Skip to main content
EnglishEN
European Commission logo print header

Changing Inequality at Educational Transitions

Project description

DEENESFRITPL

How to reduce inequality in educational transitions

In Europe, educational transitions often exhibit inequality. Previous investigations have primarily concentrated on the transition to higher education, overlooking earlier transitions and the significance of professional counsellors. The ERC-funded EDUCHANGE project aims to diminish inequality during the transition from compulsory to secondary education and higher education. It will conduct field experiments in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, and Iceland. The project seeks to enhance our understanding of how career guidance and information provision can contribute to reducing inequalities. Additionally, it will explore students’ subjective evaluations of costs, returns, and probabilities of success, along with psychological barriers. Finally, the project will investigate the impact of institutional context on whether career guidance and information provision can effectively mitigate inequality.

Objective

EDUCHANGE aims to become one of the first ever projects to conduct simultaneous field experiments in four strategically selected countries (Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Iceland) with the goal to reduce inequality at the educational transition from compulsory to secondary education and at the transition to higher education.

While experimental intervention studies have become more common in sociology and economics in recent years, EDUCHANGE will address five critical limitations in this literature: 1) No information or career guidance experiment with the goal to reduce inequality at educational transitions has ever been implemented in different countries with a harmonized design. This is puzzling given the importance of institutional context for the generation of inequalities in education 2) The majority of experiments focus on the transition to higher education while neglecting earlier transitions which are particularly relevant in tracked European education systems 3) Previous experiments have hardly considered the role and knowledge of professional counsellors 4) Previous interventions have mainly focused on updating students’ biased perceptions of costs and returns while neglecting other psychological and social barriers 5) Advances in multimedia technologies have only to a limited extent been integrated in previous experiments.

Key outcomes of EDUCHANGE will include: (a) A more nuanced conceptual understanding of how career guidance and information provision can help to reduce inequalities (b) A comparative study of students’ subjective evaluation of costs, returns and probabilities of success and psychological barriers they attach to different educational alternatives in a comparative perspective (c) Knowledge about to what degree institutional context has an impact on whether information provision and career guidance can reduce inequality at two key educational transitions – and potentially affect persistence at the next level.

Fields of science

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Call for proposal

ERC-2022-COG

See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

Host institution

HASKOLI ISLANDS
Net EU contribution
€ 1 681 081,50
Address
SAEMUNDARGOTU 2
101 Reykjavik
Iceland

See on map
Region
Ísland Ísland Höfuðborgarsvæði
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 1 681 081,50

Beneficiaries (4)

Share this page

Download

Last update: 21 September 2023

My Booklet

Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101089112

European Union, 2024