A multidisciplinary consortium of Utrecht University (Utrecht School of Economics, Department of Child, Family and Education Studies) and Sardes Ltd. conducts a large scale impact evaluation study of Dutch preschool education policy for disadvantaged children. The study is part of a comprehensive program of research into current educational priority policy, initiated by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sciences and funded by the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO). The project evaluates a series of new policy measures together with a massive extra investment in preschool education. The most important measure is the expansion of preschool for disadvantaged children from 10 hours to 16 hours per week as of August 2020. For many municipalities the new measures imply a significant change of policy, which has to be effectuated in a relatively short period of time. For other municipalities the new measures match standing practice closely. Because of this variation in local practice and the staggered implementation of the reform, the policy measures create a natural experiment that can be used to make strong claims about the causal effects of the preschool expansion.

The project will include three cohorts of two- to three-year-old disadvantaged children: a pre-transition, transition and post-transition cohort. Included are children from families with a low socio-economic status with a Dutch, Turkish, Moroccan or other non-Western background. The children, in total about 2000, will be recruited in daycare and preschool centers in 30 to 40 municipalities spread over the country. Children’s development will be followed in the domains of motor skills, spatial cognition, language skills, executive functions, self-regulation, and social competence. The study takes into account differences in the quality of the provided preschool education at the centers (measured using observations and structured interviews), and of the home environment (based on interviews with parents). The data-analyses will make optimal use of the natural experiment and will apply micro-econometric techniques (in particular difference-in-difference and instrumental-variables). In addition to the impact evaluation, focusing on child outcomes, a multiple case study will be conducted of the municipal policies regarding preschool education. The study runs from April 2019 until April 2023.

• prof. dr. Janneke Plantenga
• dr. Ryanne Francot
• dr. Ora Oudgenoeg-Paz
• dr. Thomas van Huizen

• Dr. IJsbrand Jepma (Sardes)
• Heleen Verstegen MSc. (Sardes)

A consortium of Utrecht University and Sardes Ltd has been commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment to conduct research to monitor the pedagogical quality of different types of child care provision and developments therein. The new study continues the study by the Dutch Consortium for Child Care Quality Research (NCKO) of the past years and uses partly the same measurement instruments. New instruments are added to address recent developments in the child care sector. New is also the inclusion of non-familial home based care by 'host parents' in the quality monitor. Each year, a nationally representative sample of child groups and caregivers in center-based child daycare, playgroup centers, preschools, and after school care centers will be studied through standard observations and interviews. In addition, families providing non-familial home based care will be sampled each year and similar observation and interview procedures will be applied. Over the years, an increasingly reliable and representative picture will emerge of child care quality in the Netherlands. Moreover, the annual measurements allow for the early detection of trends in child care quality. The study runs until April 2026.

• dr. Pauline Slot
• dr. Bodine Romijn

• IJsbrand Jepma
• Paulien Muller

The INTAKE project is a collaborative study of Utrecht University, child care and education provider Peuter & Co and the municipality of Rotterdam. The project concerns an exploratory research into the feasibility and potential of a combined intake and child monitoring system to follow the development of children participating in early childhood education and care programs and to determine the impact of these programs on child outcomes. A series of playful tasks is developed that can be administered at 2 years of age and subsequent ages until age 6, shortly before formal primary education starts. In this way, the development of children can be monitored in the domains of language, executive functions, self-control, motor exploration and creativity, social-emotional welbeing and behavior. A number of sub-projects have been initiated to assess the validity, reliability and feasibility of the INTAKE instrument.

• dr. Ryanne Francot
• dr. Ora Oudgenoeg-Paz

ISOTIS addresses the nature, causes and impact of early emerging social and educational inequalities in the context of socioeconomic, cultural and institutional processes. Quasi-panels and pooled longitudinal datasets will be used to examine the variation in early educational gaps and developmental trajectories across countries, education systems and time. To disentangle the complex interactions between characteristics of systems and target groups, ISOTIS will study significant immigrant, indigenous ethnic-cultural and low-income native groups, associated with persistent educational disadvantages. ISOTIS will examine current resources, experiences, aspirations, needs and well-being of children and parents in these groups in the context of acculturation and integration, and in relation to local and national policies. ISOTIS aims to contribute to effective policy and practice development by generating recommendations and concrete tools for: (1) supporting disadvantaged families and communities in using their own cultural and linguistic resources to create safe and stimulating home environments for their children; (2) creating effective and inclusive pedagogies in early childhood education and care centres and primary schools, including multilingual support; (3) professionalization of staff, centres and schools to improve quality and inclusiveness; and (4) establishing inter-agency coordination of support services to children and families.

