Trudie Schils

Research interest

My main research interest is in the field of economics of education. My research concerns the analysis of both student and school performance. In my research I address the role and limitations of using tests to measure such performance and the various aspects of performance. For example, the relevance of including cognitive and non-cognitive skills when measuring student performance and including students' social background and previous school history when measuring school performance.
I was granted a subsidy from the Dutch Ministry of Education and Culture for a project that aims to develop a method for increasing the performance of students using repetitive self-reflection. This project runs from 2010-2013 and is done together with Eva Feron. In addition, together with Lex Borghans I received a research grant to investigate to what extent schools can identify types of excellence among their children in an early stage of their education, using regular sources of information such as the school’s Student Tracking System. This project runs from 2013-2015 and is done together with Tyas Prevoo.

Activities at Kaans

At Kaans we gather information about students' economic and social background, their (non)cognitive school performance, the inputs into the educational process and the development of children from the age which they start school until the age at which they leave secondary school. The data are used to provide students, teachers, schoolboards and parents with feedback that helps to improve students' and school's performance. Find more information at here (in Dutch). For this research we receive subsidies from the Ministry of Education, schoolboards and municipalities.

Teaching

As an assistant professor, I teach and coordinate courses in the field of social economics and labour economics, e.g. economic analysis of social behaviour, European labour markets and welfare states, or understanding society. I supervise master theses in this field and actively coordinate the master track Social Economics, which is one of the master tracks within Economic Studies (IES). Next to that, I am involved in the assessment of Phd. studies in my fields of interest. I was recently nominated for the Excellent Graduate Educator award of the Maastricht University School of Business and Economics.