Projects focus on dropouts in teacher training and the interdisciplinary work on children’s well-being in primary schools.

By Caroline Zoffmann Jessen, czj@sdu.dk, 10/10/2024

Addressing the teacher shortage

The project "From dropout data to pedagogical doings" examines how dropouts from teacher education programs can be minimised. The dropout rate of teacher education challenges the already increasing teacher shortage, and despite an increasing amount of knowledge about dropouts, this knowledge has not contributed to a falling dropout rate.

Through the lens of practice theory this project will map out how dropout data is enacted and how it impacts different kinds of educational practices e.g. management and teaching, and thereby clarify how dropout data is used in organizational development to reduce teacher education dropouts.

New ways of doing interdisciplinary work to help the pupils

In the project "Noise in professional assessment" the well-being work in primary schools is examined. An increasing number of children are unhappy in primary school, and the school's teachers, social workers and pedagogues have an interdisciplinary responsibility to enhance the well-being om pupils. 

Previous studies have demonstrated a significant amount of noise (variability) when teachers, pedagogues, and social workers assess the risk of a pupil. This implies that the preventive wellbeing work can be based on flaws in human judgment.

The project thus tests experimentally the impact of the elsewhere successful Estimate-Talk-Estimate method, a structured group assessment approach, on both the level of noise and professionals’ attitudes towards risk assessment.

The project employs a mixed methods design, including a survey experiment, focus groups and interviews. The introduction of ‘noise’ to education research is further combined with insights from theory concerning impartiality. It is anticipated that the project will yield evidence on the impact of, as well as the barriers and opportunities for, the implementation of the Estimate-Talk-Estimate method.