Geert ten Dam

University of Amsterdam | UVA

In this paper, we develop an open-ended approach to evaluating students’ citizenship competences. We aim to give students the opportunity to describe what citizenship means for them in personally relevant contexts. We developed three rubrics relevant to students’ citizenship in daily life. Students in grade 10 and 11( M age = 16) evaluated their co...

Social outcomes of education are crucial for both the individual and society. This paper focuses on the extent to which state-funded (non-)religious private and public schools differ in citizenship outcomes. Data were used on 123 schools from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2016 in the Netherlands. Using multilevel analyses,...

The Dutch school system is characterized by early educational tracking and high school autonomy. This chapter focuses on how this is related to citizenship competences among students. Results of IEA’s International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 study indicate that whereas by itself citizenship competences of students in the Neth...

Using a mixed-methods approach, this paper investigates current views within society about what civic knowledge is important for students leaving secondary education. We combined questionnaire data from a representative national sample with data from a multiple-case study among several focus groups of stakeholders with various roles in society. The...

This paper analyses how young people’s citizenship knowledge is related to the different domains of citizenship in their daily lives. Based on a representative sample of some 5300 students in the third year of 80 Dutch secondary schools, our study relates citizenship knowledge to student background and school characteristics. The knowledge test dev...

We still have only a limited understanding of the effectiveness of schools in promoting citizenship, the factors explaining this effectiveness and the way in which these aspects interact. Using elaborate cross-sectional data from students, teachers, team leaders and school leaders at 78 Dutch secondary schools, this study empirically examines a sch...

Studies on game-based learning show positive effects, but insights into the relationship between students’ game activities and the outcomes of these activities are lacking. In this study of the game “NoCredit, GameOver!®” (NCGO), students’ game activities are explored and related to their learning outcomes and performance in the game. Secondary sch...

In het onderzoeksproject Understanding the Effects of Schools on students’ Citizenship (ESC) is in beeld gebracht wat middelbare scholieren weten over burgerschap gerelateerde onderwerpen, wat hun vaardigheden zijn op dit gebied, wat ze vinden van deze onderwerpen, en hoe vaak ze hierover nadenken. De onderwerpen waarover de leerlingen werden bevra...

Studies show that adolescents that follow a higher educational track have more positive experiences than those of lower levels with aspects of democracy, such as decision-making or discussions. In our study, we focus on how adolescents from different educational tracks evaluate the various possibilities to experience democracy in daily life, and wh...

Studies show adults' attitudes towards citizenship to be related to their educational level. It has been claimed that higher educated people more often possess 'good' citizenship values. However, only limited insight exists into how differences in citizenship attitudes between adolescents from various educational tracks develop over time. In this q...

The present study focuses on how views on democracy develop during adolescence. Forty Dutch adolescents were interviewed in their second and fourth year of secondary education. The study shows that the interviewed adolescents do become more familiar with politics, but do not develop more nuanced views towards democracy. As the adolescents age, a on...

Assessment of citizenship competences has become common practice following the statutory assignment of citizenship education to schools in many countries. Assessment can serve various goals. The suitability of various types of instruments depends on the alignment with the goals intended. In this paper we evaluate four types of instruments and their...

In this study, the concept of ‘community of learners’ was used to improve initial vocational education. The framework of a ‘community of learners for vocational orientation’ that we present offers both a theoretical understanding of teaching–learning processes in initial vocational education and heuristics for the design of innovative learning envi...

Schools are expected to fulfil different types of goals, including citizenship development. An important question is to what extent schools can simultaneously promote different learning outcomes. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between language ability and youth citizenship. Using a representative sample of 2429 grade 6 pupils (age 1...

Inclusive special needs education is prominent on the international education agenda. Research on the characteristics of inclusive education for students with special needs and schools providing this is scarce, however. Our aim in the present study was therefore to further theory-building with regard to inclusive special needs education. On the bas...