• dr. Pauline Slot
• dr. Martine Broekhuizen
• dr. Thomas van Huizen
• prof. dr. Janneke Plantenga
• dr. Bodine Romijn
• dr. Ryanne Francot

Preparing students for the 21^st century means teaching them higher-order thinking (HOT). This requires a thorough theoretical and practical understanding of how HOT develops and can be fostered. This Interlinked Research Project (IRP) aims to contribute to this understanding by taking a domain-specific conceptualization of HOT and focusing on primary mathematics education. While internationally, awareness is increasing that the foundation of HOT in mathematics has to be laid at young age, in Dutch primary schools it is almost absent. To provide evidence for enriching the current mathematics curriculum the IRP investigates in three part-projects what opportunities-to-learn HOT can be offered by dynamic data modeling, probability, and early algebra. The IRP is grounded in embodied cognition theory, representational re-description theory, and variation theory and uses interventions with ICT. The design combines macro-genetic longitudinal studies (development over one school year) and micro-genetic studies nested within the macrogenetic studies (development over lesson series). 

• prof. dr. M.H.A.M. (Marja) van den Heuvel-Panhuizen
• dr. L.M. (Michiel) Doorman
• dr. Jan Boom
• dr. M. (Michiel) Veldhuis

• Leibniz Institut IPN Kiel

The L2TOR project capitalises on recent developments in human-robot interaction in which the use of social robots is explored in the context of teaching and tutoring. Social robots have been shown to have marked benefits over screenbased tutoring technologies, and have demonstrable positive impacts on motivation in learners and their learning outcomes. L2TOR focuses on the domain of second language learning in early childhood: due to increased mobility of European citizens and increasing internationalisation, most children in Europe will be required to fluently use two or more languages. As language acquisition benefits from early, personalised and interactive tutoring, current language tutoring delivery is often ill-equipped to deal with this. As resources are insufficient to offer one-to-one tutoring with (near) native speakers in educational and home contexts, L2TOR will further the science and technology of language tutoring robots, with a strong focus on multimodal interactive tutoring for young children (4 years of age). L2TOR will focus on native speaking Dutch, German and Turkish children learning English. In addition, Turkish immigrant children in the Netherlands and Germany will be supported by a robot in acquiring Dutch and German. To realise this ambition L2TOR needs to address both technical aspects -such as multimodal interaction, human-robot interaction management and social signal processing-, pedagogical aspects -such as exploring the pedagogy of social robots and the use of social robot to assist in language tutoring- and developmental psychology aspects -such as understanding how children learn a first and second language from others and how this can be transposed to learning from robots.

• dr. Ora Oudgenoeg-Paz
• Erica van Doorn

Although creativity has been increasingly studied, many studies focus on creativity as a stable, individual characteristic. Since evidence indicates that creativity can be different across situations, we advocate a situated-embodied cognition point of view. Creativity can be defined as the emerging skill of an individual to discover complex affordances, in which several action possibilities are combined. This could lead to discovering and applying novel uses of objects, ideas, and solutions. In this research project, we explore how monolingual and bilingual primary school children make use of their surroundings in a visual version of the Alternative Uses Task. Eye-movements are measured to investigate identify gaze patterns. The aim of the project is to gain insight in how creativity arises.

• Marloes van Dijk MSc
• prof. dr. Elma Blom

• prof. dr. Evelyn Kroesbergen

The VLOT (Questionnaire Parents Home Language Environment) is a new measure for assessing (dual) language exposure in early childhood. The VLOT can be used by professionals to signal risk factors for language development already early in life and to refer children to provisions for preschool education and language therapy. In the current project, a longitudinal study is conducted in order to validate the VLOT and determine the optimal cut-off values for the screening. We examine the reliability, construct validity, predictive value and sensitivity-specificity of the VLOT.

