Simon Calmar Andersen

Aarhus University | AU · Department of Political Science

Achievement gaps in students' literacy skills by socioeconomic status (SES) are prevalent across the globe. Theory suggests that reading and writing skills rely on similar knowledge and cognitive processes, yet home-based reading interventions do not typically investigate effects on writing outcomes. Using a randomized controlled trial, we examined...

With an increasing number of immigrant children in many countries, questions of how to prepare them for further education become highly salient. Few studies have examined the effect of first-language instruction on children’s engagement in school and how that may later transfer into better majority-language outcomes. A randomized controlled trial i...

A large‐scale, cluster‐randomized controlled field trial (Nclassrooms = 47; Nstudents = 1,013) assessed the impact of a digital text‐to‐speech reading material that supported 8‐year‐olds’ decoding and reading comprehension. An active control group used the most prevalent Danish learning material with a research‐based systematic, explicit phonics ap...

Research on students’ understandings of their academic performance often faces limits with respect to sample diversity, statistical power, breadth of participant information, and ability to continuously track the development of participants. Government registry data do not face such limitations. We validate a brief measure of academic self-percepti...

“Early intervention” has been a mantra in recent debates about human capital investment. Strong theoretical models motivate this focus by predicting that investment in children is most cost‐effective when they are young. The “Heckman curve” summarizes this idea visually (Heckman, 2006). However, hardly any reviews scrutinize this hypothesis empiric...

The aim of this paper was to understand whether and to what extent parenting behaviors mediated the association between parental socioeconomic status (SES) and 8-year old children’s reading performance. The study used video recordings of parent–child interactions in Danish public schools while the child was assigned a difficult reading task (N = 12...

Years of research on performance management has generally concluded that performance information is seldom used purposefully by public managers and that it does not improve performance as intended. More recently, both theoretical and empirical work have begun to focus on situations in which performance management may facilitate internal organizatio...

Children's educational outcomes are strongly correlated with their parents' educational attainment. This finding is often attributed to the family environment-assuming, for instance, that parents' behavior and resources affect their children's educational outcomes. However, such inferences of a causal role of the family environment depend on the la...

Existing research demonstrates how governments can use insights from behavioral science to design policy and alter residents’ behavior. This article proposes that the effect of behavioral interventions may be different in hierarchical organizations where the decision to change behavior and the execution of that decision are split between different...

Following the publication of the Big Five Inventory- 2 (BFI-2) and its abbreviated forms (the 30-item BFI-2-S and 15-item BFI-2-XS), two studies were conducted to develop and validate a Danish translation of these measures. Study 1 first developed a preliminary Danish BFI-2 item pool consisting of translations of the 60 BFI-2 items, then tested and...

Objective: Many studies have demonstrated that personality traits predict academic performance for students in high school and college. Much less evidence exists on whether the relationship between personality traits and academic performance changes from childhood to adolescence, and existing studies show very mixed findings. This study tests one...

Some of the most important decisions young people make are choices about education. Yet recent research shows that educational decisions are poorly explained by classical models of human capital investments: adolescents do not always choose what would best optimize their long-term net outcomes. Instead, students have been shown to be influenced by...

Despite laws of universalistic treatment, bureaucrats have been shown to discriminate against minorities. A crucial question for public administration is how bureaucracies can be organized in ways that minimize illegitimate discrimination. Especially, since theories suggest that prejudices happen unintentionally and particularly under high workload...

The value of coproduction—the joint productive efforts by regular producers, such as teachers, and consumer producers, such as parents, in helping children to learn—has been recognized for some time. However, strong empirical evidence of how these benefits can be achieved is scarce, and recent research has found mixed results. A new randomized fiel...

Teacher's aides are used worldwide, in various school systems, although, there is no strong evidence of their impact on student outcomes. We use a randomized trial to challenge this state of evidence. We randomly allocate 105 schools to two types of treatments—aides with or without a teaching degree—compared to a control group. Both types of aides...

There is general agreement of the broad notion that reading and writing skills complement one another. However, when it comes to the more detailed interplay between skills at the word, sentence and text levels within and across reading and writing domains, there is much less evidence. In a study of 1160 6–9 year-old children in second and third gra...

