Excellent education in preschool and its effects on cognitively excellent pupils

Central in this PhD project proposal is the learning of cognitively excellent pupils in preschool. In a multi-level randomised design (Spybrook et al., 2009), 41 schools are randomly assigned to two school groups in which the intervention is implemented in phases. The intervention, which is called “excellent education”, uses competence-based learning to optimise the learning processes of cognitively excellent pupils. The hypotheses are: 1) excellent education for cognitively excellent pupils will result in enhancement of cognitive, social, emotional, and motivation outcomes compared to cognitively excellent pupils who do not attend excellent education; 2) longer duration of excellent education will result in higher cognitive outcomes. Interactional multilevel analysis will be used to analyse, study, and check the learning processes. In the modelling, individual and instructional variables will be integrated at pupil level, class level, and school level.