Verbal interaction in the language classroom is both a means and a goal in the language learning process. There are a lot of factors that influence students’ decision to interact with their teacher and fellow students in the classroom. For example, their background knowledge, their motivation level, their mood, and their relationship with the teacher could all play a role. Translanguaging, the planned use of more than one language for teaching and learning, is a promising pedagogical approach that stimulates learners to use their full linguistic repertoire for learning. In a more and more (linguistically) diverse society, this mixed language use could make a large impact on student behavior. 

This project aims to investigate moment-to-moment classroom interaction patterns, through social network analyses. These analyses will allow us to quantify how students and teachers interact, and estimate how this interaction might be improved. The goal of this project is to gain more insight into how using diverse languages can add to the language learning process that occurs in secondary schools. 

This project is a collaboration between the departments of Education and Methodology & Statistics. The interdisciplinary "Better Together" team brings together insights from educational psychology, applied linguistics and data science in order to improve our understanding of how teenagers in a multilingual society like the Netherlands may develop their interactional competence during foreign language lessons. Results of this project may inform teacher education and educational policy.

• dr. Nienke Smit
• dr. Mahdi Shafiee Kamalabad
• prof. dr. Jan van Tartwijk

FIRMBACKBONE is an organically growing longitudinal data-infrastructure with information on Dutch companies for academic research. Once it is ready, it will become available for researchers affiliated with universities in the Netherlands through ODISSEI, the Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations.

FIRMBACKBONE is an initiative of and collaboration between Utrecht University and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam that is funded by PDI-SSH, the Platform Digital Infrastructure-Social Sciences and Humanities, for the period 2020-2025.

• dr. Peter Gerbrands
• prof. dr. Wolter Hassink
• Rutger Schilpzand MSc LLM

• Prof. dr. Arjen van Witteloostuijn

Exposure to natural outdoor environments including greenery is vital for people’s health. Remote sensing via satellites is most commonly used to generate measures of greenery, however this does not capture the street-level perspective that people experience. On-site visits are also biased through subjective ratings, labor-intensive, time-consuming, and inefficient at a large-scale. We will address this research problem with an assemblage of IT methods to derive measures of greenery from street view services on the web which allows virtual navigation through urban spaces composed of geo-tagged street-level images. We will develop methods to automatically compute objective and accurate measures of greenery employing big street view data and deep learning.

• dr. Marco Helbich
• dr. Raoul Schram MSc
• dr. ir. R.W. (Ronald) Poppe