Project MIND | Multilingualism in daycare
Measuring the effects of bilingual daycare
The experiment
The MIND project is a study into bilingual childcare in the Netherlands. Ten childcare organizations offer childcare in both Dutch and English to children aged between zero to four years from 2018 until 2022. A team of researchers at the University of Amsterdam is investigating how children, who attend such bilingual centers, develop their language proficiency.
The research
The children, joining the participating daycare organisations have been followed during four measurement rounds in the last few years. Several kinds of information were gathered about the children and the way bilingual input is offered to them. This was gathered through language tasks with the children, teacher surveys, parental surveys and video observations. The research data might also show some interesting insights on the effect of the long term closure of the daycares because of COVID-19 since the closure of the daycares took place during the measurements.
Final results expected summer 2021
The final results will be reported to the Ministry of Social Affairs by the summer of this year. In December the minister will make a decision about the bilingual daycare policy for all daycares in the Netherlands.
Additional information
Further information on project MIND can be found here.