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Students' challenges in learning mechanics are well documented from test situations, and group discussions are considered a fruitful way to meet these challenges. In this paper, we present a study from an authentic teaching setting where upper secondary students in groups solve the task of calculating the acceleration of an elevator by means of a scale. The group work was audio recorded in three groups with different ability levels. Analysis was performed inductively using the analytical tool of semantic gravity and semantic waves. The results reveal multiple challenges solving the task, even among high-achieving secondary physics students. The study shows that for group discussions to be fruitful, students must be able to negotiate for meaning by alternating between different levels of semantic gravity. In this study, only the group consisting of relatively high-achieving students was able to do this. For the groups that did not succeed, this is found to be due to insufficient knowledge base, poor integration of the required concepts in their own language and inappropriate epistemological framing of the situation. It is concluded that more effort should be put into learning basic concepts than curricula and teaching traditions normally provide. This should include tasks carefully adapted to students' ability, where students can practice alternation between levels of semantic gravity.

Design-based research (DBR) develops solutions in combination with research and has gained increasing popularity in educational research. This research approach involves close collaboration between researchers and practitioners. Many studies show that teachers are often passive participants in DBR projects, where their role becomes implementing researchers' ideas. This paper reports on a case where teachers became, instead, a driving force in a DBR project and investigates the conditions for this to happen. Data were collected by means of group interviews with the eight pilot teachers in the KreTek project, which was undertaken as a collaboration between a university and a municipality in Norway. The authors' own experiences as participants in the project also form part of the empirical basis for the study. The conditions for active involvement identified here are 1. A shared and relevant challenge; 2. An open entrance to the project; 3. An allocated time and meeting space; and 4. Responsibility and autonomy. The results are discussed in light of perspectives on teacher professionalism, theories on self-determination and previous research on teachers' roles in collaboration between researchers and teachers. It is concluded that by fulfilling the identified conditions for active involvement of teachers with an emphasis on trust, responsibility and autonomy, teachers may play an active role in DBR projects. In turn, this can facilitate a fruitful process where products of research projects using a DBR approach are deeply grounded in practitioners' contexts and thus are able to meet the actual needs of schools.

Gifted students may be at risk of school disengagement due to lacking intellectual challenges. Four talent centers were established to offer makerspace enrichment programs, because makerspace activities promote engagement and science, mathematics, and technology learning. In the current study, we investigated gifted students’ experiences with makerspace enrichment programs in Norway in terms of social aspects, learning aspects and teacher support aspects. We conducted semistructured interviews with 15 participants (15–16 years) from four different talent centers across the country. Findings suggested that the informants had an overall positive experience of participation and that most were more engaged at talent centers than at their home schools. In addition, the makerspace approaches seemed to suit gifted learners’ need for more complex subject content and facilitate interaction with peers and teachers with similar content knowledge/interest. We concluded that makerspace activities at talent centers constitute an important supplement to ordinary school for gifted students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum physics is challenging for young students, but also a source of fascination. "Observation" is a key concept in order to understand how principles and experimental results in quantum physics differ from what we are used to in classical physics and everyday experiences. In this study we investigate how pre-university physics students understand the concept of observation in the case of the famous double-slit experiment with electrons and interpretations of its results. We found that a conception of observation as "looking," meaning a passive registration, is prevalent among students. This causes serious problems in understanding quantum physics and leads to very unproductive speculations that links to mysticism. Some students considered observation as measurement involving some sort of apparatus, but very few expressed the key idea of measurement as interaction. We discuss how a more explicit discussion of what observation means in quantum physics can benefit students' understanding of principles in quantum physics and their philosophical consequences.

Integrated STEM approaches are acknowledged as important for making school subjects relevant and engaging for students and are reinforced with the current emphasis on computational thinking. Still, such approaches are rarely realized in schools. This study investigates how the traditional 'grammar of schooling' may prevent realization of more holistic teaching in line with ideas from integrated STEM. A concrete teaching project where students design, program and build their own weather station is presented, and we investigate the values and challenges teachers see in the project and the obstacles that may prevent them from running it in class. This way it throws light on why STEM approaches may be difficult to realize in schools. The sample consists of teachers involved in a collaborative project in which Project Weather Station was developed, including the teacher who was undertaking the project in his grade 9 class. The study follows a case study design, with group interviews with teachers. Observation in class, video recording and interviews with students form a backdrop of the main interview data. Results show that teachers see value in the weather station project in line with the overarching aims of the curriculum and consistent with STEM ideas. Challenges they see are related to own competence, time use, risk of failure and logistics across subjects. It is concluded that teachers' challenges reflect a tension between overarching aims in education and the more specific competence aims in the curriculum. On a systemic level there is therefore a need for an acceptance for the value of teaching that targets overarching aims of education. It is important to acknowledge teachers' challenges and fulfil their needs for support when undertaking extensive projects that have potential for realising the more holistic aims of education typical for STEM projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum physics challenges our views of the physical world and describes phenomena that cannot be directly observed. The use of language is hence essential in the teaching of quantum physics. With a sociocultural view of learning, we investigate characteristics of preuniversity students' small-group discussions and their potential for enhancing understanding of quantum physics. The empirical data are 96 small-group discussions about two fundamental dilemmas: whether light can be both waves and particles, and whether the cat in Schrödinger's thought experiment can be considered to be both dead and alive. The discussions were analyzed by means of a framework of four categories, grouped as productive and nonproductive for learning, where "productive" means that students build constructively on each other's utterances and take the peers' ideas into account. Results show that a total of 70% of the discussions were productive, indicating that small-group discussions have a potential for enhancing understanding in quantum physics. This potential is constituted by leading students to (i) articulate conceptual difficulties, (ii) deepen their understanding through exchange of views, and (iii) formulate new questions. The paper concludes with a discussion on how the learning potential of small-group discussions may be realized by combining dialogic and authoritative approaches.

