicator to disentangle the effect of the policy on the performance of the observations from the effect of the policy on the environmental harshness that the observations have to face. This innovative design allows us to introduce the notion of causality in efficiency studies and to shed light on the mechanisms underlying the inefficiency at the unit and policy level. In the application, the present study assesses the impact on the efficiency of a funding program that aims to foster educational equality.

Little is known about the individual differences in student experiences and expectations of the COVID-19 crisis and the resulting school closures. Yet, as the crisis may have uniquely impacted students, knowledge about their personalities is highly relevant. In a sample of 347 Flemish students, this study explored the association between personality traits and differences in responses to the crisis. The Big Five personality traits of students were assessed in January 2020, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Students were reassessed in June 2020 with a set of items related to well-being, remote learning, and family and social life. The results suggested that more conscientious students (showing a better perception of remote learning) and more open students (considering the period as an opportunity to learn new skills) adjusted well to the changes induced by the crisis. On the contrary, students high in neuroticism (showing higher stress levels) were harmed.

The present paper examined the effect of adjusting learning material to the out-of-school interests of students. In particular, using a field experiment involving 1449 secondary school students in 31 Flemish schools, we evaluated the effectiveness of the instructional method "example choice" in a computer-assisted financial education program. Example choice allowed students to choose between contexts potentially more aligned with their out of-school interest, which in turn determined the backdrop examples for exercises in the computer-assisted program. Schools were randomly assigned to a control or treatment condition. While students in both the control and treatment schools received the computer-assisted program, example choice was added only to the program for students in treatment schools. Results show that example choice did not increase students' financial knowledge. Despite the well-established psychological belief that students' interest in an academic topic can be instilled by the educator or the learning environment, example choice did not affect the interest of the average student in the financial topic. Moreover, example choice even led to significant motivational deficits for students with low perceived competence.

Using a computer-based learning environment, the present paper studied the effects of adaptive instruction and elaborated feedback on the learning outcomes of secondary school students in a financial education program. We randomly assigned schools to four conditions on a crossing of two factors: the type of instruction (uniform or adaptive) and feedback (verification or elaborated). A total of 1177 students in 32 schools completed the program in ability groups in the classroom. The results showed that the program, on average, enhanced the financial knowledge of students by almost half of a standard deviation. No significant changes in students’ financial behavior were found. Despite the promise of adaptive practices to address the individual needs of students, we observed no additional learning gains associated with adaptive instruction and elaborated feedback. A marginally significant heterogeneous effect for gender was reported, where girls were negatively affected by adaptive instruction. Moreover, despite our sample included more students from a favorable socioeconomic status, the adaptive practices seemed to lower the motivation level. Hence, while no information on the time spent on the instruction and feedback was retrieved, the latter finding suggested that the practices may have been perceived as burdensome by students, thereby rendering them ineffective.

Little is known about the individual differences in student experiences and expectations of the COVID-19 crisis and the resulting school closures. Yet, as the crisis may have uniquely impacted students, knowledge about their personalities is highly relevant. In a sample of 347 Flemish students, this study explored the association between personality traits and differences in responses to the crisis. The Big Five personality traits of students were assessed in January 2020, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Students were reassessed in June 2020 with a set of items related to well-being, remote learning, and family and social life. The results suggested that more conscientious students (showing a better perception of remote learning) and more open students (considering the period as an opportunity to learn new skills) adjusted well to the changes induced by the crisis. On the contrary, students high in neuroticism (showing higher stress levels) were harmed.

Financial education is often considered to be a necessary condition in order to stimulate better consumer choices. We investigate this claim by analyzing the impact of a financial education course on consumer choices made by 688 students of the 8th and 9th grade. We combine a randomized controlled trial with a discrete choice experiment to analyze how financial education and other critical factors of a purchase decision like price, credit availability, information on product quality, and promotion affect consumer decisions at a young age. We find that students favor purchase options with free gifts and positive consumer reviews. They also prefer cash payments over credit. However, we do not find evidence that this behavior is triggered by financial education. Financial education does not automatically result in better consumer choices, even if the financial education course increased students' financial literacy.

