Conference Agenda

This study investigates the differences in academic performances between primary school students in Nigeria's public, low-cost, and high-cost private schools. Unfortunately, reliable evidence on the causal differences in performance between different school types is unavailable in Nigeria. This is because it is difficult to derive causal estimates of the effect of school type on academic achievement when students are not randomly allocated to each school type.

Instead, students self-select into school types based on expected (in this case, their academic achievement) or are predisposed to attend particular school types due to certain demographic characteristics. This non-random selection of students into each school type introduces systematic bias between students in the different school types (Tooley & Yngstrom, 2014). Therefore, selection into a school type (high-cost private schools, for example) and academic achievement of students in that school type are confounded by pre-existing differences between students attending high-cost private schools and those not.

The earliest studies that attempted to estimate the private school effect used simple regression models treating the school type variable as exogenous. This means that researchers treat the school type a student attends as an independent causal factor of any observed differences in academic achievement between public and private school students (Lipcan et al., 2019). However, the main challenge in using regression models is the issue of selection bias which occurs because selection into private schools is endogenous. Therefore, treating private schools as exogenous will likely lead to computational differences because the school type a child attends is influenced by some child and household factors. For example, children from higher socio-economic households are more likely to attend private schools because of the costs associated with private schooling. These children are also more likely to afford after-school tuition (extra lessons), have parents who are highly educated and have higher ambition, and have access to other forms of social capital that can impact academic achievement. Therefore, households that select one school type (private schools, for instance) might differ in key observable and unobservable demographic factors from households that select public schools. This means that estimates OLS estimates will be biased and would not be the true causal effect of attending a private school.

In this study, I use the three advanced statistical techniques from a comparative perspective to assess the extent of selection bias, and control for it: Instrumental Variables, Heckman Correction, and Propensity Score Matching to evaluate the extent of selection bias and control for it (see Heckman, 1979; Rosenbaum & Rubin, 1983).

Finally, most studies of the impact of school type on academic achievement divide schools into categories, public and private schools. However, this categorization is misleading for Nigeria (and most countries in SSA). Private schools differ in terms of tuition and other fees associated with them. To illustrate this, public schools are not completely free in Nigeria. While they are tuition-free, there are other direct costs associated with attending public schools, such as uniforms, exam fees, and books. In some instances, the tuition fees and costs associated with some private schools are cheaper than those associated with public schooling. Therefore, students attending lower-cost private schools will likely differ from those in higher-cost private schools along many dimensions. As a result, in this study, I intend to adopt a method of comparison that accounts for four school types: public schools, extremely low-cost private schools, low-cost private schools, and high-cost private schools.

My study is part of a larger project called BRIDGES which aim is to develop research- based interdisciplinary didactics in teacher education, and to improve teacher education with the support of and in collaboration with the end users. The focus of interdisciplinary didactics is closely related to the renewal of the Norwegian national curriculum (2017 – 2020) and the introduction of the three crosscutting themes public health and life skills, democracy and citizenship, and sustainable development. The implementation of the crosscutting themes into the curricula has prompted an interest for and actualized interdisciplinarity in both teacher education and schools. Interdisciplinary work is the common denominator in BRIDGES, and the research conducted is either focusing especially on one of the three crosscutting themes or interdisciplinarity as an objective to ensure better coherence within and between school subjects or disciplines in teacher education. In my PhD-project, I facilitate a collaborating space, that is this study’s main objective. In 2017, a national initiative for decentralized competence development in schools was implemented, emphasising partnership and locally based initiatives as pivotal means to target learning and development in schools. The partnership entails an equal and mutually binding collaboration, departing from research-based, practice-oriented, and relevant measures (Udir, 2022) to facilitate processes that improve practices. The overall aim is to improve practices within teacher education and collaboration between schools and teacher education for mutual exchange of knowledge, experiences and worldviews, and to obtain a deeper understanding of how practices develop. The overarching research question for my study is how can collaboration between teacher education and the field of practice contribute to learning and strengthening practice for teacher educators and schoolteachers? I the project I investigate collaboration both on a horizontal and vertical level, looking at collaboration within teacher education and between teacher education and schools. In addition, I explore how both teacher educators and schoolteachers understands the concept interdisciplinarity in teaching and learning.

The project is designed as a case study, where I as a teacher educator collaborate with two other teacher educators and three schools in one Norwegian municipality throughout one school year. Interdisciplinarity is targeted as a focus area the municipality and its schools wish to address and further develop. The overall strategy, or design for the partnership is decided by the school owner (municipality) together with the administrative project leader at the university. In this case, the design is a so called “competence package” consisting of eight different modules targeting interdisciplinarity in different ways. We as the teacher educators create the content and tasks for the different modules, and the school principals are responsible for initiating and leading the teachers’ work and development processes locally. The competence package is built around a methodology focusing on individual and collective reflections on different parts of the curriculum, and on introducing new elements into existing practice and already prepared work in classroom (Penuel et al., 2007, Kennedy, 2016). Authentic learning implies that initiatives targeting competence development in schools should enable teachers to be agents in their own development process. The intention of the reflections is hence to facilitate critical discussions to challenge existing practices and enable the teachers to find ways to ask new questions related to their fundamental values and theories of action (Robinson, 2018).

