2025
Computer-Assisted Learning in the Real World: How Khan Academy Influences Student Math Learning
Dec. 8, 2025
This seminar was be held by Professor Philip Oreopoulos. He presented new research using administrative data from more than 200,000 students to examine the real-world effects of computer-assisted learning with Khan Academy’s MAP Accelerator. The study shows that even modest weekly use leads to measurable improvements in math performance, with larger gains at higher usage levels.
Is the treatment weak or the test insensitive: Interrogating item difficulties to elucidate the nature of reading intervention effects
Nov. 27, 2025
This seminar was held by David J. Francis and Paulina A. Kulesz. They discussed their work on how different reading assessments detect the effects of educational interventions, and why some tests may underestimate meaningful changes in student performance. The study provides important insights into how assessment design affects the detection and interpretation of intervention effects.
Expanding early child care in Norway: Effects on medium-run cognitive skills
Nov. 20, 2025
This seminar was held by Professor Henrik D. Zachrisson. In this talk, he presented findings from a study estimating the effects of the nationwide expansion of Norway’s universal early childhood education and care (ECEC) program for 1- and 2-year-olds in the early 2000s. Using data covering all children born between 2002 and 2007, the study shows that access to ECEC from age two improved later math and reading test scores, with particularly strong benefits for children from families with lower parental education levels.
From Potential to Performance: How Schools and Neighbourhoods Shape the Expression of Traits and Genes
Nov. 13, 2025
This seminar was held by Qi Qin, Doctoral Research Fellow at PROMENTA, Department of Psychology. In this talk, she presented findings from the GeoGen project, which examines how schools and neighborhoods shape the expression of genetic and psychological traits in educational achievement. Drawing on genomic and administrative data from over 30,000 Norwegian families, the study reveals that environmental contexts can either amplify or compensate for genetic differences—showing that educational equity depends not only on access to resources but also on creating environments that help every child reach their potential.
Peer Perceptions and Students' Investments in Schoolwork
Nov. 6, 2025
This seminar was held by Dr. Ranveig Falch. She presented results from a randomized controlled trial showing that students often underestimate how much their classmates study—and that correcting these beliefs leads those who spend relatively little time on schoolwork to study more. The findings highlight how perceptions of peers and beliefs about effort can shape students’ learning behavior.
Parental and Early Child Skills Outweigh Home Numeracy Environment in Predicting Arithmetic Development
Oct. 30, 2025
This seminar was held by Dr. Tonje Amland. In this talk, she presented findings from her study which examined how parental arithmetic skills and early child abilities influence children’s arithmetic development, and to what extent these factors outweigh the effects of the home numeracy environment.
Improving estimation of student proficiency with joint models for item responses, response times, and interaction counts
Oct. 23, 2025
This seminar was held by Professor Björn Andersson. In this talk, he discussed how joint latent variable models can enhance the estimation of student proficiency in computer-based tests by leveraging detailed response data and addressing factors that influence estimation accuracy.
Assessing the Measurement Equivalence of a set of Items: Item-specific Diagnostics on an Interpretable Metric.
Sep. 25, 2025
This seminar was held by Professor Johan Braeken. In this talk, he discussed the limitations of traditional model comparison for assessing item equivalence and present a new method with item-specific effect-size diagnostics using effect-coding.
The ReadWell and ABC123 trials
Sep. 11, 2025
This seminar was presented by Monica Melby-Lervåg and Tonje Amland from CREATE, and Anita Lopez-Pedersen from Department of Special Needs Education. In this talk, they presented results from two large-scale randomized trials, ReadWell and ABC123, and examine the relationship between children’s reading and math skills.
Benefits of Process Data for Evaluating the Differential Effectiveness of App-Based Treatments
June 18, 2025
Marie-Ann Sengewald, the recipient of the Sigrid Blömeke Scholarship Award 2025, gave the talk at this CREATE Open Seminar.
With the growing use of digital treatments, such as learning apps, process data are increasingly available that offer valuable insights into how participants engage with these interventions. Building on this potential, our study bridges psychometric approaches and evaluation research by integrating response time modeling to refine the measurement of latent abilities, alongside differential effect analyses to explore heterogeneity in treatment outcomes. We compare different modeling strategies using data from Torkildsen et al. (2022), who developed an app-based morphological training program and evaluated its effectiveness in a randomized controlled trial involving 717 second-grade students. Our findings highlight that disengagement indicators not only enhance data quality but also provide a better understanding of who benefits most from the treatment.
