Projects
Parental involvement in literacy development of primary school children in Tanzania KU Leuven
Despite several initiatives to enhance primary education provision in Tanzania, and as a consequence high enrollment rates, there have been limited improvements in the early literacy development of Tanzanian children. The current education system of Tanzania focuses mostly on schools and teachers as the key educators in children’s learning with little attention to the role of parents and the home environment. This PhD project aimed at ...
Primary School Children's Socioemotional Competence: Assessment, the Effects of the EMOscope Intervention and the Role of Engagement KU Leuven
The project seeks to improve the understanding of primary school pupil’s socioemotional competence and conditions for its development. The research has three objectives. Firstly, it investigates the psychometric properties of a newly-developed socioemotional understanding test called the Domino Test for Socioemotional Understanding (DOTSEMU). Secondly, it examines the impact of the intervention aimed at developing socioemotional competence in ...
EFFECTIVE in TEACHING FRENCH: a blended learning path for (future) primary school teachers Thomas More
The Influence of Teacher-Student Relationship and Interaction on Primary School Children’s Working Memory: A Multi-Method Approach KU Leuven
Working memory (WM), one of the core executive function (EF) components, is the ability to temporarily hold and manipulate verbal and visuospatial information. WM is considered integral to planning, decision-making, reasoning, and problem-solving, making it crucial for children’s academic achievement and social functioning. In primary education, when foundational skills in reading comprehension and arithmetic are developing, the role of WM on ...
Teaching Chemistry to Primary School Children: A Board Game Case Study Linking Material Hardness to Atoms and Bonds KU Leuven
In this work, it was investigated whether children can explain the mechanistic relationship between atoms and bonds and the hardness of materials by playing a custom-made board game. Recent studies show that primary school children can already understand and retain aspects of the particulate nature of matter after formal teaching interventions. In this project, material hardness was selected after conducting an extensive curriculum analysis ...
The evaluation of school communities in primary and secondary education. University of Antwerp
Celebrating gender and neglecting history: The history of gender representation in Moroccan primary school textbooks for colonial period onwards (1912-2022) KU Leuven
This research focuses on the history of gender representation in Moroccan textbooks and manuals for primary school grades within a broad chronological period (from the colonial era 1912 to date).The present research main objective is to investigate how gender was represented in primary school textbooks at three points in time: the French and Spanish colonial period, the immediate postcolonial era, and the present day, in terms of the visual ...
Ancient Greeks - Young Heroes: ancient Greek language and mythology for primary school pupils growing up in multidimensional poverty Ghent University
The project Ancient Greeks - Young Heroes brings the Ancient Greek language and mythology to underprivileged children in primary school. UGent students annually teach Ancient Greek in East-Flemish primary schools, and teachers from all over Flanders also apply the teaching material in their own classes. This didactic material (available for free on our website) has been created based on pupil needs. Our research shows that not only does ...
The development of primary school children’s executive functions in the classroom: The role of teacher expectations KU Leuven
Executive functions (EFs) have been defined as domain-general, higher-order cognitive functions necessary to master new, complex actions with the need of flexible, goal-directed reactions (Hughes & Graham, 2002). The quality of EFs is predictive for academic functioning and performance (Vandenbroucke et al., 2017). As such insights in the development and both preventive and curative classroom interventions is needed. Current research ...