“It is no wonder many secondary school students complain that school is irrelevant to the real world. […] The adolescent begins to realize that in real life we encounter problems and situations, gather data from all of our sources, and generate solutions. The fragmented school day does not reflect this reality” (Jacobs 1989, p. 1).

Interdisciplinarity helps and challenges students to think about the world from different disciplines, and, therefore, from different and diverse perspectives (Lattuca, Voigt, & Faith 2004). It prepares students for the way they need to handle real problems and situations in a real and diverse world and hence prepares them for the future (Beane 1997). A coherent curriculum is a widely shared ideal amongst teachers at all levels of teaching and learning (Janssen 2020). Furthermore, interdisciplinary teaching plays an important part in counteracting overload and fragmentation of the curriculum (Abbenhuis et al. 2008). For example, by diminishing overlap in learning plans between different school subjects, the problem of an overloaded curriculum can be solved (Folmer et al. 2017).

This study will focus on interdisciplinary teaching at secondary schools in The Netherlands. When considering all the advantages mentioned above, one would expect interdisciplinary learning to be an essential component of the curricula in secondary schools. However, according to recent reports (for example, the ‘Curriculum Mirror’ of 2017) it is not.

The main goal of this study is to investigate current practices of interdisciplinary teaching and learning, focusing on difficulties teachers encounter when developing this type of education. The two main questions to be answered are:

1. Which problems do teachers in secondary schools in The Netherlands encounter when developing interdisciplinary education?

2. What do teachers need in order to improve their interdisciplinary education?

Answers to these questions will provide essential input for a didactical instrument aiding teachers in the development of interdisciplinary education. This instrument will be developed in the next phase of this research project.

This study focuses on a specific department of the Dutch secondary school system: the gymnasium. The ‘gymnasium’ is the Dutch school type that prepares pupils for higher education (university). This is also the school type where, among other subjects, Latin and Greek Languages and Culture are taught (Remie 2022, Burgersdijk 2022). The gymnasium is considered a promising place for interdisciplinary teaching and learning, but also here the development of it appears to be problematic (BGV 2015, BGV 2020).

In order to answer the questions two methods were used (see also the method section below). First, a questionnaire was sent out to gymnasium teachers of different subjects in The Netherlands. Secondly, I organized three focus group meetings with teachers from different gymnasia.

In this ignite talk I will argue that interdisciplinary education in Dutch gymnasia is often developed on top of existing disciplinary curricula. In other words, it is overloading curricula, instead of doing the exact opposite. Therefore, to make interdisciplinary teaching successful, it is important to really embed it in the curriculum, strengthening and diversifying existing disciplinary curricula. This is one of the main steps that needs to be taken to successfully embody a widely shared ideal: a coherent curriculum.

Almost everything around us is made up. It is created – whether intentionally or unintentionally – by other humans, including things that we often take to be natural, such as the foods we eat or animals we keep as pets. As it turns out, most of the vegetables we enjoy and the pets we love to spend time with have been “designed” by artificial selection over decades, even centuries. What does that mean for us as humans, and as designers?

Recognizing that we live, for the most part, in an artificial, human-created world can change how we are in the world, how we perceive it, interact with it, and, more importantly, how we can change it. One could argue that it also provides us with a moral imperative to do so because we know that much of the world around us is unfair, often disadvantaging and marginalizing huge swaths of people and communities. Since there is nothing inherently “natural” about these artifacts or processes or systems, we have the agency to change them.

Included in this artificial world is education. Almost every aspect of what makes up today’s educational system—classes, schools, credit hours, universities, degrees, even the very idea of receiving an “education”—has been invented by humans. The current design of education does not work for many, particularly the groups that have been historically marginalized. If schools are not fun, if they do not support play and creativity, it is because they are designed to be this way (either intentionally or by happenstance as a side effect of some other decisions that were, at that time, believed to me more important). Because these are creations of humans, they can be reimagined and redesigned for better outcomes. Although the changing educational system might be incredibly complex, it is worth recognizing that it is designed and so can be re-designed.

In our work, we have found that expanding what we see as artificial, particularly the artificial nature of education and schooling, can enable powerful change. It is enabling in two ways. First, it allows us to interrogate everything around us, not taking it as a given, but rather something that was created and thus can be re-created, re-imagined, and re-designed. Second, it provides a response to those who resist change by making an essentialist argument — “this is just how things are.” Acknowledging the artificiality of the system suggests that this is how things may be, but they don’t have to be this way.

Another important aspect of seeing the world as artificial is expanding what we mean by the “world.” For too long we (and the field of design) have conceived of the designed world as constituted of physical artifacts and other technological tools. Although these are important, we argue that there are many intangible aspects to the designed world. They may include experiences (such as the feeling of awe when faced with the immensities of the cosmos); processes (such as the process of registering for school), systems (such as the K-20 educational system), or even culture (such as the culture of high-school football). Although design in some spheres (such as systems and culture) might be more complex than others, applying a wide-angled design lens can increase agency, empowering change makers. In order to do so, we need a frame, a way of categorizing or classifying the different kinds of “designed things” that are out there in the world.