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Multilingual children living in areas with low socioeconomic status (SES) are at an increased risk of having speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). Many multilingual children with SLCN in Sweden have insufficient basic vocabulary knowledge in the majority language, preventing them from achieving the school's learning goals. However, there is a lack of studies of interventions that could improve vocabulary development in this group, and that can be delivered in an everyday educational setting. This pilot study evaluates the effect of a school-based vocabulary group intervention, which combines elements from shared book reading and the Lexicon Pirate method, on vocabulary skills. A non-randomised pretest-posttest control group design was used. Eighteen six- to seven-year-old multilingual children attending preschool class in low SES areas either received intervention (n = 9) or were included in a control group (n = 9). The intervention group participated in 12 intervention sessions over six weeks. Word knowledge, semantic fluency, and comprehension of semantic relations were assessed pre- and post-intervention. Results revealed that children in the intervention group demonstrated significant gains in knowledge of both trained and untrained words, compared to the control group. No effects were found on semantic fluency or comprehension of semantic relations.

The interaction between student language use and sensemaking is an area in science learning that needs further elucidation in order to meet government standards in science education. In this study, concept mapping was used to explore the relationship between scientific language use and sensemaking defined as the interaction between the scientific concept system and everyday concepts in order to make sense of a proposed phenomenon. Eighty-eight concept maps from five different school classes and two school systems were analyzed in terms of their language use and concept formation from a Vygotskian perspective. This work proposes an intimate relationship between student language use, concept system formation and sensemaking in science, indicating possible implications for the study of learning as well as formative assessment using concept maps.

Although school attendance in Sweden is mandatory, there are numerous absentee students. Research studies have recognized that several of the absentee students have neuropsychiatric disabilities. However, few studies have focused on the voices of these specific students. Therefore, this study focused on their experiences of being out of school. In-depth interviews were performed with an interpretive phenomenology approach. Three themes emerged. The first was a need for supportive structures and relationships; all of the students had long histories of problematic schooling and described supportive structures and relationships with to teachers and peers as important to them. The second theme was a gendered understanding of the school absences; there were gender differences in the students' understanding, and the students described their self-image and confidence as having been harmed by their failures in school, which caused the boys especially, to develop defence strategies. The third theme was a need to have only a few secure relationships and to be taught in a smaller context. The study also illustrates the value of listening to students, partly because they know themselves best but mostly to show them respect and give them power over their own lives (i.e., empower them). The results are important for researchers and practitioners since the study provides in-depth knowledge on which areas the students felt were important and increased understanding of how the students experienced their situations.

Given young children's frequent use of the internet and the expectations formulated in policy documents such as the Swedish national curriculum, teachers need to promote critical awareness about information found online, even in the earliest years of schooling. Responding to the need for more information about how first-graders understand the internet, we report on findings from focus group interviews concerning what students in Grade 1 think the internet is and what kind of experiences and linguistic resources they draw upon to express their understanding. Based on thematic and systemic-functional linguistic analysis, the results show that the children mostly express an understanding of the internet as something concrete, such as an app, as something encapsulated in apps or hardware and, more generally, as an enabler for the use of different apps. Students connections to using YouTube and games are prevalent, and their understanding of the internet is shaped by experiences of screen interactions when using these apps. On rare occasions, students hesitantly tried to formulate abstract perspectives concerning what the internet is or what it means. Possible directions for promoting and researching a more abstract understanding in pedagogical practice are discussed.

This longitudinal study investigated the development of oral narrative skills in monolingual Swedish-speaking children (N = 17). The MAIN Cat/Dog stories were administered at four timepoints between age 4 and 9. Different narrative aspects were found to develop differently. In story comprehension, the children performed high already at T1 (4;4) and were at ceiling at T2 (5;10), whereas story structure developed significantly until T4 (9;4). Narrative length and syntactic complexity reached a plateau at T3 (7;4). Referent introduction was not mastered until T4. The results suggest that general conclusions regarding the development of narrative skills depend on the specific aspects studied.

