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It was announced last week that from next year onwards, the Dutch cabinet will allocate 30 million euros to the prevention of students dropping out of and making the wrong programme choices in higher education. That is exactly the subject that educational scientist Sanne Akkerman is going to study in her large-scale research project, for which she recently received an ERC Starting Grant. With a special smartphone app, that 600 youngsters are going to use, she hopes to gain insight in the development of their interests and the role their environments play in that.

One third of the students in higher education drop out prematurely.

"We already know a lot about the reasons why they give up or regret their choices," researcher and professor Sanne Akkerman explains. "The pressure of work could be too high, the programme could be disappointing, or the students have mental or financial issues. But the role interests play is still unclear, even though interests form the natural source of learning. That is why we would like to know how someone's diverse range of interests develop in the long run and how they relate to choices regarding education and work.

Internal conflict

Existing research primarily focuses on one subject, like mathematics, how this interest develops and how education environments can explore it. What makes Sanne's research innovative is that she looks at multiple interests and the role contexts such as school, family, friends and leisure activities play. Sanne says: "Someone can have an affinity for science, but an affinity for sociological issues as well. A programme choice can then lead to an internal conflict because one of those interests has to go." And it is not just the education environment that influences an interest. "A father who argues that mathematics is just abstract and stupid can definitely make an imprint on someone's choices." 

Smartphone app inTin

In order to gain an understanding of these factors, Sanne will follow 600 youngsters for three years and let them use the smartphone app inTin. In that period, half of the group will transition from secondary education to higher education while the other half is in college and transitioning to either follow-up programmes or jobs. In these three years, the participants keep diaries twelve times in which they write when they are pursuing their interests, how important these are to them, what they are doing, how much time they spend on them and who they associate with. "For instance, a female student could write down that she is pursuing her important interest in chemistry, but that the classes are deadly boring," Sanne says. "By looking at it from moment to moment, we can also see how new interests come about. This could be by attending a class that fosters a student's interest in a new topic to the point that the student looks up more information on it and talks to friends about it."  

Multidisciplinary nature 

“I expect that many students have multiple interests that they cannot always seem to fit in one degree programme.

I expect that many students have multiple interests that they cannot always seem to fit in one degree programme.

If my research confirms this suspicion, this begs the question how we want to arrange or present our degree programmes. Look at the degree programme Psychology, where you can also utilize your interests in Medicine and Mathematics. After all, this degree programme also pays attention to the role the brain and statistical knowledge play. It would be good to stronger emphasize the multidisciplinary nature of a degree programme."

Fostering interests  

"Within educational sciences, there is a lot of attention for how teaching programmes can be arranged in such a way that learning improves optimally," Sanne continues. "It is mostly geared towards qualification and testing, and less towards the individual. We need to pay more attention to students' interests, as these are the natural source of learning. If you can foster or broaden those, you will automatically create involved, curious and learning students. My research will hopefully also yield useful insights for information giving and matching within the education system. It would be great if we could develop practical instruments with which we could better guide students' weighing-up processes, so every student could find their way."

Sanne Akkerman studied Educational Sciences in Nijmegen and defended her PhD thesis on Interdisciplinary Collaboration between academics at Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ in 2006. After that, she worked as an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor at the Department of Education of Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ, where she supervised PhD research and taught many classes in the research Master's programme Educational Sciences. She carried out research in the fields of interorganizational and interdisciplinary collaboration, school-work transitions, online peer groups and youngsters' social-media use, school-home-peer-hobby transitions and the effects of those on the development of interests. Akkerman has been with Leiden ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ since 1 September. She works there as a Professor of Higher Education at the ICLON (the Leiden ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ Graduate School of Teaching), which has applying scientific insights in practice as one of its goals.

Text: Esther Kooymans