Reading Comprehension Efficiency: Balancing Speed and Accuracy in Reading Assessment
June 5, 2025
This seminar was held by Dr. Rebecca Knoph. In this talk she investigated the relationship between reading comprehension accuracy and speed through two timed reading assessments.
An RCT Study and a Policy Evaluation Study in Primary Education: Insights from Switzerland and the Netherlands
June 4, 2025
In this seminar Karolin Maskos and Madelon Jacobs, both PhD candidates visiting CREATE, presented their current research. The study examines the effects of formative peer and self-assessment on primary school students’ mathematics achievement.
Beyond the Fovea: Word Recognition is Impeded by Adjacent Stimuli
May 22, 2025
This seminar was held by PhD candidate Dzan Zelihic, from the Department of Special Needs Education. He presented work that is part of his doctoral project, where a novel variant of the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) is employed to investigate lexical activation in the presence of adjacent stimuli.
Longitudinal Research on Educational Inequalities in Europe: A Scoping Review of Trends, Gaps, and Methodological Approaches
May 15, 2025
This seminar was given by Dr. Diego Gonzalez Campos. In this talk he shared initial findings from a scoping review of longitudinal studies providing quantitative evidence on inequalities in educational outcomes, socio-emotional skills, and educational attainment among K–12 students across Europe.
Missing Data Handling When a Variable Is 100% Missing and Other Wizardry: A Case Study on Data Enrichment for Measurement of SES in TIMSS
May 8, 2025
This seminarwas held by Professor Johan Braeken. In this talk, he presented an ongoing study on data enrichment for measuring socio-economic status in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.
Genetic Signal in Cognitive Traits
May 6, 2025
This seminarwas held by Dr. Bruno Sauce and Dr. Alexandra Starr from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In this talk, they presented findings from ongoing projects involving large-scale genetic studies that explore how our inherited DNA differences contribute to variations in cognitive and educational outcomes, as well as mental health in childhood and adulthood.
Effects From Early Language Interventions - Results From Large Scale Trials
Mar. 31, 2025
This seminar was held by Dr. Beth Phillips from the Florida Center for Reading Research. In her talk, she discussed effects from early language interventions, sharing results from several intervention studies.
Effective implementation by schools takes time! An example from an intervention for the prevention of reading difficulties
Mar. 27, 2025
This seminar was given by Professor Peter F. de Jong from the Department of Child Development and Education at the University of Amsterdam. In this talk, Professor de Jong focused on interventions implemented by schools, using an example from the Netherlands of an intervention for children at risk of reading difficulties.
Behavioural Genetic Approaches to Studying Individual Differences in Children’s Behaviour and Learning
Mar. 14, 2025
This seminar was held by four PhD candidates from the University of Oslo and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). Madelief Kuijper, Josefina Bernardo, Kassandra Pomper, and Britt Min gave a flash talk, where the overarching topic is behavioural genetic approaches to studying individual differences in children's behaviour and learning.
The definition of dyslexia: old and new
Feb. 5, 2025
This CREATE Seminar was given by Professor Maggie Snowling from Oxford University. Her research is focused on children’s language and learning. In recent years, her research has been focused on longitudinal studies of children at high-risk of reading problems, and she has been involved in the implementation of randomised controlled trials assessing the efficacy of reading and language interventions.
From Longitudinal Studies to Interventions via Causal Models: Examples from Reading and Language
Feb. 4, 2025
This CREATE Seminar was given by Professor Charles Hulme from the University of Oxford (Charles Hulme, Oxford University). He has broad research interests in reading, language and memory processes and their development and is an expert on randomized controlled trials in Education.
Causal Inference and Differential Effect Analysis in (Covariate-adjusted) Group Comparisons
Jan. 30, 2025
This talk was held by Dr. Marie-Ann Sengewald, recipient of The Sigrid Blömeke Scholarship Award from CREATE. In this talk, she gave valuable insights into her research in the field of causal inference and differential effect analysis in group comparisons.
Students’ Academic and Non-Academic Outcomes: Examining Student, Teaching, and School Predictors
Jan. 27, 2025
In this talk, Associate Professor Rebecca Collie shared research examining factors linked with students’ academic outcomes (e.g., achievement) and non-academic outcomes (e.g., wellbeing). Rebecca Collie is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology in the UNSW School of Education
2024
CREATE Seminar: Educational Inequality: Patterns, Causes, and Potential Solutions
Dec. 10, 2024
This CREATE seminar was given by Professor Sean Reardon. He is the Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford.
