Grant Agreement number, type: – 101089112, ERC-2022-COG

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.
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. 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 interventions have mainly focused on updating students’ biased perceptions of costs and returns while neglecting other psychological and social barriers.
Key outcomes of EDUCHANGE will include: (a) A more nuanced conceptual understanding of how career guidance and information provision can help to reduce inequalities (b) A comparative study of students’ subjective evaluation of costs, returns, and probabilities of success and psychological barriers they attach to different educational alternatives in a comparative perspective (c) Knowledge about to what degree institutional context has an impact on whether information provision and career guidance can reduce inequality at two key educational transitions.