Evaluation of the implementation of curriculum materials for civics in the Netherlands

Discusses a study evaluating the implementation of curriculum materials for civics in the Netherlands. Pedagogical principles aimed at increasing students' social commitment; Central research question; Exploration of broad context for implementation; Actual use of teaching packages by teachers

Modelling TIMSS data in an European comparative perspective: exploring influencing factors on achievement in mathematics grade 8

In international comparative studies like TIMSS data analysis is aimed at differences and similarities among education systems (countries). In this article the outcomes are presented of explorative path analysis on data collected with grade 8 students and classrooms in eight Western and two Central European education systems. For the 10 education systems the resulting general path model explains 19% or less of the variance in achievement in mathematics. In many systems home educational background and students’ attitude towards mathematics have a positive relation with achievement in mathematics, out-of-school activities a negative. Due to the psychometric quality of scales and non-availability of measures of important factors at classroom level (e.g., time on task and teacher’s expectation), no significant results were found of factors that can be manipulated by policy makers

Data-informed curriculum reform: Which data, what purposes, and promoting and hindering factors

Schools face a lot of data on the functioning of their school which they can use to make improvements in teaching, learning and the organization. For data use to lead to improvement, it is important to further research the concept data-driven decision making. The results of this explorative study in the Netherlands show that teachers mainly use classroom level data for making instructional decisions at classroom level, and school leaders mainly use school level data for policy development decisions. This article ends with suggestions with regard to enhancing the effectiveness of data-driven decision making, for example by stressing the importance of developing teachers' competence in the use of data

Mathematics achievement in the Netherlands and appropriateness of the TIMSS mathematics test

Dutch students performed relatively well on the TIMSS mathematics test for population 2, although influential mathematics educators heavily criticised the appropriateness and fairness of the test in terms of the new, application- and inquiry-oriented mathematics curriculum which was implemented beginning in August 1993. This new intended curriculum differs drastically from the previous more formal and curriculum from before 1993. For both policy makers and mathematics and science educators in the Netherlands important questions are the following: how should this discrepancy between students’ performance and curricular appropriateness of the test be interpreted, and is there a discrepancy? Via expert appraisal, data have been gathered about the extent to which the TIMSS mathematics items are appropriate for this new intended mathematics curriculum. In addition, teachers were asked to judge the appropriateness of a selection of mathematics items in terms of the implemented curriculum. In this article the outcomes of the analyses with regard to the overlap between, on the one hand, the test and, on the other hand, both the intended curriculum and the implemented curriculum are described. In addition, as far as the intended curriculum is concerned, test-curriculum overlap outcomes are related to students’ performances on the test