His research investigates the causes, patterns, trends, and consequences of social and educational inequality. This includes issues of residential and school segregation and of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in academic achievement and educational success, as well as methods of measuring social and educational inequality (including the measurement of segregation and achievement gaps) and methods of causal inference in educational and social science research.
MAIHDA: A New Approach for Investigating Intersectional Inequalities?
Dec. 5, 2024
This CREATE open seminar was given by Professor George Leckie from the University of Bristol, UK. George is a Professor of Social Statistics and Co-Director of the Centre for Multilevel Modelling (CMM). His research interests focus on the application and dissemination of multilevel modelling. He has applied this method to study the effects of institutional and geographical contexts on sociodemographic inequalities in individual educational and health outcomes. A long-standing interest of his has been examining school effects on student learning through school value-added models, as well as engaging in debates regarding the use of such data to inform school accountability and choice.
Becoming a reader
Nov. 7, 2024
This CREATE open seminar was given by Professor Kate Nation from the University of Oxford. Professor Kate Nation is a distinguished member of CREATE's Scientific Advisory Committee. She is a professor in Experimental Psycholoy, and her research is concerned with language processing, especially reading development.
Intervening to improve outcomes: Some thoughts from 10 + years of reading RCTs and QEDs
Nov. 6, 2024
CREATE Internal Seminar was given by Professor Robert Savage from York University. Professor Robert is a distinguished member of CREATE's Scientific Advisory Committee. He holds a professorship in Experimental Psychology, and he is particulary interested in preventing early reading and spelling problems.
Can we improve reading and language skills? Lessons learned from genetic designs and randomised trials
Oct. 10, 2024
This open CREATE seminar was given by Professor Monica Melby-Lervåg. What skills are malleable through interventions and to what extent, has attracted attention from researchers for centuries? In this talk Melby-Lervåg presented a closer look at malleability of reading and language skills.
Reading and Math Skills Development: Insights from Finnish Data
Sep. 26, 2024
This CREATE open seminar was presented by Associate Professor Maria Psyridou. Her research focuses on the development of reading and math skills and the early identification of children in need of support.
Using Genetic Tools to Study Educational Inequality
Sep. 12, 2024
This CREATE open seminar was given by Associate Professor Elsje van Bergen from Vrije University (VU) Amsterdam. Dr. van Bergen's research explores the intricate interplay between nature and nurture in shaping individual differences in learning abilities.
Modeling Faking in High-Stakes Personality Assessments
Aug. 22, 2024
This CREATE seminar was given by Timo Seitz from University of Mannheim. The talk focused on the importance of item desirability characteristics and qualitatively different faking tendencies in high-stakes personality assessments.
Are all individuals fit for measurement?
May 30, 2024
This CREATE seminar was given by Professor Johan Braeken. Have you ever wondered whether all participants in your research study were providing actual proper responses to your carefully designed questionnaire or ability test? Well, what if I tell you that, indeed, people do not always behave as expected!
Investigating the effect of experience sampling study design on careless and insufficient effort responding identified with a screen-time-based mixture model
Apr. 25, 2024
Studies using experience sampling or ecological momentary assessment are susceptible to unwanted effects from careless responding by participants. At this seminar, Associate Professor Esther Ulitzsch (CEMO and CREATE) presented work on how features of the experience sampling study design relate to careless and insufficient effort responding.
Language and literacy interventions: past experiences and the way forward
Mar. 7, 2024
This CREATE seminar was be given by Professor Arne Lervåg, Professor Monica Melby-Lervåg and Professor Janne von Koss Torkildsen. They gave an overview over the results of these trails, discuss them, point at weaknesses and reflect on what is needed to put the field forward.
Generalized linear latent variable models for mixed data in educational research
Feb. 29, 2024
This CREATE seminar was given by Associate Professor Björn Andersson. He presented a fast estimation method for GLLVMs and illustrated its application to longitudinal data and joint modeling of process and performance data. Future extensions to support multilevel models and further types of nonignorable missing data are described.
Socio-economic Inequality in Education
Feb. 15, 2024
This CREATE seminar was given by Henrik Daae Zachrisson. In this lecture, he described the extent of socio-economic educational inequality in Norway and discussed the evidence base for various measures to reduce and prevent this.
Reading fluency – what is it and why does it matter?
Feb. 8, 2024
This CREATE seminar was given by Professor Athanasios Protopapas. Fluent reading is considered necessary for understanding nontrivial passages and is associated with better reading comprehension. We do not really understand either the cognitive mechanisms of fluent reading or the potential causal connections between fluency and comprehension. In the BetterReading project we tackle some of these issues head on.