Prompted by the evidence of international tests of achievement that Swedish students have poor equation solving skills, this paper presents an interview study of upper secondary students' understanding of the topic. Students, from both vocational and academic tracks in two typical suburban upper secondary schools were invited to explain how a solution to the algebraic equation x + 5 = 4x -- 1, presented with no explanation, had been conceptualised by the hidden solver. Analyses showed that students were not only familiar with linear equations but consistently invoked a 'do the same to both sides' procedure, indicating a secure understanding of the principles underpinning the solution of algebraic equations. Such understandings, which seem to defy international tests' outcomes are conceptually beyond a reliance on the inverse operations necessary for arithmetical equations. Explanations for this apparent inconsistency, which go beyond mere maturation, are proposed.

Evolutionary theory explains a wide range of biological phenomena. Proper understanding of evolutionary mechanisms such as natural selection is therefore an essential goal for biology education. Unfortunately, natural selection has time and again proven difficult to teach and learn, and students' resulting understanding is often characterized by misconceptions. Previous research has often focused on the importance of certain key concepts such as variation, differential survival, and change in population. However, so-called threshold concepts (randomness, probability, spatial scale, and temporal scales) have also been suggested to be important for understanding of natural selection, but there is currently limited knowledge about how students use these concepts. We sought to address this lack of knowledge by collecting responses to three different natural selection items from 247 university students from Sweden and Germany. Content analysis (deductive and inductive coding) and subsequent statistical analysis of their responses showed that they overall use some spatial scale indicators, such as individuals and populations, but less often randomness or probability in their explanations. However, frequencies of use of threshold concepts were affected by the item context (e.g., the biological taxa and trait gain or loss). The results suggest that the impact of threshold concepts, especially randomness and probability, on natural selection understanding should be further explored.

Teachers around the world have started teaching programming at the K-9 level, some due to the formal introduction of programming in the national curriculum, others without such pressure and on their own initiative. In this study, we attempted to understand which skills -- both CT-related and general -- are developed among pupils in the process of working with programming in schools. To do so, we interviewed 19 Swedish teachers who had been teaching programming for a couple of years on their own initiative. The teachers were selected based on their experience in teaching programming. Our thematic analysis of these interviews shed light on what skills teachers perceive pupils develop when programming. This led us to identify three themes related to CT skills and five themes related to general skills. The CT skills identified corresponded well with and were thus thematically structured according to the dimensions of CT proposed in the framework of Brennan and Resnick, namely computational concepts, computational practices and computational perspectives. In addition to the CT skills, our thematic analysis also resulted in the identification of general skills related to digital competency and 21st century skills, namely cognitive skills and attitudes, language skills, collaborative skills and attitudes and creative problem-solving skills and attitudes.

Children with a history of developmental language disorder (DLD) entering school are a challenge for classroom teachers. Teachers are often not very familiar with DLD, and language difficulties in school age children are often not obvious in context-supported everyday language. However, their language is still vulnerable. The teachers' way of talking with four children with DLD, two with predominantly production difficulties and stronger language comprehension and two with language comprehension difficulties were studied in two types of context, differing in their degree of structure. Variables for a quantitative analysis were number of words per minute and mean length of utterance (MLU) in words for both teachers and children, and the number of questions asked by the teacher. A qualitative analysis focused on identifying typical characteristics depending on context and the child's type of difficulties. In both contexts the teachers talked more than the children, but the difference was smaller in the less structured context, mainly because the children talked more. The two children with predominantly production difficulties seemed to take advantage of the opportunities to take initiatives offered in the less structured context. The children with comprehension difficulties function better in the more structured context, where their comprehension difficulties were less obvious. Studies with more rigorous design analysing more aspects of teacher's interactive behavior in different contexts and with children with different linguistic profiles are needed to provide teachers with information to raise their awareness of how to provide support adapted to the linguistic profiles of children with DLD.

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the intelligibility of children's atypical speech in relation to listeners' language background. Method: Forty-eight participants listened to and transcribed isolated words repeated by children with speech sound disorders. Participants were divided into, on the one hand, a multilingual group (n = 29) that was further divided into subgroups based on age of acquisition (early, 0-3 years; intermediate, 4-12 years; and late, > 12 years) and, on the other hand, a monolingual comparison group (n = 19). Results: The monolingual listeners obtained higher intelligibility scores than the multilingual listeners; this difference was statistically significant. Participants who acquired Swedish at an older age (> 4 years) were found to have lower scores than other listeners. The later the age of acquisition, the less of the atypical speech was decoded correctly. A further analysis of the transcriptions also revealed a higher level of nonwords among the incorrect transcriptions of the multilinguals than that of the monolinguals who used more real words, whereas both groups were equally prone to using blanks when they did not perceive a word. Conclusions: This indicates a higher risk of communicative problems between late acquirers of Swedish and children with speech sound disorders. Clinical implications, such as involving communication partners in the intervention process, are discussed as well as possible linguistic explanations to the findings. This study could be seen as a starting point in the field of research regarding the relations between the language background of the listener and the ability to perceive atypical speech.