Background: The Scandinavian countries have a long history of implementing social interventions, but the interventions have not been examined using randomised controlled trials until relatively recently compared with countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of randomised...

Not all citizens’ voices are heard with equal strength in the political chorus. Based on studies of policy feedback, we suggest that engaging underrepresented citizens in the production of public services (i.e., making them “coproducers”) increases their political voice. We use a field experiment to test the effect of involving ethnic minorities in...

New hires offer a mixed blessing. They can spur teams to reflect on their processes in ways that encourage learning. But organizational newcomers may also struggle to achieve inclusion. This article examines how newcomers' experiences in public organizations depend on their social distinctiveness. While diversity is usually framed in terms of biode...

Many areas of public management research are dominated by a top-focused perspective in which emphasis is placed on the notion that managers themselves are usually the best sources of information about managerial behavior. Outside of the leadership literature, managers are also the typical survey respondents in public management studies. An alternat...

Why public organizations adopt and abandon organizational innovations is a key question for any endeavor to explain large-scale developments in the public sector. Supplementing research within public administration on innovation with the related literature on policy diffusion, this article examines how external factors such as conformity pressure f...

Background Good motor skills are considered important for children’s physical, social, and psychological development, but the relationship is still poorly understood. Preschool age seems to be decisive for the development of motor skills and probably the most promising time-window in relation to preventive strategies based on improved motor skills....

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

Studies of representative bureaucracy have shown how minority groups are often underrepresented in public agencies (passive representation) and that the match between bureaucrats’ and clients’ racial background has important impacts on minority groups (active representation). Much less attention has been devoted to the question of what influences t...

Significance Many large-scale parent interventions turn out to be ineffective, particularly for socioeconomically disadvantaged families—possibly because some parents believe that their children’s reading skills are relatively fixed and unresponsive to practicing. This study shows large and consistent effects on both reading and writing skills of s...

Performance evaluations are a central component in the administration of public organizations. The predominant model of how both public managers and citizens evaluate performance suggests that satisfaction judgments about performance are based on a comparison of performance to some adapted standard like expectations or goals. However, in a number o...

How can elected officials induce bureaucrats to invest in acquiring the expertise necessary to provide high-quality public services? To address this question, we test and extend aspects of Gailmard and Patty’s expertise model in the context of contemporary governance using a unique randomized controlled field experiment of school principals in Denm...

Significance Across the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the instruction time at age 10 y old varies by a factor of two, reflecting, at least in part, differences in beliefs about the value of additional instruction time. Because educational resources are typically not randomly allocated, it has proven to be a major...

Research in public management and public leadership has intensified internationally and in Denmark. The article provides an overview of the impact of public management and leadership on outcomes for citizens. We focus on transformational leadership, which is one of the most prominent leadership approaches, the major strands in the formal structure-...

Både i Danmark og internationalt forskes der mere og mere i offentlig ledelse, og denne artikel giver et overblik over litteraturen om, hvilken effekt offentlig ledelse har på borgernes udbytte af de offentlige ydelser. Herunder går vi i dybden med transformationsledelse som en central tilgang indenfor lederskab, der fokuserer på lederens adfærd. V...

It is well established that bureaucrats' implementation of policies is influenced by their own policy positions, that is, their attitudes toward the given policies. However, what affects the policy positions of bureaucrats? This article focuses on whether the policy positions of bureaucrats at the front lines of government are susceptible to frames...

Research in leadership impacts is characterized by relative complex theories with many contingencies and partly overlapping leadership variables, e.g. theories of charismatic and transformational leadership and goal-setting. We take one step back in selecting one key leadership behavior which is common in several theories: The role of signaling hig...

Research in the sociology of education argues that the educational system provides different learning opportunities for students with different socioeconomic backgrounds and that this circumstance makes the educational process an important institutional context for the reproduction of educational inequality. Using combined survey and register data...

Media, politicians, and reform proponents frequently assert that public sector organizations are inefficient and burdened by administrative procedures. But are negative stereotypes of the public sector reflected in people's perceptions of public service provision? Given the methodological challenges of isolating the perception of publicness from ot...

