Search

Undergraduate students can be appointed as ‘student assistant’ and as such they can fulfil many different tasks, related to education, research and organisation. These tasks vary from entering data or making schedules to guiding tutorials or assisting in lab settings. In the year 2018/2019 at the University of Twente, an estimated 51.000 to 84.000 student assistant working hours were spent on learningrelated tasks. In order to enhance the quality of education at the university, it is proposed to extend the didactical training for student assistants with tasks in which they are formally involved in other students’ learning processes (Learning Assistants, LAs). The Learning Assistants Project at the University of Boulder, Colorado [1] has been an inspiration. By incorporating elements of other LA trajectories, the ‘Colorado LA Model’ has been adapted to the local situation and demands. The main goals of the intervention are that Certified LAs show a reflective, professional attitude aimed at improving their practice as LA and that LAs can determine pedagogical strategies for assisting, when provided the goals, teaching strategies and assessment of the unit they are asked to assist in. Following a rapid prototyping approach [5] an LA-training trajectory is designed and implemented at small scale. Simultaneously, an inventory is being made of the current roles and tasks of LAs, and more in-depth needs analysis for the design of this training. This article present the first results of both the training needs assessment and the pilot LA-training.

Citizenship education in the Netherlands leaves much to be desired. The competences of students in secondary education lag behind those of peers in similar countries. We also see such differences between countries in citizenship education offered by schools. Dutch students indicate that schools pay relatively little attention to promoting citizenship, as do teachers and principals. This situation has been around for quite some time now. As a consequence of the general nature of the statutory obligation, it is unclear what is expected from schools. This calls for balance between school autonomy and steering in education. Three focal points are available to the government: the curriculum, the school as a training place and the context in which schools promote citizenship. In an education system characterized by autonomy, the government must steer in a way that is conceivable, visible and feasible. This requires clear goals, insight into outcomes and support for schools.

In this chapter, the use of communities of learners in prevocational secondary education is investigated via design research. We aimed to translate theoretical notions about communities of learners into educational practice during two years of joint design by teachers and researchers, a process supported by one of the school’s leader. We expected communities of learners to enhance students’ quality of and engagement in learning. In this chapter, we provide a detailed review of the first year of our study at one of the schools, where we developed and evaluated two curriculum units. We focus on how the teachers collaborated with the school leader and the researchers to develop curriculum units that would foster communities of learners and how (developing and implementing) the curriculum units affected student learning. Data were collected through observations of all the meetings of the development team, all the lessons of the implemented units, and interviews with teachers and students. The results show that the teachers’ focus was mainly on designing engaging activities for their students. The community of learners concept did not seem to become meaningful for them, and little reflection on the concept’s relationship to the school’s vision regarding teaching and learning occurred. The second curriculum unit succeeded better at promoting student learning in the intended way; the units became part of the regular curriculum, and similar units were developed later.

In this paper, we report on research into a mobile game about medieval Amsterdam. The objectives of the paper are to generate insights into how mobile game-based learning in secondary education affects pupils’ knowledge of medieval Amsterdam, their motivation for History and for the subject of Middle Ages, and their attitude towards collaborative learning. We investigated the effects of a game called Frequency 1550. Frequency 1550 is a mobile city game developed by the Waag Society in which pupils playfully acquire historical knowledge about the medieval city of Amsterdam. A quasi-experimental design is followed in which data have been gathered on the process of gaming and learning of 458 pupils from twenty classes of five schools. Qualitative and quantitative data have been gathered. In this paper the focus will be on the quantitative data. Pupils of ten classes played the mobile history game, whereas the other pupils followed regular project-based lesson series (control condition) especially designed for this project in strong co-operation with five History teachers from the participating schools. The results show that, on average, pupils of the game received higher scores on the knowledge test on facts about medieval Amsterdam than pupils who followed regular project-based lessons. No significant differences were found between the groups regarding narrative knowledge, motivation for History and for the subject of Middle Ages, and attitude towards collaborative learning.

This article discusses the way in which social identities structure the learning processes of students in two subjects in the Dutch secondary school curriculum - Care and Technology. It analyzes interviews with 23 students and their teachers with a view to explaining the disappointing results in these subjects in terms of breaking through gender and class-related preferences and learning outcomes. The subjects Care and Technology refer on the one hand to social practices with which groups of students identify in different ways. On the other hand students also appear to make active use of these subjects in their identity development. We argue for explicitly combining the notion that learning is peripheral participation in social practices with analyses of the power relationships that structure those practices. Also the question should be addressed of how the relative autonomy of the school can be used for organizing learning experiences in such a way that social positions and identities are not inhibitive, and the restrictive character of social identities is challenged.

De vraag is gerezen of het hoger onderwijs met de maatschappelijke veranderingen is meegegaan. Zo zijn er bij o.a. de studenten en op de arbeidsmarkt veranderingen waarneembaar. Ook onze moderne kennissamenleving heeft grote behoefte aan meer en breed opgeleide krachten.