At this fourth lunch the speakers were:

Peter Pels (Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology): What is secularisation?

Most disciplines researching religion in modern societies start from the assumption of secularisation. Secularisation theory is still common sense, even though the so-called "return of religion" and related research have undermined most of the ways in which it used to be empirically confirmed. Case studies of the emergence of "modern religion" - from Victorian occultism to present-day New Age - show how misplaced many of the (quantitative) methods for assessing secularisation have become, and how ethnographic research can show us what secularisation exactly is, why it is global but not universal, and how it pervades basic cultural patterns of modern societies.

Marian Hickendorff (Psychology, Unit Methodology and Statistics): The free fall of Dutch complex arithmetic achievement: What can solution strategies tell us?

Mathematics education in primary schools is a hotly debated topic in the Netherlands. Recent national and international assessments have shown that student achievement on certain aspects of performance has decreased over the years. In my research project I aim to gain insight into why sixth graders’ performance on complex arithmetic problems has appeared to be in a free fall since 1987. In a first study we carried out secondary analyses on national assessment data. Specifically, we coded the solution strategies that students applied, and analyzed changes in strategy use and strategy accuracy between 1997 and 2004. We found an increase in the use of the risky strategy of mental calculation at the cost of the safer traditional algorithm. Moreover, each strategy yielded fewer correct answers in 2004 than it did in 1997. Two follow-up studies have been carried out to study accuracy differences between mental and written solution strategies in a more systematic way.