DAVID REIMER
Sociologist, University of Iceland
SELECTED RESEARCH PROJECTS
Ongoing projects
EDUCHANGE (role: PI, ERC Consolidator Grant)Real-time estimations of inequality in learning behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic using data from lea
Duration 2023-2028
EDUCHANGE aims to become one of the first ever projects to conduct simultaneous field experiments in four strategically selected countries (Denmark, Germany; Hungary, Iceland) with the goal to reduce inequality at the educational transition from compulsory to secondary education and at the transition to higher education. While experimental intervention studies have become more common in sociology and economics in recent years, EDUCHANGE will address five critical limitations in this literature: 1) No information or career guidance experiment with the goal to reduce inequality at educational transitions has ever been implemented in different countries with a harmonized design. This is puzzling given the importance of institutional context for the generation of inequalities in education 2) The majority of experiments focus on the transition to higher education while neglecting earlier, transitions which are particularly relevant in tracked European education systems 3) Previous experiments have hardly considered the role and knowledge of professional counsellors 4) Previous interventions have mainly focused on updating students’ biased perceptions of costs and returns while neglecting other psychological and social barriers 5) Advances in multimedia technologies have only to a limited extent been integrated in previous experiments.
The project has not yet started. Anticipated kick-off will be during the summer of 2023. For more information email: reimer@hi.is
Learning in the time of Corona (role: PI, funded by Spar Nord foundation)Real-time estimations of inequality in learning behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic using data from lea
Duration 2022-2024
The project examines inequality in learning behavior as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic by drawing on unique digital data sources. Using real-time information on children’s digital learning behavior before, during, and after school closures, the project investigates the impact of the different periods with school closures on inequalities in learning behavior.
Reducing Inequality in Access to Higher Education (role: PI, funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark - Social Sciences)
Duration 2019-2024
The purpose of the project is to develop an intervention study that can reduce social inequality in access to higher education in Denmark. A recent study showed that even among high school students with an average above the normal (over 9 in the Danish grade scale) who have gained access to higher education, the social background plays an important role: only 52% of high school students with unskilled parents entered in a university program in the period 2008-2010 compared with 85% of those whose parents had a university degree.
Recently concluded projects
Duration 2018-2023
The project examined two aspects of school culture at Danish compulsory schools that are important for the generation of social and gender inequalities among students:
The school’s general orientation towards postsecondary education, which in the context of US high schools has been labelled as a school’s organizational habitus and
the prevalence of gender stereotypes, e.g. beliefs about students’ competencies and orientations based on their gender.
The project will draw on two distinct empirical approaches to measure school culture. First, the project will develop and conduct questionnaire surveys to gauge values, attitudes and practices among teachers and students.
Second, the project will study school culture by exploiting newly available forms of process-generated data at schools (“big data”) that are available through the use of learning platforms and learning management systems (“LMS”) in the Danish school context.
Duration 2018-2022
LIFETRACK is a country-comparative research project on the relationship between educational institutions and the formation of social inequality. The project will run from 2018 to 2020 and analyse in which way different institutional arrangements of secondary educational systems influence the formation of social inequality over the life course. A particular focus will be on the long-term consequences of different approaches to sorting students in the course of secondary education. With this, the project follows up on recent research, which showed that not only those school systems with formal between-school tracking, but also comprehensive school systems tend to sort their students in a socially selective way.