dr. (Sanneke) S de la Rie

Biography

Sanneke de la Rie works as a postdoctoral researcher on the international NWO Open Research Area project “The Development of Inequality in Children’s Educational achievements (DICE),” within the research group of Prof. Dr. Renske Keizer. The project examines how childhood inequalities develop over time (ages 3 to 16), what factors may influence inequalities, and how national context may strengthen or buffer these processes. The international team aims to contribute to the intergenerational transmission of inequalities literature by looking at development over time, as opposed to international large-scale assessments which take snap-shots of achievement. They examine development in early childhood cross-nationally, and conceptualize child development in a comprehensive manner by investigating both cognitive, as well as behavioural and health outcomes. This is done by leveraging rich cohort and administrative data from France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, embedding these countries in a harmonized framework.

Sanneke completed her PhD in Pedagogy at the Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her dissertation focuses on implementation quality and effects of family literacy programs. Recognizing the strong and long lasting influence of parents as first educators of their children, family literacy programs aim to promote children’s literacy development by stimulating the home literacy environment, particularly in at-risk families. Previously established disappointing program effects for these families stress the need for insight into how programs are implemented. Starting from a comprehensive framework for measuring implementation quality, Sanneke’s PhD-research maps how implementation quality is generally included in family literacy research. Applying the framework in an effect study of the Dutch program Early Education at Home (VVE Thuis), she provides recommendations for how the implementation of family literacy programs can be improved. Adequate implementation quality of these programs is not self-evident. Future studies should therefore comprehensively examine the role of implementation quality in program evaluations, while in practice, systematic preparation for implementation of FLPs is necessary. Promoting differentiation, both in delivery and program content, can help to better support participating families from various socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds in implementing these programs.

Sanneke’s research focuses on three main topics: 1) the intergenerational transmission of inequalities, 2) family literacy programs, and 3) early child language development.