Utrecht University

Prof. Paul Leseman (psychology, linguistics) is full professor of education and coordinator of the Utrecht University team. His research interests concern typical and atypical development of executive functions, language, literacy and numeracy in early and middle childhood as related to home characteristics, day care, and pre- and primary school quality. Leseman is principal investigator of the large-scale national cohort study pre-COOL into the effects of early childhood education and care on children’s language, cognitive and social-emotional development. Leseman is scientific coordinator of the FP7 project CARE on quality, curriculum and impact of early childhood education and care in Europe (2014-2016), and principal investigator in the Horizon2020/ICT2015 project L2TOR on the use of social robots in second language learning (2016-2018). He was advisor to DG EAC of the European Commission for the Communication on Early Childhood Education and Care of the European Commission and to the Working Group Quality Framework for European ECEC.

Bodine Romijn is a PhD student at the department of Educational and Learning Sciences of Utrecht University since 2016. She studied Educational Sciences at Utrecht University and worked as a student assistant at the department of Educational and Learning Sciences. For her graduation thesis she studied the influence of educational dialogues on emergent academic skills of educationally disadvantaged children in Dutch preschools.
Her main research interests concern quality and inclusiveness of early childhood education and care settings in relation to professional development, organisational climate, and curriculum. Within ISOTIS she will be involved in the studies on professional development in early childhood and primary education and the development of an ICT-based professionalization programme.

Martine Broekhuizen is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Child Family and Education Studies at Utrecht University. Her research interests concern ECEC quality, parenting beliefs and behaviours, and child temperament and socio-emotional development. She completed a PhD thesis (2015) at the department of Developmental Psychology of Utrecht University on individual and contextual differences to the effects of early child care quality in relation to children’s socio-emotional development.

Within ISOTIS, Martine is co-coordinating WP 2. She will mainly be involved in designing and coordinating the questionnaire and in-depth parent interview studies in the ten countries involved in ISOTIS. These studies will focus on resources, experiences, aspirations and support needs of families in disadvantaged communities

Over the last two years, Martine has worked on the EU CARE project (www.ecec-care.org). Within CARE she co-coordinated a study in nine European countries into the values, beliefs and concerns of parents, teachers and policy representatives regarding ECEC.
Next to these two large projects, Martine is co-supervising the PhD project of Yue Song (MSc.) on the development of prosocial behaviors in toddler's, and of Ingrid Midteide Lokken (MSc.) on the relation between Kindergarten quality and children's social-emotional development.
Martine is also affiliated as an external researcher with the The Better Provisions for Norway's Children project (BePro; www.blogg.hioa.no/betterprovision) at the University College of Oslo and Akershus.

Melissa Be is a junior researcher at the department of Educational Development and Training.
She studied Education, Socialisation and Youth Policy at the University of Utrecht. Since then, she has been working for various projects focusing on the domain of Early Childhood Education and the quality of child-care centres in the Netherlands.
Her main research interests concern the professionalisation of teachers (teacher-child interactions), inclusive education and parental involvement in schools.
Within ISOTIS, she is working as a data-collection coordinator for WP2 in the Netherlands. She will be mainly involved in designing and conducting the training for the Turkish and Moroccan interviewers and monitor and guide them during the process.

Dr. Pauline Slot is a researcher at Educational and Learning Sciences at Utrecht University. Her research interests concern structural and process quality of ECEC, and children’s language and self-regulation skills development. Slot has written a PhD thesis at the department of Educational and Learning Sciences of Utrecht University on ECEC curriculum, structural and process quality of ECEC provisions in the Netherlands and its effects on children’s vocabulary and self-regulation and executive functioning skills development. Currently, Slot is a researcher in the European CARE project, in which she conducted secondary data analyses on five European datasets into the relations between structural and process quality and issues of social selection mechanisms in ECEC. Moreover, she co-coordinates a multiple case study in nine European countries into ECEC quality and curriculum. Also, she is involved as researcher in a Danish RCT study into enhancing young children’s school readiness by implementing a professional development program. Further, she is the co-supervisor of a Polish PhD student from Warsaw University who studies relations between structural and process quality of Polish ECEC services for 0-3 years old children.

Ryanne Francot is a PhD student at the department of Educational and Learning Sciences of Utrecht University since 2017.
She studied Educational Sciences at Utrecht University and worked as a junior researcher at the department of Educational and Learning Sciences.
The topic of her Graduation Thesis was the multidimensionality and heterogeneity of the complex construct of bilingualism.
Her main research interests concern the language development of (bilingual) children, the home learning environment and quality and new learning ecologies in inclusive education.
Within ISOTIS she will be mainly involved in the studies on the resources in the home environment and the partnerships between professionals and the home environment.

Dr. Thomas Van Huizen is an assistant professor at the Utrecht University School of Economics. His main research fields are labour economics, economics of education and applied micro-econometrics. In terms of methodology, his areas of expertise are quantitative data analysis and program evaluation (applying quasi-experimental techniques). Topics of previous research projects include labour market flexibility and the impact of childcare arrangements on female labour force participation and child development.

Ayça Alayli is currently a PhD candidate at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on immigration context, home learning environment and parental investment and the role of acculturation attitudes. Her current work focuses on Turkish immigrants' acculturation attitudes with a person centered mixture modelling approach (Latent profile analysis). Recently, she was involved in a UNICEF project; 'Pathways to Strengthen the Pre-primary Workforce in Low- and Middle-income Countries', White paper, with Dr. Jan Peeters (VBJK-Belgium), as a junior consultant.