Viktória Pál
Winner of travel grant of DKK 30.000.
Equal Education by Different Approaches: Leave No One Behind in education
People have different needs based on abilities and personal circumstances. Most education systems cannot take it into account and those that do, create special extra programs, instead of finding a solution that involves all students in the system. Viktória Pál plans to collect student evaluations to get to know their needs and based on the feedback on the current system and help from psychologists specialized in educational needs, she will implement different classroom designs into which students can self-select themselves based on their needs and preferences. Throughout the investigation, she will collect feedbacks and conduct interviews with students to learn about the effectiveness of the program. Later, she will conclude her findings, and write a paper with the outcomes and advices on how the system should be implemented.
Viktória is planning to investigate in Budapest, Hungary. She plans to conduct her investigation throughout the first semester of the academic year 2024-25 and collect baseline observations and evaluations until then.
Watch the pitch below.
Follow
Viktória Pál
's investigation
There has been a change in Viktória’s investigation journeys. She has expanded her travel plans to include Spain, Portugal and Germany. Below you can read posts along the way from her journey where she describes the experiences she has had and what she has learned so far.
January 2024
Why Hungary?
Hungary is a beautiful country, where I am also doing a remote master’s program in Budapest, the capital city. For my masters thesis, I am focusing on student retention and drop-out rates, with a focus on universal design and equal opportunities for students in education. My supervisor, Dr. Anikó Almási, is a great supporter of the project and is very invested in in.
Through her, I do not only have access to my own University’s database, but potentially two other universities will let me analyse their data. In addition, I will be able to conduct interviews with students, who decided to drop-out and others, who continue to study, so I will be able to base my assumptions on qualitative input.
This opportunity in Hungary will greatly help my project and potentially impact the support system at University level offered for struggling students. Since the education system in Hungary is similar to that of Denmark in setup, I believe the finding can be applied there also, with only minor modifications. Furthermore, since the data will include multiple different universities, the findings will be more generalizable, than I could achieve at other destinations.
At the moment I am taking some short courses to introduce myself for different softwares that will be used for the qualitative analysis of the interviews as well as organize the dates for meeting with the students and get access to the databases from the universities. I hope to start the quantitative analysis in May with expected preliminary results during the summer.
April 2024
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May 2024
Viktória’s travel journal
For the first part of my project, I am carrying out a qualitative analyses, for which I needed to conduct interviews with student about their university experiences. Most of them dropped out or changed their major during their studies, so their input on how they experienced it and why they made their decisions. The interviews were either online or in a small restaurant where we could talk and the atmosphere was sufficiently quiet and calming. During the interview they also talked about their feelings, the accessibility and flexibility of the university and how they would adjust the education system, if it was possible. Interestingly, many who dropped out but later went back/changed their major did not consider their decision of leaving the system for a while a bad one.
June 2024
Upcoming summer school
Viktória will travel to Portugal in the summer, more specifically to Lisbon, for the ISEG summer school 2024 to participate in the programme called Machine Learning for Prediction and Causal Analysis and learn about how to decide if using Machine learning would be preferred over more traditional methods. She will use this knowledge to improve her model in predicting student vulnerability for dropping out. With machine learning she aims to find a way of creating a model that can be applied to universities not just in Hungary, but also in other countries later on, leading to lowered student drop-out rates and better university experiences that include and invite everyone.
Currently, she is analysing the interview data that she gathered from university students who dropped out from the education system and uses these information along with literature and inputs from EGM to form hypothesis to be tested with predictive models. In the next couple of months she will formalize the hypothesis and start preparing the data for testing.
July and August 2024
Summer schools for knowledge gain
Viktória has participated in multiple summer schools in order to gain valuable knowledge for her project. First, she travelled to Lisbon to learn more about machine learning methods to utilize in her data analysis. During the week, she listened to the approaches that are important for the setup of the analysis and how to decide which method to use. This experience shaped her plans for her project which now also include machine learning approaches, more specifically random forest.
After Portugal, Viktória travelled to Germany in August and partake in two courses on qualitative data analysis. First, one in social network analysis where she explored the potential of using a network approach to identify students with higher risk of dropping out and she was awarded the second highest grade achievable in Germany, a 1.3. It is yet undecided if this method will be executable on the dataset.
Lastly, she attended a course on qualitative data analysis, where she developed her data collection methods and was able to design a questionnaire to investigate student dropouts in more depth. This survey will be utilized in her project and data will be collected with it in October. The findings will be utilized when writing the final report for the Bevica Scholarship and will hopefully shed light in how students view the decision of dropping out and which factors they find most influential.
August 2024
Starting a PhD
Viktória started a PhD at RWTH Aachen University at the Chair of Microeconomics and the Junior Professorship of Experimental Economics in August. The position lasts approximately 3 years and her focus during this time will be foreseeably on decision making and factors influencing it. She also aims to incorporate accessibility into her experimental work, to allow everyone to participate if they so desire and to get rid of system influenced selection bias from an accessibility point of view.
Her work profile can be found on this page: https://www.expecon.rwth-aachen.de/cms/expecon/Die-Juniorprofessur/Team/~biurto/Wissenschaftliche-Mitarbeiterin/lidx/1/