This article reports results from a longitudinal study from age 4 to 7 of comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure in Swedish monolingual children (N = 17). "Baby Birds/Baby Goats" from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) were used to elicit narratives and ask comprehension questions at age 4;4, 5;10 and 7;4. Results showed a steep development from age 4;4 to 5;10 in both comprehension and production of macrostructure, but only some further development in comprehension to age 7;4. For the measures studied, children seem to reach a plateau around age 6. Consistent differences between comprehension and production (higher scores in comprehension) and between stories (higher scores on "Baby Goats") were found across time points.

Purpose: Intelligibility is a core concept of speech-language pathology, central both to the assessment of speech disorders and to intervention in such disorders. One purpose of this study was to investigate the reliability and usability of a single-word assessment procedure, the Swedish Test of Intelligibility for Children (STI-CH), in a clinical setting. Another purpose was to investigate the validity and reliability of an assessment method designed to assess functional intelligibility: the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS). Method: Thirty children aged 4;1-10;1 years;months were recruited from speech-language pathology clinics in Western Sweden. Each child's treating speech-language pathologist served as listener in the STI-CH assessment while the ICS was completed by each child's parents. External listeners (2 last-year speech-language pathology students) were used to assess the validity of the speech-language pathology. Results: The mean duration of the test procedure for the STI-CH was about 19 min, and 57% of the test sessions were reported as difficult. There was a weak but statistically significant correlation between the results from the STI-CH and the ICS (r = 0.40, p < 0.05), and both methods showed high reliability in terms of interlistener reliability (intraclass correlation exceeding 0.97) and internal consistency, respectively. Conclusions: The STI-CH had high reliability and was time efficient but had some procedural problems. The ICS had moderate validity but high reliability. The STI-CH is promising for clinical use but needs to be developed further. The validity of the ICS can be discussed and needs to be further investigated.

Technology is a compulsory subject at Swedish elementary schools and, according to the syllabus, helps students develop their ability to examine different technological solutions and reason how these solutions affect society, environment, and humans. An important challenge for educational research is to analyse and understand the consequences and impacts of technologies on students' learning, well-being, and participation in society. It is important to understand how technological systems work in order to orient oneself in modern society and to make well-informed decisions about what is good or bad use of technology. The purpose of this study is to further explore students' understanding of technological systems and their features through investigating the students' reasoning and collaboration in small-group interactions. We found a relatively large number of situations where students clearly demonstrate that they understand technological systems and the components and relationships among them. On the other hand, some situations indicate that students have difficulty explaining and understanding or realising concepts, theories, and relationships regarding technological systems. The findings need to be examined critically, although the students in this study were not used to this way of working with concepts or using images in their presentations. The study was conducted in the spring of 2016 at a compulsory school in the south of Sweden.

In the present investigation, 15 first term university students were faced with 80 context-based idioms in English (L2) and Swedish (L1) respectively, 30 of which were in the source domain of animals, commonly used in both languages, and asked to explain their meaning. The idioms were of varying frequency and transparency. Three main research questions were thus addressed: 1. How well do students master idioms in their L2 as compared to their L1? 2. How do (a) degrees of transparency, (b) idiom frequency and (c) the choice of source domain affect students' L1 and L2 comprehension? 3. To what extent is context used when interpreting L1 and L2 idioms? Results show that while the frequency of an idiom does not appear to play a part in whether it is comprehended or not in either language, the degree of transparency is of great importance in students' L2. Also, students make extensive use of context in their L2.

This article describes and compares the differences between a feature-oriented understanding and a relational understanding of a child's behavior and the different ways of educating children which these two empirical and theoretical perspectives offer. The feature-oriented perspective focuses on the nature and character of impoverished children as the cause of their life situation and behaviors. However, the relational perspective focuses on how material assets affect children. In the first case, education is a question of saving the children from bad genes or a nonexistent upbringing. In the second case, it is an opportunity to change the material conditions for poverty-stricken citizens. During the industrialization period, gender and power issues were phenomena which were full of value judgments. Hence, this article also discusses what it means for a child to be born in a tradition-bound patriarchal society and have her/his future in an emergent industrial world which, yet, was still unequal. (Contains 5 footnotes.)