Targeted parental involvement is increasingly employed to activate parents to use their supporting role to enhance learning effects of students. Given the low cost, one popular measure is information provision to parents. However, the evidence on such measures remains limited. This study provides causal evidence on the effects of information provision to parents in a financial education course where parental involvement was stimulated. Based on a randomised controlled trial with 1253 students from grade 8 and 9 in Flanders, we identify the effects of the classroom intervention separately from parental involvement prompted in homework and the provision of subject-specific information to parents on students’ learning outcomes. The estimates reveal that, overall, the treatment effectively increases financial knowledge and skills. However, despite its popularity in schools, the value added of prompting parental involvement and providing parents information is not significant overall, but only for financial skills.

This paper develops a novel methodology to estimate in a dynamic setting the causal impact of a policy on efficiency. Classical efficiency techniques evaluate multidimensional performance but ignore the endogeneity issues in policy evaluations. We develop an indicator which accounts for the dynamic performance of the observations and for the possible correlation between the treatment status and the efficiency score. Besides, we propose a decomposition of the indicator to disentangle the effect of the policy on the performance of the observations from the effect of the policy on the environmental harshness that the observations have to face. This innovative design allows us to introduce the notion of causality in efficiency studies and to shed light on the mechanisms underlying the inefficiency at the unit and policy level. In the application, the present study assesses the impact on the efficiency of a funding program that aims to foster educational equality.

This paper reviews the puzzles of insurance demand, and provides an overview of behavioural-based explanations on the concept of underinsurance. In particular, the study outlines the biases (among myopia, narrow framing and others) that help to explain the existence of those puzzles. The results indicate that biases do motivate the chances of underinsurance through sub-optimal probability weighting or wrong probability estimation of risks. We discuss that the literature has fallen short in providing possible solutions for the puzzles, with this study proposing financial literacy treatments, that aim at improving knowledge and use of finance, as a systematic solution.

This paper proposes an innovative approach to evaluate the causal impact of a policy change in a multi-input multi-output setting. It combines insights from econometric impact evaluation techniques and efficiency analysis. In particular, the current paper accounts for endogeneity issues by introducing a quasi-experimental setting within a conditional multi-input multi-output efficiency framework and by decomposing the overall efficiency between ‘group-specific’ efficiency (i.e., reflecting internal managerial inefficiency) and ‘program’ efficiency (i.e., explaining the impact of the policy intervention on performance). This framework allows the researcher to interpret the efficiency scores in terms of causality. The practical usefulness of the methodology is demonstrated through an application to secondary schools in Flanders, Belgium. By exploiting an exogenous threshold, the paper examines whether additional resources for disadvantaged students impact the efficiency of schools.

With increasing decentralization of public activities to the municipalities, it has become imperative to deploy an enhanced service provision analysis at the local level. This paper suggests the innovative use of a composite indicator to measure the multidimensional aspects of the local public provision comprising of several commonly administered municipal tasks. We propose a robust conditional version of a directional distance composite indicator with weight restrictions based on the municipal expenditure composition. Specifically, we deal with the presence of "undesirable" municipal service indicators and with the heterogeneity among the municipalities in their political preferences, priority public activities and operating environment characteristics. To illustrate the applicability of the suggested method, we show the construction of the municipal service provision composite indicator for 307 Flemish municipalities over the year 2006-2011. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

As early school leaving has been shown to have a substantial impact on later life outcomes, it has received considerable attention in policy debates. However, national and regional differences in early school leaving are not necessarily due to differences in policymaking but might be the consequence of underlying differences in the economic and social structure of a region. This paper develops a procedure to account for regional differences in assessing performance in regard to early school leaving. The application focusses on Spain, which has a high rate of early school leaving and significant differences between regions. The results show that most regional differences can be attributed to population composition. However, three regions perform better once population characteristics are accounted for.

