Proud to be tvmbo - Kortlopend Onderwijsonderzoek

Choice for tvmbo
As well as asking the students their reasons for choosing tvmbo, we invited teachers to
give their opinion on the same subject. The main reasons that teachers believe that
many or some students choose tvmbo are these:
• Students were impressed by the open day (71%).
• It’s a nice school (64%).
• Students want to learn to communicate in English (50%).
• Students don’t choose: their parents do (50%).
• English is an important world language (43%).
• Students want to communicate with other English speakers (43%).
Interestingly, this is a question where the teachers answer differently from the students.
Teachers seem to think that students choose the school because of the school or
its reputation, rather than for its tvmbo stream. This is in contrast to what the students
said, that is that English is an important world language, that they are aware of how
useful English is for their futures, and that they want a challenge.
Useful activities for European and International Orientation (EIO)
We asked teachers about which EIO activities they believe that students learn the most
from. It turns out that, perhaps because most schools have just started tvmbo, these results
are inconclusive. Most activities suggested were scored with the score not done.
The two EIO activities which are considered to be useful are ‘activities in school with
native speakers’ or ‘native speakers or language assistants in the class’. These are activities
which are, presumably, easy to organize, unlike activities such as exchanges or
trips abroad which take more time to set up. Students also said that they learn the most
from EIO activities where they come into contact with speakers of English.
Assessing tvmbo
We also asked the teachers about ways of assessment that they use in tvmbo and which
work well. Many of the responses were “I don’t do this”, perhaps because the issue of
assessment is not such an important one at this stage of implementation of tvmbo.
Schools and teachers are possibly more concerned about the teachers’ English and
about what happens in the classroom than about the issue of assessment. However, the
majority of answers indicating which assessment methods teachers do use show that
what works well are making concrete things (e.g. clothes, recipes, and a model) and
presentations. The vast majority of the teachers also assess continually during their lessons
by checking understanding as they go along.
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