Ilja Cornelisz

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Background It is internationally recognized that people with disabilities have an equal right to work as people without disabilities. This includes deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) people. Previous studies, primarily conducted in the US, showed discrepancies between employment outcomes of DHH people and typically hearing people. Objective There is s...

This paper presents evidence that students with special needs (SN) have no impact on the academic achievement of their peers in primary and secondary schools in the Netherlands. Administrative data is used on all Dutch students who are in their final grade of primary and secondary education in the years 2015-2018 and student and school fixed effect...

Background Lebanon is a low-to-middle-income country, hosting more than 1.1 million Syrian refugees, with 90% mental health treatment gap. The National Mental Health Programme (NMHP) in Lebanon along with the World Health Organization (WHO) launched the Step-by-Step (SbS) e-mental health intervention for adults with depression. Step-by-Step is a 5-...

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Background Although the relationships among physical disability, mood disorders, and pain are well described in multiple sclerosis (MS), little is known about whether those symptoms are associated with sleep disturbances. Methods Forty-six patients with MS experiencing pain participated. Sleep was indirectly measured by assessing rest-activity rhy...

Young people may adapt to vision impairment (VI) in a variety of ways. To explore heterogeneity in social participation, data were mined for distinct patterns. Existing data from 258 young people with VI, aged between 26 and 44 years ( M = 35.3 years; SD = 5.07), were clustered. Social participation was measured by four closed-ended questions and t...

Background: Access to evidence-based psychological treatment is a challenge worldwide. We assessed the effectiveness of a fully automated aviophobia smartphone app treatment delivered in combination with a $5 virtual reality (VR) viewer. Methods: In total, 153 participants from the Dutch general population with aviophobia symptoms and smartphone...

Participation in educational activities is an important prerequisite for academic success, yet often proves to be particularly challenging in digital settings. Therefore, this study set out to increase participation in an online proctored formative statistics exam by digital nudging. We exploited targeted nudges based on the Fogg Behaviour Model, h...

In educational contexts where many domains subject to improvement are interdependent and causal evidence is frequently lacking it is difficult, if not impossible, for policymakers and educational practitioners to decide which domain should be invested in. This paper proposes a new method that uses Conditional Mean Independent Correlations (CMIC) an...

Background Fear of spiders, or Arachnophobia, is one of the most common specific phobias. The gold standard treatment, in vivo exposure therapy, is effective, but comes with significant limitations, including restricted availability, high costs, and high refusal rates. Novel technologies, such as augmented reality, may help to overcome these limita...

Background Most displaced people with mental disorders in low- and middle-income countries do not receive effective care, and their access to care has deteriorated during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Digital mental health interventions are scalable when digital access is adequate, and they can be safely delivered during the COV...

Background: Most people with mental disorders in communities exposed to adversity in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) do not receive effective care. Digital mental health interventions are scalable when digital access is adequate, and can be safely delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Objective: To examine the effects of a new W...

Inefficient targeting of students at risk of dropping out might explain why dropout-reducing efforts often have no or mixed effects. In this study, we present a new method which uses a series of machine learning algorithms to efficiently identify students at risk and makes the sensitivity/precision trade-off inherent in targeting students for dropo...

Objectives This study examines the effects of a restorative justice programme in the Netherlands on educational outcomes and repeated delinquent behaviour of young people who have committed a criminal offence. Methods We use data from a field experiment, in which the participants are randomly assigned to a restorative justice programme. We link th...

Unresolved states of mind regarding experiences of loss/abuse (U/d) are identified through lapses in the monitoring of reasoning, discourse, and behavior surrounding loss/abuse in response to the Adult Attachment Interview. Although the coding system for U/d has been widely used for decades, the individual indicators of unresolved loss/abuse have n...

Longitudinal randomized controlled trials generally assign individuals randomly to interventions at baseline and then evaluate how differential average treatment effects evolve over time. This study shows that longitudinal settings could benefit from Recurrent Individual Treatment Assignment (RITA) instead, particularly in the face of (dynamic) het...

Objectives: In patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), a relationship between physical disability and pain has been observed. In addition a relationship between physical disability and cognition in MS has been suggested. However, cognitive functions and pain appear not to be correlated in MS patients. Therefore, we examined whether a possible relat...

Effort is key in learning, evidenced by its omnipresence in both empirical findings and educational theories. At the same time, students are consistently found to avoid effort. In this study, we investigate whether limiting effort avoidance improves learning outcomes, and explore for whom this would be the case. In a large-scale computer adaptive p...

