Shaping Futures: The Role of Primary Schools and Teachers for Students with Mental, Neurodevelopmental and Behavioral Disorder
Franziska Valder and her co-author doctor Michaela Paffenholz from the Ifo Institute, at the University of München, receives 5,6 m. for the project "Shaping Futures: The Role of Primary Schools and Teachers for Students with Mental, Neurodevelopmental and Behavioral Disorders" from DFF.
Mental, neurodevelopmental, and behavioral (MNB) disorders affect a growing share of children worldwide, and in Denmark. These disorders - such as ADHD, autism, conduct disorders, and learning disabilities - are linked to poorer educational and labor market outcomes, such as lower GPA, school drop-out and lower earnings. The prevalence of MNB disorders in childhood can thus lead to persistent and large inequality. Given the high prevalence and societal cost of these disorders, improving inclusion is a major policy goal, but past reforms have struggled.
This project examines how schools and teachers shape the relationship between MNB disorders and education and labor market outcomes. Combining economic methods with insights from education research, it uses administrative data, the well-being survey, and new survey data from teachers across Denmark. The core method builds on “teacher value-added” models, estimating each teacher’s contribution to student outcomes such as test scores and well-being. This method has demonstrated large general importance of teachers for their students’ outcomes but with little focus on children with MNB disorders or outcomes other than test scores. It is however likely that teachers are particularly important for that group: Many MNB disorders first arise in school-age and teachers and schools thus set precedent for how these disorders are handled.
By bridging Economics and Education research, the project advances understanding of how teachers and schools can promote inclusion for children with MNB disorders. It broadens traditional measures of teacher effectiveness to include well-being, focuses on vulnerable subgroups, and links self-collected data on teacher and school characteristics to student success.
You can read more about the project here (in Danish)