This project was co-financed by ODISSEI in the extra LISS Corona call for proposals in March 2020.
Researcher: Thijs Bol, University of Amsterdam
From March 16, a school shutdown is effective in the Netherlands, and most children must keep up with their schoolwork from home. In this period, parents are expected to provide homeschooling for their children, and guide them in their learning process. With this module, the researcher will investigate (a) parental differences in providing homeschooling (b) the effects of the school shutdown on the short- and long-term educational outcomes of children.
The core hypothesis is that the long exposure to homeschooling will increase socio-economic inequalities in education. At home, children from disadvantaged families often have relatively fewer resources to study, and parents are less capable to support the learning of their offspring. Therefore, the current period of school closure forms a large challenge for equal opportunities in education. It is therefore of crucial importance to map how parents in the Netherlands differently help their children with education, and to study how this affects children’s educational outcomes in the short- and long run.
For this module, parents with school-going children (in primary or secondary education) will be addressed in the LISS panel. The newly gathered data, as well as existing items from previous waves, will be merged to the Dutch population registers (the Nationaal Cohortonderzoek Onderwijs). By identifying the families in the registers, the researcher can eventually study how the educational outcomes of children that were (differently) exposed to this period of school closure are affected in the short- and long-term.
The research was covered by the Jeugdjournaal and NOS (in Dutch).
Image: Jena Backus for Pexels