Public management studies are increasingly using survey data on managers' perceptions of performance to measure organizational performance. These perceptual measures are tempting to apply because archival performance data or surveys of target group outcomes and satisfaction are often lacking, costly to provide, and are highly policy specific render...

Det er først for nylig, at det inden for uddannelsesområdet er blevet undersøgt, hvordan brugere reagerer, når investeringer i den offentlige serviceproduktion øges. Disse nye studier tyder på, at det får brugerne til at sænke deres bidrag til produktionen af disse ydelser. Det er uheldigt i den forstand, at det sænker den samlede effekt af de offe...

Recent studies indicate that service users may respond to increased investments in the public service production (in education) by lowering their contribution to the service production. This is unfortunate as it reduces the overall effect of increased public investments. However, coproduction theory suggests that service users’ response depends on...

While recent research has shown that management matters, we know very little about the role of national contexts in shaping management effects on performance. We address this issue by comparing the impact of management of similar organizations—schools—in very different national contexts, the unitary and corporatist Denmark and the fragmented, adver...

Two central governance challenges are directing leadership attention to performance data and the management of diversity. This article examines connections between the two, asking if the introduction of diversity, as a form of organizational change, is associated with greater leadership use of performance data. Diversity is theorized as a double-ed...

Research points to the double-edged nature of diversity for organizations, as the mix of different backgrounds and perspectives foster both conflict and innovation. But this research relies heavily on laboratory or observational designs. We use a randomized controlled field-experiment to provide causal evidence of both the positive and negative asp...

This article examines the implementation of a set of compulsory IT-based, self-scored, and adaptive nationwide tests in a low-stakes accountability system. We exploit exogenous variation resulting from students voluntarily retaking the nationwide test after the IT system was down for ten days. We find beneficial effects of testing across the studen...

Recent interest in governance networks comprising actors outside traditional governmental hierarchies has reinforced the issue of efficiency vs. democracy. Are the efficiency gains of this mode of governing won at the expense of democracy? This essay shows a way out of the alleged trade-off by combining two theoretical perspectives: a deliberative...

Recent theoretical developments suggest that management actions have different impacts on outcomes in public and private organizations. This proposition is important to public organizations' widespread import of private sector management tools, such as performance management. This article examines how performance management influences performance o...

In accordance with social exchange theory, prominent streams of management research emphasize the importance of reciprocal exchange relationships between organizations and their employees. When employees perceive themselves as supported by the organization, they reciprocate with increased work motivation. However, we do not know how this knowledge...

Public managers and researchers devote much attention to the benefits of coproduction, or the mixing of the productive efforts of public employees and citizens in public service design and delivery. One concern, however, is the distributional consequences of coproduction. This article proposes that disadvantaged citizens may be constrained by a lac...

Immigrant students in Denmark on average perform worse in lower secondary school than native Danish students. Part of the effect may not stem from the immigrant students themselves, but from the student composition at the school. From a policy perspective, the latter aspect is quite interesting since it is more feasible to change student compositio...

Many scholars have struggled to explain stability and change in public resource allocation. What ultimately matters to most citizens, however, are the effects of such spending patterns on organizational performance. In this article, we investigate the relationship between stability of resource allocation and organizational performance. Using time-s...

Many resources have been invested in reforming the public sectors of most countries in the world during the last 20 years. Greater focus on evaluation and performance is one of the most central aspects of these reforms, but despite much academic research virtually no systematic evaluations of the outcome of the reforms themselves are found. This pa...

Research on the effect of school choice on student performance has generally been based on small-scale experiments or comparisons of Catholic and public schools in the United States. Recent studies indicate, however, that the market competition stemming from school vouchers does not affect all private schools equally. This study makes use of indivi...

We examine whether competition from private schools improves public school performance and expenditure. It is difficult methodologically to isolate the effect of competition, but we use new measures of competition in both the public and the private school sector and a data set comprising detailed background information on more than 35,000 public sc...

Much governance literature deals with the limited capacity of the state and the market to govern core state welfare services such as education, scientific research and healthcare. Rather less attention has been focused on how the outcome of these services can be improved politically. An analysis of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory (Luhmann 1997a, 20...