Doornkamp, Laura http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3972-0593
Doornkamp, Frank http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9882-0941
Van der Pol, Lotte D. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0480-5802
Groeneveld, Sandra http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6736-1447
Mesman, Judi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7506-9094
Groeneveld, Marleen G. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8406-5861
Funding for this research was provided by:
H2020 European Research Council (726141)
Article History
Received: 7 April 2023
Accepted: 25 April 2024
First Online: 3 June 2024
Declarations
:
: Each of the authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.
: This study used administrative data that were subtracted from secondary schools’ student administration systems. The Implementation Group (TIG) subtracted relevant anonymized data from these systems and transferred the anonymized dataset to the researchers. TIG is an organization that develops administrative tools for secondary schools to inform schools about patterns in their student data. Approximately half of all secondary schools in the Netherlands are affiliated with TIG. As a result, TIG has access to a great amount of secondary school data and was able to subtract this data for this study purpose (<i>if schools provided informed consent</i>). TIG has no conflict of interest, financial or otherwise.
: The director of a school or another authorized employee granted informed consent to us 1) to collect a relevant selection of their schools’ administrative data for research purposes and 2) to collect additional data on their school characteristics through Governmental Open Access Data. When informed consent was granted, TIG transferred the selection of anonymized administrative data to the researchers via a secured digital environment. The selection included students’ gender, educational level per year, subject choice per year, student performances (grades) per year in four subjects (math, physics, Dutch language, and French language), and corresponding teachers’ gender for the subjects per year over the period 2011 until 2021. Students and teachers were not traceable in the data and not known by the researchers. The additional data on school characteristics included school denomination, school structure, and level of urbanity.
: All data collected remained confidential and were stored on a secured drive (only the researchers had access to this drive). All individual schools were assigned a unique identification number. The identification list that links schools’ unique identification numbers to school names and other identifying information has been deleted.
: Data collection and data management procedures were discussed with a data protection officer within the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs, Leiden University. The Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs’ ethical clearance is in line with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Leiden University’s code of conduct for scientific integrity. The formal ethical approval for this study was provided by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs (Leiden University).