As schools are increasingly expected to develop their students’ political and social engagement in order to promote good citizenship, they are struggling to define what good citizenship is. In this article, we put forward a way of formulating perspectives on citizenship that specifies the normative aspects of good citizenship in a systematic manner...

Research shows adolescents to be positively oriented towards democracy, but little is known about what it actually means to them and what their views are on decision-making in both everyday situations and political democracy. To gain insight into these aspects of adolescents’ democratic views, we have interviewed 40 Dutch adolescents from second gr...

Formal schooling, family and associational life are expected to enable adolescents to develop democratic attitudes. However, much remains unknown about how young people perceive these settings for developing such attitudes, and whether this perception differs for students in different educational tracks. This interview study of Dutch adolescents ai...

The present study focuses on the development of citizenship competences of Dutch adolescents, including the political and social aspects as part of adolescents' daily lives. We followed 5070 adolescents aged 12-16 years across a three-year period in lower secondary education. The variance on school and student level was estimated and a three-level...

Among the competences that are considered necessary for a democratic way of living are “consideration for others,” “helping others,” and “caring for each other” (Westheimer and Kahne 2004). In the past few decades, however, it has been emphasized that a democratic, pluriform society not only requires citizens to be prepared to make their own contri...

Despite widespread attention to citizenship in educational practice, knowledge of the citizenship of students is still fragmented. We therefore present a comprehensive framework to integrate empirical data and theoretical insights into the citizenship of young people today. To develop and validate the framework, we conducted exploratory and confirm...

This study examines the effects of general educational quality of schools, school citizenship policy, and ethnic homogeneity of the student body on the acquisition of citizenship competences in the final year of primary education. The theoretical framework is based on developmental, psychological, and sociological studies into effects of social con...

Boys show a stronger preference for digital entertainment games than girls. For this reason, it may be that game-based learning is more acceptable to boys than to girls. Yet game-based learning might improve the performance of both boys and girls, depending upon the instructional design. In a quasi-experimental study with a secret-trail game, effec...

Most of the empirical frameworks and theories concerned with the development of citizenship today are quite complex and only provide some guidance for what citizenship education should attend to; they do not provide insight into the actual citizenship of students. We constructed a typology of student citizenship, on the basis of data collected from...

This article describes experiences with a qualitative research project into teachers’ learning from innovating their own educational practices. Decades of New Public Management (NPM) in the Netherlands, with its top-down and businesslike approach to areas of public interest, obscured the learning and innovating capacity of teachers, teams, and scho...

Insight into the citizenship of students is typically gained via surveys. However, social desirability always plays a role in self-reporting. The relationship between social desirability and citizenship is multi-interpretable. In this article, two views on the divergence and convergence of citizenship and social desirability are presented leading t...

Many school health promotion curricula address a single health behavior, without paying attention to potential learning effects in associated behavioral domains. We developed an innovative curriculum about smoking and safe sex that also focused on promoting students' transfer of knowledge, skills and attitudes to other domains. In a quasi-experimen...

Little is known about views on democracy of adolescents. In this article we describe results of our interview study with forty adolescents of fourteen years old on their views of democracy and decision making. The study focuses on the daily lives of adolescents and decision making within local contexts, such as the classroom. The adolescents’ views...

The results of a nationwide study of the citizenship competences of adolescents in the Netherlands are presented from the perspective of democratic citizenship in this article. Citizenship competences are defined as the knowledge, skills, attitudes and reflection needed by young people in a democratic and multicultural society to adequately fulfil...

Women, on average, outnumber men and are more successful in higher education. A literature overview showed that these differences may be explained by gender differences in learner characteristics, by external factors and by institutional factors. This study aims to explain gender differences in higher education in more detail by focusing on one of...

This paper presents the results of a study on students’ appreciation of information and communication technology (ICT) applications in schools for general secondary education. We investigate to what extent students from different gender and ethnic backgrounds appreciate various characteristics of ICT tools. The research question is, ‘How are studen...

