Chapter 5. Heat and Learning in a Moderate Climate: Temperature Effects on Primary School Students in the Netherlands tests per subject during primary education, making around twentyfour observations for reading and math together. However, for some students the number of observations may deviate from this in our data for several reasons. First, schools often do not take the tests in sixth grade as students take another standardized exit test, which partly determines their track advice for secondary education. In addition, there is no mid-term reading test in first grade. Second, students might deviate from a normal flow through primary education by repeating or skipping a grade. Third, not all schools have shared their tests scores and if students have switched schools we may not have all their data complete. While taking the tests in primary education is required by the government, sharing the data with the Netherlands Cohort Study on Education is voluntary.2 Although tests do not have direct consequences for the students’ educational trajectories, they are consistently used within the Dutch education system to follow the development of students’ reading and math performance. At the end of primary education, teachers are supposed to provide every student with a track advice for secondary education. This advice is partly determined by students’ scores on the tests, as teachers do get informed after all tests which track would suit their students’ skill level. Although this advice could be raised by a nationwide standardized test, the advice is important in the process towards secondary education. For reading, we focus on reading comprehension. Primary schools make a distinction between technical reading and reading comprehen2A representativeness analysis in Haelermans et al. (2020) shows that our sample is almost representative for the Dutch student population. 116
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