During the last decade there has been on-going discussions about students' declining interest and low achievement in science. One of the reasons suggested for this decline is that teachers and students have different frames of reference, whereby teachers sometimes communicate science in the classroom in a way that is not accessible to the students. There is a lack of research investigating the effects of coteaching with senior students in science in upper secondary schools. To improve teaching and to narrow the gap between teachers' and students' different frames of references, this study investigates how an experienced chemistry teacher gains and refines her pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) by cooperating with two grade 12 students (age 18) as coteachers. The teacher and the two coteachers coplanned, cotaught and coevaluated lessons in chemical bonding in a grade 10 upper secondary class. Findings indicate that the coteachers contributed with their own learning experiences to help the teacher understand how students perceive difficult concepts. In such way, the coteachers were mediating between the teacher and the students, thus bridging the gap between the teacher and the students' frames of references. The teachers' PCK was refined which in turn lead to improved teaching strategies.

This article presents the result from a study comparing the perception and understanding of a game story between sighted and visually impaired players playing the same game. In particular, whether sighted and visually impaired players could experience and recount the same story construed from the plot elements that are either manifested by audio and graphics in the case of sighted players or primarily by audio in the case of visually impaired players. To this end, we have developed a graphical point-and-click adventure game for iOS and Android devices that aims to show how inclusive game design may be used to facilitate a shared gaming experience between sighted and visually impaired players. The game provides players with audio feedback that enables visually impaired players to interact with and experience the game, but in a manner that does not interfere with the overall appearance and functionality of the game. Thus, it has been designed to be fully inclusive to both groups of players and to give the same gaming experience when it comes to story content. The game has been evaluated through formal user tests where subjects have been asked to play the first chapter of the game followed by an interview. The study shows that the perception of the story was almost identical between the two groups. Generally it took visually impaired players a little longer to play the game but they also seem to listen more carefully to the dialogue and hence also build a slightly deeper understanding of the characters. The study also shows that the sighted players did not respond negatively towards the inclusive game design employed in the game.

Based on the EU FP 7 project, PROFILES, this article presents our findings from a three-round Delphi study conducted in Sweden that aimed at establishing a consensus on how science education should be developed for citizens to enhance civic scientific literacy. A total of 100 stakeholders (9th graders, school teachers, scientists, and science education researchers) were involved in our Delphi study in 2012-2013. The results revealed that there were some highly ranked consensus ideas: environmental issues, inquiry skills, motivation/interest, and holistic comprehension. The conclusions of our research imply the importance of involving different stakeholders in the educational reconstruction process; we suggest that schoolteachers in particular should play a vital role.

Effective feedback presupposes that students understand the task on which feedback is given. But what about the teachers formulating and assessing the task? Do they always understand it as intended? And if so, feedback on what? The purpose of this study is to examine how university teachers individually understand tasks distributed to students. Does interpretation differ if the teachers themselves try to solve the task, discuss the solution with other teachers, as well as try to formulate better versions of the task? The theoretical framework rests upon a hermeneutic understanding of reality. There is thereby reason to doubt the possibility of information transfer and the understanding of feedback as a strict rational process. The empirical material was collected in connection with development work, and sections where the participants expressed uncertainty considering the interpretation of the task were transcribed. The empirical material shows that teachers interpret a task somewhat differently when examining it more carefully, on their own and together with other teachers. It also shows that the same teacher vacillates in their interpretation of a task when examined more thoroughly. Consequently feedback given to students also differs. The drift of meaning is probably quite minor, but still noteworthy.

The aim of the research reported in this paper was to explore students' "journey" towards conceptual understanding during an undergraduate course. The task that medical students face--to learn a substantial quantity of detailed knowledge and integrate into a coherent whole in a limited time frame--is demanding. Seven students were interviewed in a group, and 17 students gave their reflections in writing. Data was gathered from both groups on five separate occasions. The findings suggest that students seek different kinds of understandings as they get to grips with their studies. The forms of understanding were: understanding as "knowing the language", "knowing the map", "knowing the catalogue" and "experiencing an integrated whole". Students first appeared to focus on the first two forms, and later in the course, as they learned more, they focused on the "catalogue" or the "integrated whole". The findings point to potential pathways students might take towards gaining deeper understanding.

