ECER 2008 - Social cohesion in schools

Live blog from a session at ECER 2008.

Presetation from Ton Mooij from Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Focus in last few years in the Netherlands (and across Europe) to promote citizenship, social integration and social safety. Addressing issues such as disturbance, aggression, bullying, ... All are effected by social and historical differences.

Goal of the project described to use interventions to promote social cohesion. Involve children in creating positive attitudes. Work based on previous study that found you could involve children in developing pro-social behaviour and that it did have a positive effect. Goal is to promote self-regulation. Data was collected by Internet survey. Reported a relation between school size and perceptions of social safety. [I'm not clear about what he said and may have to check this up but I think the findings were counter-intuitive - I think he said larger schools were socially safer - DM]

Reference: Mooij, T (2008) Education and ICT based self-regulation in learning theory, design and implimentation. In Education and Information Technologies. (In press.)

[Presentation focused on broad methodologies and numbers involved but I would have liked more on how they did it. How do you promote social safety? How do you involve the pupil? How can you promote self-regulation and personalised learning? -DM]