Preventing Early School Leaving

U-can-act is a scientific research project that focuses on the effectiveness of methods to reduce early school leaving in secondary education. The research group behind the U-can-act project wants to offer insight into the individual processes of school drop-out because current scientific research mainly focuses on group risk factors.

The Challenge

The ultimate goal of this project is to help as many young people as possible achieve their starting qualification. The researchers behind this project hope to achieve this by writing several scientific publications and a new handbook on early school leaving. In order to provide insight into what are crucial developments for young people to leave school early and how this can be prevented in practice, data is needed from supervisors and young people at MBO. In order to do this, the choice was made to collect data from both the young people and the supervisors on a weekly basis. The challenge for the researchers within this project was how to collect this data on a weekly basis over a period of six months.

The Solution

Researchable has contributed to the development of an application and a questionnaire system for the automated collection of data. With the application it is possible to automatically send weekly invitations to the students to fill in questionnaires. Thanks to the developed software, within 36 weeks more than 7000 questionnaires were completed and the research was a success.

The project can be viewed at u-can-act.nl and the questionnaire system has been released open source on github.