The quality assurance and evaluation of primary schools requires early risk detection. This is a daunting task, not only because risks are typically rare and their origins complex, but also because governing institutions have limited resources and capacity and desire efficiency and proportionality. Many countries, including most Organisation for Ec...

We propose a new model to assess the mastery level of a given skill efficiently. The model, called Bayesian Adaptive Mastery Assessment (BAMA), uses information on the accuracy and the response time of the answers given and infers the mastery at every step of the assessment. BAMA balances the length of the assessment and the certainty of the master...

Background E-mental health interventions may help to bridge the mental health treatment gap. Evidence on their effectiveness is compelling in high-income countries. Not enough evidence has been generated on their use with communities affected by adversity in low- and middle-income countries. The World Health Organization (WHO), the National Mental...

en Early Warning Systems (EWS) in higher education accommodate student counsellors by identifying at‐risk students and allow them to intervene in a timely manner to prevent student dropout. This study evaluates an EWS that shares student‐specific risk information with student counsellors, which was implemented at a large Dutch university. A randomi...

Adolescents show more risk taking behavior than children and adults. Most adolescents do not experience adverse consequences of this increased risk taking behavior. However, excessive risk taking can result in long term adverse consequences. To better target prevention efforts at those adolescents who are at risk for excessive risk taking, these ad...

The quality assurance and evaluation of schools requires early risk-detection; a daunting task since school failures are typically rare and their origins complex. In the Netherlands, the Inspectorate of Education monitors the regulatory compliance of roughly 6000 primary schools, with limited resources and capacity, and a desire for proportionality...

Virtual proctoring technology is credited with increasing the accessibility of exams by enabling students to participate in exams at any time and place. In this field experiment, students were randomly assigned to virtual proctoring or traditional on‐campus examination to evaluate the effect, nature and timing of implementation barriers for online...

BACKGROUND Aviophobia (fear of flying) can greatly impact daily life functioning in those afflicted. Traditional exposure-based treatment is hampered by limited availability to practice with airplane situations due to economical and practical reasons. Low-cost and easily accessible virtual reality exposure therapy may address these challenges. OBJ...

Background Aviophobia (the fear of flying) can greatly impact the daily life functioning of people with the condition. Traditional exposure-based treatment is hampered by the limited availability of airplane practice situations, which is a result of economical and practical concerns. Easily accessible and low-cost virtual reality exposure therapy m...

Background The importance of randomization in clinical trials has long been acknowledged for avoiding selection bias. Yet, bias concerns re-emerge with selective attrition. This study takes a causal inference perspective in addressing distinct scenarios of missing outcome data (MCAR, MAR and MNAR). Methods This study adopts a causal inference pers...

BACKGROUND The lack of availability of evidence-based services for people exposed to adversity globally has led to the development of psychological interventions with features that will likely make them more scalable. The evidence for the efficacy of e-mental health from high-income countries is compelling and the use of these interventions could b...

Background The lack of availability of evidence-based services for people exposed to adversity globally has led to the development of psychological interventions with features that will likely make them more scalable. The evidence for the efficacy of e-mental health from high-income countries is compelling, and the use of these interventions could...

This study examined user engagement with ZeroPhobia, a self-guided app-based virtual reality (VR) Cognitive Behavior Therapy for acrophobia symptoms using cardboard VR viewers. Dutch acrophobic adults (n = 96) completed assessments at baseline and immediately following treatment. Primary outcome measures were the Acrophobia Questionnaire (AQ) and t...

While self-report measures are ubiquitous in the educational research literature, the benefits of self-report are often maligned. Rather than discarding or ignoring data generated from self-report measures of cognitive processing and motivation, research is needed to determine when and if self-report measures can contribute to our collective unders...

For decades, self-report instruments – which rely heavily on students’ perceptions and beliefs – have been the dominant way of measuring motivation and strategy use. Eventbased measures based on online trace data arguably has the potential to remove analytical restrictions of self-report measures. The purpose of this study is therefore to triangula...

Early Warning Systems (EWS) accommodate student counselors by identifying at-risk students and allow them to intervene timely and prevent student dropout. This paper evaluates an EWS that shares student-specific risk information with student counselors, which was implemented at a large Dutch university. A randomized field experiment was conducted t...

Background The importance of randomization in clinical trials has long been acknowledged for avoiding selection bias. Yet, bias concerns re-emerge with selective attrition. This study takes a causal inference perspective in addressing distinct scenarios of missing outcome data (MCAR, MAR and MNAR). Methods This study adopts a causal inference persp...

