Lena-Emilia Schenker investigates self-views and achievement inequality in children. She does this as part of the “The Confidence Gap” project conducted by KiDLAB. The project is funded by an NOW-Vidi grant. She uses Virtual Reality (VR) experiments to study how achievement inequality is perpetuated through children’s academic self-views and teacher-child interactions. In the VR experiments, she examines how different teacher behaviors (such as differential praise or) affect children’s academic self-views. She also uses classroom observations with longitudinal follow-ups to investigate how the daily interactions of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds with teachers shape children’s academic self-views and achievement. Her supervisors are Eddie Brummelman and Jellie Sierksma.

Research expertise

• Children’s self-views
• teacher-child-interactions

Research methods

•    Experiments
•    Surveys
•    Virtual Reality
•    Observations
•    Daily Diary
•    Physiological Measurement

I supervise Bachelor’s and Master’s theses.