This article is part of a larger project focusing upon explanatory illustrations that children encounter in pre- and primary school education. The research questions concerned (a) how preschool children make sense of iconic symbols when placing items of refuse on illustrations of refuse bins in a sorting task and (b) what stumbling blocks they encounter when interpreting these symbols. Video data were collected with 30 children between four and five?years of age. From the children's verbal and non-verbal interactions, four different categories of sense-making were constructed: by material, by object type, by appearance and by function. Three stumbling blocks were identified. The first had to do with giving the symbols a different logical meaning to the intended one; the second related to what materials the different refuse items were made of; the third was being able to stick to one correct way of interpreting each symbol.

In this paper, we report a case study of a 16-year-old Swedish upper secondary student's developing understanding of key concept areas studied in his upper secondary school chemistry course. This study illustrates how the thinking of an individual learner, Jesper, evolves over a school year in response to formal instruction in a particular educational context. Jesper presented a range of ideas, some of which matched intended teaching whilst others were quite inconsistent with canonical chemistry. Of particular interest, research data suggest that his initial alternative conceptions influenced his thinking about subsequent teaching of chemistry subject matter, illustrating how students' alternative conceptions interact with formal instruction. Our findings support the claims of some researchers that alternative conceptions may be stable and tenacious in the context of instruction. Jesper's rich conceptualisation of matter at submicroscopic scales drew upon intuitions about the world that led to teaching being misinterpreted to develop further alternative conceptions. Yet his intuitive thinking also offered clear potential links with canonical scientific concepts that could have been harnessed to channel his developing thinking. These findings support the argument that identifying students' intuitive thinking and how it develops in different instructional contexts can support the development of more effective science pedagogy.

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the new Cognitive Spare Capacity Test (CSCT), which measures aspects of working memory capacity for heard speech in the audiovisual and auditory-only modalities of presentation. Method: In Experiment 1, 20 young adults with normal hearing performed the CSCT and an independent battery of cognitive tests. In the CSCT, they listened to and recalled 2-digit numbers according to instructions inducing executive processing at 2 different memory loads. In Experiment 2, 10 participants performed a less executively demanding free recall task using the same stimuli. Results: CSCT performance demonstrated an effect of memory load and was associated with independent measures of executive function and inference making but not with general working memory capacity. Audiovisual presentation was associated with lower CSCT scores but higher free recall performance scores. Conclusions: CSCT is an executively challenging test of the ability to process heard speech. It captures cognitive aspects of listening related to sentence comprehension that are quantitatively and qualitatively different from working memory capacity. Visual information provided in the audiovisual modality of presentation can hinder executive processing in working memory of nondegraded speech material. (Contains 3 figures and 2 tables.)

This study aimed to (a) assess language comprehension in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) without intellectual disability, (b) assess differences between ASD diagnostic subgroups, and (c) analyze the relationship between language comprehension and performance and verbal IQ, respectively. The 94 participants (83 boys, 11 girls; 4:0-6:8 years) were a subgroup of a large cohort of 208 Swedish preschool children with ASD that had been followed longitudinally over 2 years. The Comprehension Scale of the Reynell Developmental Language Scales III (RDLS) was used at follow-up to assess language comprehension. Results revealed a delay in the development of language comprehension as well as high variability within the group as a whole. The Asperger syndrome and the Autistic feature groups performed within the normal range whereas the PDD-NOS and the Autistic disorder groups performed at the lower boundary of the normal range. However, importantly, 38% or more of the children showed results in the impaired range (i.e., less than 10th percentile) regardless of ASD type. Explained variance in language comprehension scores were 10% for non-verbal and 41% for verbal IQ. Many children with ASD without intellectual disability may have difficulties comprehending instructions in the classroom and in other everyday situations. The results highlight the need for detailed linguistic assessment of children with ASD. (Contains 3 tables and 3 figures.)

This chapter takes into account and discusses innovative learning in the 21st digital and communicative century based on life-world-phenomenology and Hannah Arendt's view of democracy. From this point of view, the authors address and discuss how democratic practices can offer innovative musical learning in relation to what is taking place in research and educational projects in Sweden and the Nordic countries. They mainly focus on settings from everyday life, in which human beings are more or less surrounded by and interact with music and technology. Toward the end of the chapter, the authors also reference and provide examples of projects that are organized by governmental resources as well as those inside the process of formal education. They do so because official initiatives provide important information on contemporary understanding(s) of the values of music education. They hope that this section will contribute to further reflections on different views on the significance of music education. (Contains 9 notes.)