• dr. Ora Oudgenoeg-Paz

• dr. Ine van Liempd
• dr. Ora Oudgenoeg-Paz

In line with the EU strategies for 2020 and the need for a systemic and integrated approach to Early Childhood education and Care (ECEC), the project identifies eight key issues and questions for which effective policy measures and instruments should be developed. They concern assessing the impact of ECEC, optimizing quality and curricula for ECEC to increase effectiveness, raising the professional competencies of staff, monitoring and assuring quality of ECEC, increasing the inclusiveness of ECEC, in particular for socioeconomically disadvantaged children, funding of ECEC, and the need for innovative European indicators of children’s wellbeing. The project addresses these issues in an integrative way by combining state-of-the-art knowledge of factors determining personal, social and economic benefits of ECEC with knowledge of the mechanisms determining access to and use of ECEC. In developing a European knowledge base for ECEC, the project adds to the existing knowledge in three ways. First, it includes secondary analyses of recent and ongoing large-scale longitudinal ECEC research from several European countries. Second, it includes the perspectives of important stakeholders and integrate cultural beliefs and values through a large scale survey across Europe. Third, it includes an observational in-depth study in ECEC centers in eight countries, along with a cross-cultural evaluation of observed practices. The central aim is to develop an evidence-based and culture-sensitive framework of (a) Developmental goals, quality assessment, curriculum approaches and policy measures for improving the quality and effectiveness of ECEC; and (b) Effective strategies of organizing, funding and governing ECEC that increase the impact of ECEC. The interdisciplinary research team constructs this framework, based on the competencies and skills that young children need to develop in current societies, identifies the conditions that have to be fulfilled to promote child development and wellbeing, and identifies strategies and policy measures that support access to high quality provisions, and that are likely to receive broad support of stakeholders, thereby enhancing the impact of ECEC. Website: http://ecec-care.org. 

• dr. Pauline Slot
• dr. Martine Broekhuizen
• dr. Thomas van Huizen
• prof. dr. Janneke Plantenga

The purpose of this study is to support the revelation of children’s talent in understanding phenomena in science and technology (S&T) and gaining knowledge about the development of this understanding. The focus will be on two age groups: 4-5 olds and 10-11 olds and will include three S&T systems: physics, mathematics, and technology. The study contributes to the ‘filling’ of the ‘Talent map’ as a guide for fostering children’s S&T talent. The heart of the study forms the carrying out of a series of theory-led interviews of children, based on principles from embodied cognition and representational redescription. The collected data will give possibilities for micro- and macro-genetic diachronic analyses within systems as well as synchronic analyses between systems.

• dr. Willemijn Schot
• dr. Jan Boom

Changing conceptions of knowledge in the learning sciences as primarily embodied and based in perception-action couplings that relate to environmental information structures, or affordances, give rise to new approaches in educational design in mathematics, science and technology education. Following embodiment theory, the focus of the project is specifically on role of the physical and social affordances of mathematics, science and technology tasks that elicit and guide exploration behavior towards discovering the scientific principles embedded in these tasks.

• dr. Pieter de Bordes
• dr. Jan Boom

This project focuses on number-space mapping (making a link between amounts/numbers and space) from an embodied cognition perspective. The relations between motor development, exploration behavior, spatial cognition and early maths skills in infancy and early childhood are investigated. During three years, the development of two groups of children is followed. The first group will be followed from the age of 7 months onwards, the second group will be followed from the age of 2 years and 7 months onwards.

• dr. Chiel Volman

Deelname aan voorschoolse voorzieningen voor opvang en educatie toonde de afgelopen decennia een sterke sociaal-selectieve tendens. Kinderen van hoog opgeleide tweeverdieners maakten vaker gebruik van kinderopvang, kinderen van laag opgeleiden namen vooral deel aan peuterspeelzalen en voorscholen, allochtone kinderen voornamelijk aan voorscholen. Met de Wet Kinderopvang uit 2005 zijn financiële obstakels om van kinderopvang gebruik te maken grotendeels verdwenen. De vraag is hoe het deelnamepatroon van de genoemde bevolkingsgroepen zich de komende jaren ontwikkelt als gevolg van verdere harmonisatie en of de voorschoolse opvang- en educatievoorzieningen voldoende toegerust zijn om nieuwe groepen gebruikers te bedienen. Onderzoek toonde dat de basale sociaal-emotionele kwaliteit van de Nederlandse kinderopvang ‘voldoende’ is naar internationale maatstaven, maar dat de kwaliteit op het gebied van ontwikkelingsstimulering en educatieve activiteiten daarbij achterblijft. De kwaliteit van voorscholen en peuterspeelzalen is vooral onderzocht in het perspectief van taal- en cognitieve stimulering. Onbekend is wat de basale sociaal-emotionele kwaliteit  is van deze voorzieningen. Het onderzoek wordt uitgevoerd in een representatieve steekproef van ca. 265 instellingen voor voorschoolse opvang, peuterwerk en educatie, die deelnemen aan het landelijke Pre-COOL cohortonderzoek. Het onderzoek bestaat uit een breedtestudie onder alle instellingen en een dieptestudie in een representatieve deelsteekproef van ca. 60 instellingen. Met vragenlijsten en systematische observaties wordt informatie verzameld over de structurele kwaliteit (groepsgrootte, staf-kindratio, opleiding en specifieke training van de staf), de emotionele proceskwaliteit (sensitieve responsiviteit van de staf, autonomiebevordering, structuur bieden) en de educatieve proceskwaliteit  (m.b.t. ontluikende schooltaal, geletterdheid, gecijferdheid, ‘science’). Gebruik wordt gemaakt van o.a. de CLASS Toddler en de ECERS-E.

