Home>Gaia Grassi
Research Interest(s): Educational inequality, Social mobility, Extreme events, COVID-19
Discipline(s): Sociology
Language(s): English, French, Italian
Biography
https://www.invalsi.it/Gaia Grassi is a PhD candidate within the “LEARN” project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and supervised by Bastian Betthäuser. Her research interests focus on understanding how extreme events, such as health crises and environmental disasters undermine children’s educational development and contribute to educational inequalities.
She studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and obtained a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Sciences Po Paris, where she completed a thesis examining how the academic aspirations of young people in the UK changed in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Projects
“Understanding the Consequences of Major Health Crises for Education: Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic (LEARN),” ERC Starting Grant Project, led by Bastian Betthäuser.
To understand how extreme events such as the COVID-19 pandemic have affected children’s educational development, Gaia’s research will primarily adopt a quantitative methodological approach, drawing in particular on high-quality longitudinal educational datasets, such as the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) and INVALSI data.
Thesis topic
Educational Trajectories, Attitudes and School-to-Work Transitions: Understanding the Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic for Educational Inequalities (provisional)
publications
WORKING PAPER
- 2026, Bastian Betthäuser, Bartholomew A. Konechni, Vanessa Wittemann, Gaia Grassi, Susan Swingler, Anders Bach-Mortensen, Niklas Ayris and Una Oljaca, Publication bias inflates effect size estimates for common educational interventions. Working Paper. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/rf8kx_v1