The software industry needs well-trained software designers and one important aspect of software design is the ability to model software designs visually and understand what visual models represent. However, previous research indicates that software design is a difficult task to many students. This article reports empirical findings from a phenomenographic investigation on how students understand class diagrams, Unified Modeling Language (UML) symbols, and relations to object-oriented (OO) concepts. The informants were 20 Computer Science students from four different universities in Sweden. The results show qualitatively different ways to understand and describe UML class diagrams and the "diamond symbols" representing aggregation and composition. The purpose of class diagrams was understood in a varied way, from describing it as a documentation to a more advanced view related to communication. The descriptions of class diagrams varied from seeing them as a specification of classes to a more advanced view, where they were described to show hierarchic structures of classes and relations. The diamond symbols were seen as "relations" and a more advanced way was seeing the white and the black diamonds as different symbols for aggregation and composition. As a consequence of the results, it is recommended that UML should be adopted in courses. It is briefly indicated how the phenomenographic results in combination with variation theory can be used by teachers to enhance students' possibilities to reach advanced understanding of phenomena related to UML class diagrams. Moreover, it is recommended that teachers should put more effort in assessing skills in proper usage of the basic symbols and models and students should be provided with opportunities to practise collaborative design, e.g. using whiteboards. (Contains 4 figures, 3 tables and 1 note.)

Many students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) demonstrate comprehension difficulties. In the present study, 12 high-functioning Swedish students with ASD (aged 10-15 years) took part in a naturalistic classroom-based intervention to support comprehension of connected narrative discourse. An effective approach for supporting discourse comprehension in children with ASD was assumed to include: (i) providing teachers and students with a shared and explicit set of concepts for talking and thinking about the activity of comprehension, that (ii) can structure the child's discourse comprehension under scaffolding and modelling from the teacher. In the pre-testing session, the students with ASD presented with poor discourse comprehension but receptive vocabulary and reading decoding skills close to normative performance. Post-intervention test results, following 4 weeks of training, indicated specific and significant improvements in discourse comprehension. Support for the potential of this type of teaching was also obtained from teachers and students. The teachers reported that they would continue to use the same or similar comprehension instruction for 11 out of 12 students, and for multiple reasons, and students were also mostly positive to the training. Implications for practice and further research are discussed, as are limitations of the study.

Background: Huntington's disease not only affects motor speech control, but also may have an impact on the ability to produce and understand language in communication. Aims: The ability to comprehend basic and complex discourse was investigated in three different stages of Huntington's disease. Methods & Procedures: In this experimental group study, 18 patients with Huntington's disease completed a test that assessed basic language abilities as well as tests from a battery of tasks that explored the ability to comprehend more complex information. The test battery assessed the ability to comprehend logico-grammatical sentences, ambiguous information and inferred meaning on sentence and discourse levels. Outcomes & Results: In comparison with results from pair-matched participants in a control group, matched for gender, age and education, the group of individuals with Huntington's disease had significantly more problems with all tasks requiring more complex cognitive processing. There was a correlation, as well as tendencies towards correlations, between results in the group of individuals with Huntington's disease and stage of the disease. However, results within the stage groups were heterogeneous, and some individuals in an early stage of the disease sometimes performed as well as others in a late stage. Conclusions & Implications: It is likely that, in complex discourse tasks, individual differences in cognitive capacity may contribute and override other differences related to stage of disease. These results indicate that it is important to assess comprehension even in early stages of Huntington's disease, with tests that are sensitive to subtle language disorders, to reduce communication problems for the individuals concerned and their conversational partners. (Contains 6 figures and 3 tables.)

The paper explores how novices in school-based vocational training make sense of computerized numerical control (CNC) machines. Based on two ethnographic studies in Swedish schools, one from the early 1980s and one from 2006, it analyses change and continuity in the cognitive, social, and emotional processes of learning how to become a machine tool operator. What and how students learn will become part of their self-understanding, future vocational identity, and sense of what they know. The paper discusses in detail the various tasks involved in learning CNC and how students and teachers understand and handle their everyday encounters with the machines. The study combines a situated learning perspective with one from science and technology studies, which focuses on how a technology's script is made workable, or "localized", as part of ongoing activities and interactions in the school.

