Danish
A Danish-based project is in the process of building up an internationally recognised education knowledge centre with an aim to identify factors and their relation to progression within the country’s educational system. Project coordinator and centre director Niels Egelund explains more.
To educate about education
Initiated by the Danish Prime Minister, a council was set up in 2005/2006 to isolate areas in education in need of further research. Headed by The Danish Globalisation council, a series of meetings with 25 educational experts drew attention to a gap in the Danish education system, with a relatively “low” amount, (78%) of young people moving to secondary school.
Knowledge gap Niels Egelund, professor of special education at the Department of Education at Aarhus University, was one of academics involved in this education council. He says Denmark’s low transition rate led to a push from The Danish Council for Strategic Research to initiate a bulk of research in the area. With financial backing from the research council, work was done to coordinate a number
of researchers and research
communities in Denmark to form a five- year project with the long term aim of creating a Centre for Strategic Research in Education in Denmark. “For the first time in Denmark there will
be a large-scale collaborative effort to uncover comprehensive causal relations in education,” says Egelund.
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Four research areas Each research institution has a focus on one of five different research areas or ‘work packages’. Through these “packages”, the centre aims to identify a number of causes and relations in various stages of the educational system: day- care and pre-school, compulsory school,
What makes the project unique is its
strong emphasis on quantitative methods, he says. Egelund explains that The Danish Council for Strategic Research pushed for this focus, as previously Danish educational
research was dominated by
qualitative data. In the project’s second year the research
team today consists of 12 Danish quantitative and qualitative researchers in economics, sociology and education. Both the project and centre is led by Department of Education, Aarhus University and headed by Egelund. Other institutions cooperating on the project include The School of Economics and Management, Aarhus University, The Danish National
Centre for Social
Research and The Danish Institute of Governmental Research.
post-compulsory transition patterns and post-vocational education. Each work package has different focus and target areas and involves researchers from various partner institutions. Work Package one (WP1) aims to
identify which factors in day-care and pre-school affect child development and determine attainment and educational achievement. Data is used from population registers back to the 1960s, family demographics, income, education, health care usage, test scores from 9th grade, upper secondary school and military conscription, existing and new survey data from The Danish Child Development Survey and an existing 60 day-care- facility experiment. WP1 research is the only work package
that has gleaned results so far, says Egelund – for the other four packages it is too early to draw any conclusions. WP1 has found that children receiving high quality day care gain higher marks in their schooling exam than those in lower quality day care institutions. “High quality” has been determined by factors such as preschool class numbers and the turnaround of preschool teachers. These factors have a
Insight Publishers | Projects
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