HAND IN HAND: Empowering Teachers Across Europe to Deal with Social, Emotional and Diversity Related Career Challenges - International Dataset

HAND IN HAND: Empowering teachers across Europe to deal with social, emotional and diversity related career challenges (HAND:ET) is a European (Erasmus K3) policy experimentation project that brings together 11 partners and 13 associated partners from seven countries (Austria, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Portugal, Slovenia, and Sweden).

The project focuses on teachers by supporting their development of social and emotional competencies as well as their diversity awareness (SEDA) to empower them for the complexity of everyday working life with increasingly diverse classrooms and enable them to deal flexibly with new challenges. It also puts the teachers' well-being at the centre by highlighting how developing SEDA competencies simultaneously fosters self-care for teachers, giving a central role to the voices of teachers.

Information on the project can be accessed at: https://www.handinhand.si/en/

Further information on the project and the evaluation results can be found in the following publication: Kozina, A. (2024). Empowering Teachers Across Europe to Deal with Social, Emotional and Diversity Related Challenges, Volume 1: Experimentation Perspectives. Waxman.

Information on the instruments used in the evaluation is provided in the attached document "HAND_ET_Scale_Documentation.pdf".

Design: All countries implementing the experiment (Austria, Croatia, Portugal, Slovenia and Sweden) invited schools to participate. The schools participating in the experiment were randomly allocated to either the experimental or the control group. Central to the experiment’s design, schools had to agree to their participation in either condition (experimental or control). The intention was to test the effectiveness of the HAND:ET system in promoting SEDA competencies: to compare the changes in the same competencies from before implementing the HAND:ET system (pre-test) to after implementing the system (post-test) in a group of teachers (and other school staff) who took part in the experiment (experimental group) with a group of teachers (and other school staff) who did not participate (the control group). 

 Data collection period: T1 (pre-test) data was collected August to September 2022, T2 (post-test) data was collected Mai to July 2023.

 Sample: The HAND_ET datafile includes primary and/or secondary teachers from Austria, Croatia, Portugal, Slovenia, and Sweden, who responded to the questionnaire either at first time point or second time point or both. In Austria, teachers teaching students in grades 1 to 4, in Croatia those teaching students in grades 1 to 8, in Portugal those teaching students in grades 1 to 12, in Slovenia those teaching students in grades 1 to 9, while in Sweden teachers teaching students in grades 4 to 9 participated.

 The HAND_ET datafile is structured as follows: 

·  Variables from 'IDS' to 'Gender' include general information about the participant (e.g  group, participation in pre- or post-test, gender)

·  Variables from 'TC06exp' to 'TCN22_TCN2204' capture responses from questionnaire items administered during the pre-test.

·  Variables from 'TC02_2' to 'TCN30_TCN30Q04_TCN30G03_2' contain responses to questionnaire items used in the post-test data collection.

·  Variables from 'observe' to 'coopteach' include scale scores for the scales administered in pre-test.

·  Variables from 'observe_2' to 'coopteach_2' include scale scores for the scales administered in post-test.

·  Variables from 'observe_D' to 'CloseC_D' include scale scores calculated as differences between measurements at Time 1 (T1) and Time 2 (T2) for all questionnaire scales.

·  Variables from 'observe_D.1' to 'CloseS_D.5' contain scale score differences (T1-T2) with missing values imputed. As we did 5 imputations, there are five variables for each scale (as indicated at the end of the variable name).

 The scale score for each participant at each point in time was computed as the arithmetic mean of responses to the items of a scale measuring a SEDA construct. A scale value was only computed if responses for at least half of the items of a scale were available. No overall scale score was computed for multidimensional constructs. Subscales were treated as separate scales in the analysis. The difference score was computed as the T2 minus T1 scale score. A positive value corresponds to an increase of the scale score and a negative value indicates a decrease in the scale score of T2 compared to T1.

 The dataset includes variables with imputed scale scores. We only imputed the difference score for each of the outcome variables five times. The imputation was carried out separately for each of the scales based on the three variables: group, T1, and T2 scale score. We used  predictive mean matching with the R package mice (Buuren & Groothuis-Oudshoorn, 2011) for imputation. The teachers that have a missing in the group variable have no imputed values.