Francesca Borgonovi

Francesca Borgonovi is a British Academy Global Professor. She is on extended leave from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development where she is a Senior Policy Analyst. At the OECD she has been responsible for analytical and developmental work in the OECD-led international assessments (PISA and PIAAC) and the Education for Inclusive Societies project. Francesca is also an Adjunct Professor at the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po and has held research positions in the Department of Social Policy and the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Research Summary

Her British Academy funded project "Digital technologies in education: measurement and consequences" aims to explore the way in which technology interacts with formal learning to shape personality traits such as drive, perseverance, motivation as well as stress and anxiety levels. The research will study how technology use for educational and recreational purposes impacts on young people’s dispositions and how such dispositions are related to outcomes such as educational attainment, labour market participation and performance, civic and social engagement, and health, potentially driving inequalities in these outcomes. The project will also study how technology (computer-based testing, in particular) can be used to study and measure such dispositions in robust, valid and reliable ways across countries and across population subgroups within countries. Her broader research interests include: gender and socio-economic disparities in academic achievement, student engagement and motivation, the outcomes of migrant and language minority students, and the role of education in shaping trust and attitudes towards migration.

Francesca's research has been published, among others, in the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Educational Psychology, Social Science and Medicine, The American Educational Research Journal, Intelligence and Current Directions in Psychological Science.