The effects of offering and seizing optional learning opportunities rarely have been investigated. Thus, university instructors have no basis on which to decide whether offering optional learning opportunities to their students would be worth the effort and which students would seize and benefit from them. To target these questions, we designed a…

This conceptual educational framework considers: (1) the idiosyncracies of national educational structures in Germany, Norway, and the United States in regions which represent a wide range of rural socioeconomic circumstances,and (2) scholastic rank as a determinant of ambition and as a sorting-out mechanism. Social inequalities resulting from…