_{Foto: Annemiek van der Kuil}

Sara Geven

I am an associate professor at the Sociology Department at the University of Amsterdam, affiliated with the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), the Amsterdam Centre for Inequality Studies, and the programme group Institutions, Inequalities and Life courses (IIL).

In my work I try to understand which factors contribute to educational (in)equality between students from different social backgrounds. I am particularly interested in how the larger educational context (e.g., school, educational system) contribute to this (in)equality.

The past few years, I have primarily focused on inequality in teacher expectations and tracking recommendations (‘schooladviezen’ in Dutch). This work was funded by a Veni grant from The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) (2018-2024; “What do you expect? Studying teacher expectations through an institutional lens”). Currently, I am the PI of a project in which – together with educational professionals – we use my Veni findings as well as newly collected data to explore how to design and implement scientifically-informed tracking procedures that enhance equal educational opportunities (funded by the Amsterdam University Fund (AUF) and an NWO Impact Explorer grant). I am also a co-PI of the NWO/NRO-funded project “Making or breaking the class ceiling: growth-affording teacher beliefs and practices in a selective school system”, in which we study how schools’ and teachers’ ideas and practices with respect to selection relate to (in)equality in educational opportunities. In the past, I was also a team member of the PRIMS project, a study on students’ transition from primary to secondary school in the Netherlands (NWO/NRO, 2019-2024). 

My research interests include: educational sociology; social stratification; teacher expectations and track recommendations; social networks; quantitative methods and statistics.