B. Belfi

Barbara Belfi (1981) is a psychologist and educational scientist. Her research focuses on how education can adapt to the major social and technological changes shaping today’s world. Migration, globalisation, and growing social and economic inequality have made student populations more diverse than ever. Students increasingly differ widely in their backgrounds, learning needs, and performance levels, while digitalisation and technological progress are transforming what and how young people need to learn to thrive in today’s and tomorrow’s society and labour market.

Barbara studies how education systems can respond to these developments by rethinking curricula, teaching practices, and school structures so they remain responsive to diverse learners and relevant to a changing world. Her work examines how schools can deal effectively with increasingly diverse student populations and anticipate shifting skill demands by fostering 21st-century skills such as creativity, adaptability, and collaboration.

She coordinates the HBO-Monitor, a large-scale survey among graduates from Dutch universities of applied sciences, which tracks how higher vocational education prepares students for the skills needed to succeed in today’s and tomorrow’s labour market. She also contributes to the Horizon Europe project Skills2Capabilities, which examines how vocational education and training (VET) can respond to evolving skill needs –  identifying which skills are becoming more important and how schools can best integrate them into their curricula. In the NWA project Juveniles, Equality and Digitalization (JEDi), she studies how digitalisation affects young people’s learning, self-image, and confidence – and how schools and parents can help them build the skills needed to navigate digital life responsibly.

Her research on increasingly diverse student populations focuses on how schools can support students with different learning needs. Her book Samen tot aan de meet (“Together until the Final Grade”) offers practical tools for teachers and is widely used in Dutch and Belgian schools. In the Erasmus+ project Alternatives for Retention (AlteR) and the EARLI Centre for Excellence in Research (E-CER), she works with European partners to explore how schools can adapt their teaching to this growing diversity.

Her work has been published in leading journals such as Educational Research Review, British Educational Research Journal, and Teaching and Teacher Education, and has been featured in Dutch and Belgian media.

For her full and up-to-date list of publications, please visit her Google Scholar profile.

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Teaching

Barbara supervises bachelor and master theses and guides PhD students.