Students' difficulties with learning science have generally been framed in terms of their generalized conceptual knowledge of a science topic as elicited through their explanations of natural phenomena. In this paper, we empirically explore what more goes into giving a scientific account of a natural phenomenon than giving such generalized explanations. We audio-recorded pairs of upper secondary students during laboratory work in electrochemistry. We used a situative and pragmatist approach to study learning in action. This approach made it possible to study how the particulars and contingencies of working with a real electrochemical cell went into students' reasoning. Our results show that students needed to learn to make distinctions, recognize, and name the particulars in encounters with their cell. They also needed to learn what counts as reasonable readings and to deal with quantitative issues and correlations pertaining to their cell. We refer to these additional learning requirements as the students' "taxonomic" and "measurement" interests. Implications for what is involved in giving a scientific account of a natural phenomenon in school are discussed. The study constitutes an attempt to include, in a systematic way, also the particulars and contingencies of actual practice in an account of students' reasoning in science. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure, and 3 footnotes.)

To acknowledge both conceptual and situational factors, children's understanding of the Earth was considered from three angles: 1. the perspective as the physical point or direction from which something is seen or depicted; 2. conceptual frameworks; 3. the relevance of explanations in a situation. Fourteen children were interviewed individually in front of a poster of a satellite photo of the Earth. The interviews were semi-structured and focused on what the children understood was depicted in the poster and if they had seen the Earth. The effect of choice of perspective was demonstrated by children who only talked about how the Earth could be seen from space. The need to relate different conceptual frameworks became apparent with children, who meant that the Earth was situated in the direction of the sky. Different understandings of the relevance of an explanation were detected when the interviewer talked from the perspective in the room, but children talked about the perspective in the present poster. The results indicate that not only both conceptual frameworks and understanding of perspectives play a part when students encounter questions related to the concept of Earth, but also the students' judgments of the relevance of different explanations in a situation.

In this paper we present results from a 10-year (1997-2006) longitudinal study in which we, by interviews once or twice every year, followed how students, throughout the compulsory school, developed their understanding of three situations in which transformations of matter occur. We believe that students have to meet scientific ideas early in order to gradually, in social cooperation with classmates, friends, teachers, and other grown-ups, elaborate the meaning of a concept. We followed 23 students all born in 1990. In 1997 we introduced the idea of the particulate nature of matter. We have conducted interviews allowing students to explain the transformation of matter in fading leaves left lying on the ground, burning candles, and a glass of water with a lid on. In the interview at 16 years of age, less than one-fifth of the students use molecular ideas in scientifically acceptable ways. The overall conclusion is that most students do not connect the knowledge they gain in school about the particulate nature of matter to these everyday situations. On the other hand, the students seem capable of using a simple particle model and the model can help them understand the invisible gas state. The question of how to use this capability in order to develop students' scientific ideas is still not solved and more research is argued for. (Contains 2 tables and 3 notes.)

The results presented here derive from a longitudinal study of Swedish upper secondary science students' (16-19 years of age) developing understanding of key chemical concepts. The informants were 18 students from two different schools. The aim of the present study was to investigate the mental models of matter at the particulate level that learners develop. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews based around the students' own drawings of the atom, and of solids, liquids, and gases. The interview transcripts were analysed to identify patterns in the data that offer insight into aspects of student understanding. The findings are discussed in the specific curriculum context in Swedish schools. Results indicate that the teaching model of the atom (derived from Bohr's model) commonly presented by teachers and textbook authors in Sweden gives the students an image of a disproportionately large and immobile nucleus, emphasises a planetary model of the atom and gives rise to a chain of logic leading to immobility in the solid state and molecular breakdown during phase transitions. The findings indicate that changes in teaching approaches are required to better support learners in developing mental models that reflect the intended target knowledge. (Contains 7 figures and 4 tables.)

In this article, getting access to children's perspectives is presented as a prerequisite for assessing as well as developing children's understanding. Children's perspectives are analysed through examples taken from three domains of knowledge: music, mathematics and nature. The issues of assessing and developing children's knowledge are discussed against this empirical background. It is argued that children's perspectives are pivotal to both these educational objectives.

