The first presentation, "Highly differentiated but still not the same results. Explaining differences in educational achievement between highly differentiated educational systems with general and vocational training", a joint paper with Tijana Prokic-Breuer, used the differences between the nonetheless relatively similar educational systems in the two parts of Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, the German-speaking Swiss cantons and the German states to explain the good performance of Flanders and the Netherlands in the international PISA tests. His research shows that individual, school-specific, and school-system effects can explain the Dutch result, but not that of Flanders. However, even after controlling for individual, school-specific and school-system specific variables, there are large differences in the performance of the educational systems analyzed.

In his second presentation, "The Differences between the educational performance of daughters of migrants and native female pupils and that of sons of migrants and native male pupils in PISA 2009. Origin and destination effects," a joint paper with Nils Kornder, Professor Dronkers presented preliminary results regarding the gap between immigrant children of different origins and native pupils by gender in different destination countries.

In addition, NEPS staff took the opportunity to discuss their own research with Professor Dronkers.