Large-scale data about learners' behavior are being generated at high speed on various online learning platforms. Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a family of machine learning sequence models that use these data to identify the likelihood of future learning performance. KT models hold great potential for the online education industry by enabling the devel...

This study examines teacher discretion effects in Dutch secondary education for the period 2007–2012. Stark discontinuities are observed in the exam grade distribution for high-stakes retaking students and are located at important graduation thresholds. This phenomenon is systematically related to the level of discretion when grading the exam, with...

Academic dismissal policies are increasingly implemented to promote academic success, with existing empirical evidence mostly restricted to short-run outcomes. This study examines long-term academic outcomes of academic dismissal for two cohorts (N=1707) of first-year bachelor students in Economics and Business at a Dutch university. Using administ...

Importance Globally, access to evidence-based psychological treatment is limited. Innovative self-help methods using smartphone applications and low-cost virtual reality have the potential to significantly improve the accessibility and scalability of psychological treatments. Objective To examine the effectiveness of ZeroPhobia, a fully self-gui...

Early Warning Systems (EWS) accommodate student counselors by identifying at-risk students and allow them to intervene timely and prevent student dropout. This paper evaluates an EWS that shares student-specific risk information with student counselors, which was implemented at a large Dutch university. A randomized field experiment was conducted t...

Large-scale data about learners' behavior are being generated at high speed on various online learning platforms. Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a family of machine learning sequence models that are capable of using these data efficiently with the objective to identify the likelihood of future learning performance. This study provides an overview of KT...

Learning analytics offers the opportunity to collect, analyse and visualise feedback on learning activities using authentic data in real-time. The REFLECTOR project was used to investigate whether there are correlations between students learning strategies, their online activity and their grades. Information about the learning strategies was obtain...

This study examines whether providing students with information on their future study success will influence their higher education enrollment decision and lower first-year dropout as a consequence. A randomized field experiment is conducted among 313 law and social science applicants at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The main results suggest th...

A prerequisite for low‐stakes activities to improve learning is to keep students engaged when confronted with challenging material. Comparing a personalized and non‐personalized version of computerized practising, this study experimentally evaluates the relationships between student effort and ability across different dimensions of task perceptions...

This article empirically examines the implications of competition among Dutch secondary schools: (1) regarding the sorting of students by performance levels in schools at the begiining of secondary education; and (2) regarding performance gains in the secondary school career, controlling for the aforementioned sorting patterns. We used data from ab...

It has become widely accepted that teachers are important in facilitating student learning. Hundreds of empirical studies have tried to explain differences in student performance by evaluating the impact of particular teacher characteristics. Yet, this topic has not been the subject of a systematic review for more than 10 years, even though most of...

Schools and governments are increasingly investing in adaptive practice software. To date, the evidence whether adaptivity improves learning outcomes is limited and mixed. A large-scale randomized control trial is conducted in Dutch secondary schools to evaluate the effectiveness of an adaptive practice program relative to a static program. Learnin...

Job turnover can mitigate some of the consequences of a recession under the condition that the labor market is able to allocate workers to jobs efficiently; the allocation of workers to jobs yields better fits in terms of education; and the speed of job turnover should exhibit a countercyclical pattern. This hypothesis is tested for one European Un...

While computer-based differentiation is increasingly common in education, no actual evidence on the effects on the learning process is established yet. This study investigates the effect of data-driven differentiation on students' learning activity, and its relation with obtained summative grades. This study takes place over the course of one schoo...

Concurrentie tussen middelbare scholen verbetert de prestaties van leerlingen in het algemeen licht, maar niet van leerlingen die toch al goed zijn. Concurrentie tussen scholen dient meer gericht te zijn op de kwaliteit van het onderwijs dan op het aantrekken van goede leerlingen. - See more at: http://www.economie.nl/artikel/het-rendement-van-conc...

An ongoing question is whether private (religious) schools provide better education than public schools. This study re- addresses this issue, using PISA 2006 and 2009 data for the Netherlands and three different methodologies. Overall, there is no consistent pattern. Results based on ordinary least squares and propensity score matching suggest priv...

Social justice in education refers to the expectation that the education system provides fairness in its access to opportunities and results. Proponents of educational privatisation believe this would not only open up opportunities for those that otherwise are restricted from attending good schools, but that it would also improve overall efficiency...

In the Netherlands, school choice is free and all schools are equally funded by the government. We measured distance from home to school as a proxy for the selectivity of choice and used characteristics of the nearest school to explain the choice of a school other than the nearest school. Almost 89% of all pupils in the 4 largest cities do not sele...