Predicting Learning in Special Education (Voorspellen van leren in Gespecialiseerd Onderwijs)

The Appropriate Education Bill (Wet Passend Onderwijs) mandates that all students with Special Educational Needs (SEN) receive an educational placement that addresses their SEN. Despite this mandate, there are still students that are not placed correctly, or are not participating in education at all.

In primary school, students with SEN can be placed within general education or they can be placed within a specialized education school, which serves only students with SEN. To address SEN needs beyond what is already available at a given school, schools make use of additional support from care providers (e.g., psychological care, behavioral specialists, and individual support), which results in an Education-Care Arrangement (Onderwijszorgarrangement). In each student’s school career, there are supports provided and decisions made along the way that impact their trajectory through the education system: the placements they are in, the progress they make, and ultimately the educational outcomes they achieve at end of secondary school.

Because these decisions ultimately impact the educational outcomes of a student, it is important that they are made with as much precision as possible. We can make more precise decisions if we can better predict how the student will progress in each scenario. Can we predict how a student will fare within a given trajectory, and thus predict what the best course of action would be? Such predictions are already implicitly made when specialists designate school placement. For example, a conclusion that a student would be better off at a special secondary school than at a general education secondary school, is a comparison between two predicted outcomes: how the student would progress if they went to a general education school versus how they would progress if they stayed within a special education school. We will investigate the extent to which we can predict student outcomes within a given trajectory using machine learning techniques.

Educational outcomes for students with SEN depend not only on placement, but also on the supports that are provided and how independent the student can be. Therefore, we will additionally zoom in on two topics that influence this ability: What are the costs and benefits of Integrated Education-Care arrangements (Onderwijszorgarrangementen) where care providers are embedded within the school? And how do we promote independence in students within special education?