Economics in Dutch Secondary Education

Throughout this paper, an attempt is made to outline the effects of the recent reform in the economics course in Dutch secondary education. Two complementary analysis methods have been applied in order to identify several outcomes of the reform. The first analysis examined data on all 509 VWO schools and all 500 HAVO schools in the year 2011. It studied the effects of the preliminary pilot program on school-level outcomes such as exam grades and graduation rates through regression. The second analytical method was a questionnaire which was filled in by 11 high-school teachers. The regression yielded no significant results for VWO schools, but for HAVO schools, the final central exam grades were found to be lower by 0.078 per cent on average for pilot schools in the year 2011 compared to HAVO school departments which were not part of the pilot program. The means comparison over time indicated that the mean average central exam grade of the new program was significantly lower by 0.336 grade points than the years before, but the total graduation rate was significantly higher by 2.460 percentage points. Furthermore, the questionnaire provided indications that teachers do not believe in effectiveness of the reform, and do not execute it perfectly. A possible explanation for these results would be the ‘transition phase’ hypothesis. Right after implementation of a reform, teachers are not used to it yet, and therefore its results will not be as expected.