The present paper examines the impact of ability matching and differentiated instruction on the learning outcomes of eighth and ninth grade students in a financial education programme. In particular, the effect of within-class ability matching is investigated by forming pairs of students either randomly or based on their abilities. In addition, the paper studies whether differentiated instruction, in the form of additional instructions for lower ability students, enhances the impact of the financial education programme. The paper provides evidence on the effects of both practices using two randomised control trials involving 65 schools and 2,407 students. Overall, the results suggest that the programme raises the financial proficiency of students by 0.18 standard deviations. Although the learning outcomes of the average student are not affected by the differentiation practices, non-native students significantly benefit from differentiated instruction.

This paper examines the elements essential to effective teacher professional development (TPD) in financial literacy education by means of a systematic literature review. We provide a theoretical underpinning for the literature review by proposing a revised presentation of an existing general TPD model. Our results provide insight into the student learning goals in financial literacy education, the desirable teaching behaviour, the required teacher quality and the contextual factors that play a role. However, our findings also suggest a lack of studies that systematically investigate whether and how TPD initiatives enhance the effect of financial education on students' financial literacy. Furthermore, existing literature fails to provide insight in how the six key features of TPD should be implemented to optimize its effectiveness.

We introduce a novel diagnostic tool to improve the performance of public services. We propose a method to compute performance/productivity ratios, which can be applied as soon as data on production units' outcomes and resources are available. Assuming outcome improvement as the main objective in a public services context, these ratios have an intuitive interpretation: values below unity indicate that better outcomes can be attained through weaker resource constraints (pointing at scarcity of resources) and, conversely, values above unity indicate that better outcomes can be achieved with the given resources (pointing at unexploited production capacity). We demonstrate the practical usefulness of our methodology through an application to secondary schools, where we account for outlier behaviour and environmental effects by using a robust nonparametric estimation method. Our results indicate that in most cases schools' performance improvement is a matter of unexploited production capacity, while scarcity of resources is a lesser issue.

This article discusses the teachers' role in self-directed learning (SDL) - a central concept in adult education. We explore the use of Socratic questioning to develop critical thinking, which is the outcome of SDL in problem-based learning (PBL). In particular, we analyse 11 adult learners' reflective journals in relation to a Socratic seminar. Findings showed that adult learners value the mutual relationship between the learner and the teacher in managing the learning process. In addition, we suggest a teaching approach where Socratic questioning can facilitate students' SDL. We conclude with implications on its use as a means to initiate the learning goals of a PBL tutorial.

This paper investigates estimation methods to model the relationship between school district size, costs per student and the organisation of school districts. We show that the assumptions on the functional form strongly affect the estimated scale economies and offer two possible solutions to allow for more flexibility in the estimation method. First, we introduce a model by adding higher-degree district size polynomials, allowing for multiple optima. Second, we develop a Fourier cost function, innovative in the literature on scale economies in education. We then compare both models to classical approaches in the literature. We illustrate how a minor change in the estimation method can alter policy conclusions significantly using Flemish school district data. In doing so, we find sizeable potential cost savings from the consolidation of school districts, especially at the lower tail of the district-size distribution. The organisational transition from small to large school districts is characterised by an interval between two optima. Beyond an apparent slowdown in cost savings in medium-sized school districts, cost savings from school district consolidation increase again, up to the optimal size of around 6,500 students. Beyond this optimum, school districts incur diseconomies of scale. The commonly used quadratic form (U'-shaped cost function) overestimates scale economies, and fails to identify the interval between both optima.

The increasing availability of statistical data raises opportunities for big' data and learning analytics. Here, we review the academic literature and research relating to the use of big data analytics in the public sector, and its contribution to public organizations' performance and efficiency. We outline the advantages as well as the limitations of using big data in public sector organizations and identify research gaps in recent studies and interesting areas for future research.