• dr. Pauline Slot
• dr. Hanna Mulder

Pre-COOL is a national representative cohort study in which about 2900 children are followed from age 2 to age 6 (2nd kindergarten grade of primary school) in order to determine the effects of early childhood education and care provisions on child social-emotional and cognitive development. From age 6, part of the cohort will be included in the COOL cohort study and followed until age 18, so that in due time conclusions can be drawn about the effectiveness of early childhood provisions in the long-term. Pre-COOL is carried out by a consortium of Kohnstamm Institute, ITS and the University of Utrecht. Within the consortium, Utrecht University is especially responsible for the development of child tests, observation instruments and questionnaires.

• dr. Hanna Mulder
• dr. Pauline Slot
• dr. Jan Boom
• dr. Carolien van Houdt

• Kohnstamm Instituut

Inspired by embodiment theory we will explore the dynamic relationship between the developmental trajectories of self-locomotion, spatial exploration, spatial cognition and spatial reference language. Spatial language is expected to emerge from early motor experience and cognitive development.

• dr. Chiel Volman
• dr. Ora Oudgenoeg-Paz

NWO, nr. 411-06-502. The project examines in an open manner, using a longitudinal multiple case-study design with multiple measurement methods, the variety of ‘literacies’  in the out-of-school context – i.e., situations of oral and written language use that relate to developing reading and writing skill - that mono- and bilingual students in the junior vocational track of secondary education, considered at risk for educational failure, participate in. In addition to determining the quantitative impact of literacies in students’ daily life, the project will also examine the personal needs, goals and motivations and the cognitive-linguistic demands involved in these literacies.

• prof. dr. Maria J. de Haan

Numerical development and the role of working memory

The focus of this dissertation is on the development of early numerical skills.
In early numerical development, an important precursor of math performance is the understanding that number words and number symbols are connected to a specific quantity. Children need to learn that for example the number word ‘three’ corresponds to the number symbol ‘3’ and that both represent the numerical value ‘•••’.  To provide insight in this development both domain specific and domain general precursors of math are examined in a longitudinal study among 250 kindergartners .
Domain specific precursors include non-symbolic numerical skills (understanding numerical magnitudes) and symbolic skills (being able to recite the counting sequence). Domain general precursors include measures of the phonological loop, the visual-spatial sketchpad and the central executive. 

The persistent disadvantages in language and reading of low income children and immigrant children with a minority language are a matter of concern. We propose that the core problem is insufficient experience with the ‘academic language register’, a register that contains many features of written language, such as specialized vocabularies, rare verb tenses, explicit space-time references, syntactic means to condense information, and strategies to structure discourse. We followed 162 Dutch, Moroccan-Dutch and Turkish-Dutch children from age 3 to age 9 years. Questionnaires and observations were used to assess language input in first and second language at home and in preschool. Story comprehension and story (re)telling tasks were used to assess children’s emerging receptive and productive use of academic language in first and second language was evaluated. Dependent measures were emergent literacy at the end of preschool and first, second and third primary school grade word decoding, spelling and reading comprehension. Children become increasingly skilled in using academic language in the preschool years. Specific language input mediates effects of socioeconomic and ethnic-cultural family background. Compared to parents, preschool teachers initiate more academic discourse, but in addressing Dutch-as-second-language-learning children, they simplify the lexical and grammatical forms. For these children, moreover, there is a competition between first and second language for scarce input time, but also transfer of skills from first to second language, at least for Turkish-Dutch children. In predicting literacy development in primary school, oral academic language skill in preschool is a stronger predictor than vocabulary and phonological awareness. For Turkish-Dutch children, moreover, academic language skill in the first language is an equally strong predictor of literacy development as academic language skill in Dutch. The first stage of the project was conducted in the period between July 2004 and July 2010. The second stage was a follow-up study conducted in 2013-2015.

• Universiteit van Tilburg; Universiteit van Amsterdam

This study investigates relationships between language abilities and cognitive control in bilingual minority children in the Netherlands. The aim is to better understand the cognitive effects of bilingualism and to disentangle effects of bilingualism and Developmental Language Disorder.

• dr. Tessel Boerma
• dr. Mona Timmermeister
• prof. dr. Elma Blom
• prof. dr. Frank Wijnen