The contributors to this collection employ the analytic resources of cultural-historical theory to examine the relationship between childhood and children's development under different societal conditions. In particular they attend to relationships between development, emotions, motives and identities, and the social practices in which children and...

Citizenship has recently been introduced into the educational curriculum. Instruments to determine the effects of citizenship education are scarce. In this article, the concept of citizenship competences is explored in order to develop a measurement instrument. Four social tasks were derived from the literature as representative of young people's c...

In the Netherlands, differences in school motivation and performance between boys and girls are a major issue in political debates. In the first years of secondary education in the Netherlands, boys tend to underachieve and to be disengaged from school. Game-based learning might improve the school motivation and performance of both boys and girls....

Generally, high-school students have been characterized as bored and disengaged from the learning process. However, certain educational designs promote excitement and engagement. Game-based learning is assumed to be such a design. In this study, the concept of flow is used as a framework to investigate student engagement in the process of gaming an...

This study investigates the relationship between the quality of student dialogue and students’ ability to justify their viewpoints on a moral issue. A curriculum unit for dialogic citizenship education was developed and implemented in the 8th grade of secondary education. In the final lesson, students discussed a moral issue and then wrote an essay...

Educational Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can be an appropriate tool for creating flexible learning environments. ICT can contribute to flexibility through its potential to keep content up‐to‐date and to address personal learning needs. ICT could, thus, make learning more accessible to a wider group of students. However, doing this...

The results are presented of a nationwide study of the citizenship competences of students in primary and secondary education in the Netherlands. Citizenship competences are defined as the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and reflection needed by young people in a democratic and multicultural society to adequately fulfil the social tasks that are part...

With handhelds, it is possible to mix virtual with real-world data (i.e., locations and contexts) connecting virtual worlds to real life. Handheld games can be used to engage students with learning in their (school) environment. In a project called 'Games Atelier' innovative pedagogy was developed that stimulated students to create content with the...

This article presents a case study into the question of how research-internal and research-external factors influence the leeway of qualitative research, and ultimately determine which questions can and cannot be addressed in research. First an overview is presented of the position of qualiative research in the field of education in The Netherlands...

This article evaluated the impact of a four-lesson science module on the attitudes of secondary school students. This science module (on cancer and modern biotechnology) utilises several design principles, related to a social constructivist perspective on learning. The expectation was that the module would help students become more articulate in th...

The aim of this study is to contribute to the innovation of pre‐vocational education, in particular, students' orientation at possible future occupations. From our theoretical understanding, vocational orientation that makes sense to students requires them to be part of a ‘community of learners for vocational orientation’. In such a community, stud...

In this article the development is described of an instrument to measure the citizenship competences of young people. Citizenship competences are defined as the ability to adequately act in social situations. Four social tasks were derived from the literature as representative of the citizenship competences of young people: Acting democratically, a...

Using mobile games in education combines situated and active learning with fun in a poten- tially excellent manner. The effects of a mobile city game called Frequency 1550, which was developed by The Waag Society to help pupils in their first year of secondary education play- fully acquire historical knowledge of medievalAmsterdam, were investigate...

Most school health education programs focus on a single behavioral domain. Integrative programs that address multiple behaviors may be more efficient, but only if the elements of change are similar for these behaviors. The objective of this study was to examine which effective elements of school health education are similar across three particular...

Supplemental Tables S1-S8. Table S1 contains information about the characteristics of the included reviews, Tables S2-S8 contain the results of the reviews for the various categories of program elements

The use of technology (information and communication technology, ICT) in secondary education is an important aspect of the current curriculum and of teachers' pedagogy. Learning supported by computers is supposed to be motivating for students and is, therefore, assumed to have positive effects on learning experiences and results. However, the quest...

Despite the renewed interest in citizenship education, relatively little is known about effective ways to realize citizenship education in the classroom. In the literature on citizenship education, dialogue is considered to be a crucial element. However, there is very little, if any, empirical research into the different ways to stimulate dialogue....