We report in this paper on a study of chemistry teachers' perceptions of their teaching in upper secondary schools in Sweden, regarding models of acids and bases, especially the Bronsted and the Arrhenius model. A questionnaire consisting of a Likert-type scale was developed, which focused on teachers' knowledge of different models, knowledge of students' difficulties, and use of textbooks in their teaching of acids and bases. The questionnaire was sent to 441 upper secondary schools in Sweden and a total of 281 teachers answered it; through a cluster analysis they were divided into three subgroups. From each subgroup, two teachers were interviewed in order to enrich the data. The results indicate that Swedish upper secondary chemistry teachers, on the whole, prefer to use the Bronsted model of acids and bases, and think that the Bronsted model is clear for students. However, in cluster one (47% of the teachers), teachers' knowledge of how the Bronsted model differs from the Arrhenius model was limited and varied. Teachers in clusters two (38%) and three (15%) were better aware of the differences between the Bronsted and older models, but only teachers in cluster three did explain the history of the development of knowledge about acids and bases in their teaching. The teachers in cluster two (like the teachers in cluster one) relied more on the content in the textbooks. There were, however, no differences between the three clusters in terms of knowledge of student difficulties. Implications for chemistry teaching and education, and for further research, are discussed. (Contains 4 tables.)

The study explores the nature of students' conceptual understanding of calculus. Twenty students of engineering were asked to reflect in writing on the meaning of the concepts of limit and integral. A sub-sample of four students was selected for subsequent interviews, which explored in detail the students' understandings of the two concepts. Intentional analysis of the students' written and oral accounts revealed that the students were expressing their understanding of limit and integral within an "algorithmic context," in which the very "operations" of these concepts were seen as crucial. The students also displayed great confidence in their ability to deal with these concepts. Implications for the development of a conceptual understanding of calculus are discussed, and it is argued that developing understanding within an algorithmic context can be seen as a stepping stone towards a more complete conceptual understanding of calculus. (Contains 3 tables and 1 note.)

This paper presents a field study carried out with learners who used a grammar checker in real writing tasks in an advanced course at a Swedish university. The objective of the study was to investigate how students made use of the grammar checker in their writing while learning Swedish as a second language. Sixteen students with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds participated in the study. A judgment procedure was conducted by the learners on the alarms from the grammar checker. The students' texts were also collected in two versions; a version written before the session with the grammar checker, and a version after the session. This procedure made it possible to study to what extent the students followed the advice from the grammar checker, and how this was related to their judgments of its behavior. The results obtained demonstrated that although most of the alarms from the grammar checker were accurate, some alarms were very hard for the students to judge correctly. The results also showed that providing the student with feedback on different aspects of their target language use; not only on their errors, and facilitating the processes of language exploration and reflection are important processes to be supported in second-language learning environments. Based on these results, design principles were identified and integrated in the development of Grim, an interactive language-learning program for Swedish. We present the design of Grim, which is grounded in visualization of grammatical categories and examples of language use, providing tools for both focus on linguistic code features and language comprehension.

This paper addresses student-teachers' ability to "read nature" in a woodland habitat before and after a 10-week ecology course. "Reading nature" is our definition of the ability to observe, describe and explain basic ecology in the field. Data consists of field-based pre-course and post-course interviews followed up by metacognitive interviews where students analyse their own learning. A bi-dimensional coding scheme is adopted to examine the range and development of students' ability to "read nature." Students find it important to know the ecology of a few key species and they recognize the importance of having learned the language of ecology -- "ecologish" -- helping them to describe and discuss ecology. Students generally recognize the excursions as key learning situations in ecology education but they give different reasons for finding excursions so important. This variation will be elaborated in the paper together with the implications for teaching ecology.

This paper will report on the development of a research program by a group of science educators at Kristianstad University, which has its roots in a longitudinal study I conducted concerning students' developing understandings of ecological processes. Following the insights generated in this first study concerning the nature of student understandings, and the potential of the longitudinal design, a research group has developed at Kristianstad which has extended this work into related areas. This paper will describe my own work and its development, and link it with three projects that use a longitudinal design, which we have subsequently undertaken and in some cases completed. The emphasis within the paper will be on the findings generated by these studies on student learning and response to science, and the particular features of the longitudinal design that allow such insights to emerge. The paper will explore patterns of change, and continuity, as a way of appreciating the particular contributions of longitudinal studies.