This article concerns the relationship between social–educational goals and the school context. We used a questionnaire to map the educational goals of teachers in pre-vocational education in the field of social competence, and investigated whether these goals were related to the percentage of students from ethnic-minority groups and to the urban e...

Schools are overloaded with health promotion programs that, altogether, focus on a broad array of behavioral domains, including substance abuse, sexuality and nutrition. Although the specific content of programs varies according to the domain focus, programs usually address similar concepts: knowledge, attitudinal beliefs, social influences and ski...

Education should endeavour to include the competences that students need to participate in a democratic society in a responsible and adequate way. The crucial question is how this can be realized in a curriculum aimed at domain-specific knowledge and skills and organized in school subjects. In this article we present a study on teaching value-loade...

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 l...

In this article we discuss the social competence students should acquire to participate in society in an adequate manner. The focus is on social competence as an educational goal and on the question of how to evaluate the efforts of schools in enhancing the social competence of their students. First, a review study is presented of research on the s...

Digital games seem to be excellent tools for facilitating and supporting situated learning. This unbinding of knowledge from a specific context fosters its transfer to new problems and new domains. Additionally, children’s attitude towards computer games is the very attitude we would like all our learners to have. Therefore, it makes sense to try t...

We present the results of a literature review of studies on teaching strategies for moral education in secondary schools (1995-2003). The majority of the studies focus on the 'what' and 'why', i.e. the objectives, of curriculum-oriented moral education. Attention to the instructional formats for enhancing the prosocial and moral development of stud...

This article deals with the potential of school-based teacher education for creating a professional community of learners. Learning to participate in the social and cultural practices with regard to education is assumed to be crucial for developing a professional identity as a teacher. From the perspective of socio-cultural theory, we have made a r...

Characterizing school health promotion is its category-by-category approach, in which each separate health-related behavior is addressed independently. Such an approach creates a risk that extra-curricular activities become overloaded, and that teaching staff are distracted by continuous innovations. Within the health promotion sector there are thu...

This article focuses on the enhancement of social competence of students in secondary education. In the literature two perspectives on social competence can be distinguished: an 'educating for adulthood perspective and an 'educating for citizenship perspective. From each perspective goals are formulated for what education should be aimed at and wha...

Study careers of minority students in Dutch higher education are still less successful compared with the careers of majority students. Minority students still seem to experience more difficulties than majority students. Vincent Tinto’s twin concepts of academic and social integration are used here to explore the experiences of minority and majority...

In common with other European countries, the Dutch government has pursued an active educa-tional policy on migrants and minorities focusing on integration. This article presents the results of a study into the objectives and results of this policy between 1970 and 2002. Were the desired objec-tives achieved or were the outcomes of the educational p...

Abstract This paper presents the results of a literature review on gender, ethnic and socioeconomic status differences related to ICT in primary and secondary education. The review was conducted in order to develop an index for analysing the inclusiveness of educational ICT applications. The research question was: ‘How and to what extent do the cha...

Samenvatting In dit artikel wordt de ontwikkeling van een meetinstrument voor burgerschapscompeten-ties van jongeren in de leeftijd van elf tot zes-tien jaar beschreven. Burgerschapscompe-tenties zijn gedefinieerd als het vermogen tot adequaat handelen in sociale situaties die zich voordoen in het dagelijkse leven. Uit de literatuur zijn vier socia...

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 an...

This article is about enhancing critical thinking as a crucial aspect of the competence citizens need to participate in society. First empirical research into the question which instructional strategies are ‘effective’ in enhancing critical thinking is reviewed. Characteristics of instruction that are assumed to enhance critical thinking are: payin...

In this chapter we discuss the issue of social differences in relation to learning. In theories on co-operative learning or collaborative learning social differences are treated as characteristics of individual learners. The focus on learning as a social process is primarily elaborated in terms of interaction between pupils and the combined constru...