Quantum physics describes light as having both particle and wave properties; however, there is no consensus about how to interpret this duality on an ontological level. This article explores how pre-university physics students, while working with learning material focusing on historical-philosophical aspects of quantum physics, interpreted the wave-particle duality of light and which views they expressed on the nature of physics. A thematic analysis was performed on 133 written responses about the nature of light, given in the beginning of the teaching sequence, and 55 audio-recorded small-group discussions addressing the wave-particle duality, given later in the sequence. Most students initially expressed a wave and particle view of light, but some of these gave an "uncritical duality description", accepting without question the two ontologically different descriptions of light. In the small-group discussions, students expressed more nuanced views. Many tried to reconcile the two descriptions using semi-classical reasoning; others entered into philosophical discussions about the status of the current scientific description of light and expected science to come up with a better model. Some found the wave description of light particularly challenging and lacked a conception of "what is waving". Many seemed to implicitly take a realist view on the description of physical phenomena, contrary with the Copenhagen interpretation which is prevalent in textbooks. Results are discussed in light of different interpretations of quantum physics, and we conclude by arguing for a historical-philosophical perspective as an entry point for upper secondary physics students to explore the development and interpretation of quantum physical concepts.

This paper presents a case study of how the interactive whiteboard (IWB) may facilitate collective meaning-making processes in group work in engineering education. In the case, first-year students attended group-work sessions as an organised part of a basic physics course at a Norwegian university college. Each student group was equipped with an IWB, which the groups used to write down and hand in their solutions to the physics problems. Based on a Vygotskian, dialectical stance, this study investigates how the students used the IWB in the group-work situation. From qualitative analysis of video data, we identified four group-work processes where the IWB played a key role: exploratory, explanatory, clarifying and insertion. The results show that the IWB may facilitate a 'joint workspace', a social realm in which the students' dialogues are situated.

In this article, we discuss how quantum physics and relativity can be taught in upper secondary school, in ways that promote conceptual understanding and philosophical reflections. We present the ReleQuant project, in which web-based teaching modules have been developed. The modules address competence aims in the Norwegian national curriculum for physics (final year of upper secondary education), which is unique in that it includes general relativity, entangled photons and the epistemological consequences of modern physics. These topics, with their high demands on students' understanding of abstract and counter-intuitive concepts and principles, are challenging for teachers to teach and for students to learn. However, they also provide opportunities to present modern physics in innovative ways that students may find motivating and relevant both in terms of modern technological applications and in terms of contributions to students' intellectual development. Beginning with these challenges and opportunities, we briefly present previous research and theoretical perspectives with relevance to student learning and motivation in modern physics. Based on this, we outline the ReleQuant teaching approach, where students use written and oral language and a collaborative exploration of animations and simulations as part of their learning process. Finally, we present some of the first experiences from classroom tests of the quantum physics modules.

This paper presents a case study of how a teacher and nine-year-old students deal with mathematics in a practical technology project. By analysing videotaped dialogues between teacher and a pair of students working on constructing a house model, we identify challenges of meaningful inclusion of mathematics in the project. The dialogues are analysed in terms of an analytical framework where four categories of interaction patterns are combined with two main paradigms of mathematics teaching: the exercise paradigm and landscapes of interaction. The project in itself has a potential for facilitating landscapes of investigation in mathematics teaching. However, we find that the teacher as well as students adheres to the exercise paradigm when mathematics is involved in the activity. Two illustrating episodes from the project are examined and presented in detail in this paper. The findings illustrate that the conceptions teachers and students hold of what mathematics teaching means can act as an obstacle in attempts to realize mathematics teaching in creative and meaningful contexts for young students. We suggest that making the various purposes of a project more explicit may help overcome this obstacle, and that the mathematics involved might be taught in separate sessions in order to form a constructive part of a cross-curricular project.

This paper presents a study of images in Norwegian physics textbooks for upper secondary school, and how they invite students into physics by means of visual communication. The concept of "framing" is used to investigate how the perspective in the image provides a sense of participation. It is found that older textbooks, where objects and experimental setups dominate the images, involve the reader in terms of weak framing. This is to some degree resembled in newer textbooks with the increased use of photographs of learners in some physics activity. This does, however, invite the learner into school physics rather than professional physics. Connections made to physics in society and everyday life in images can also be seen as inviting the learner into physics, by exhibiting how modern physicists work and by referring to the relevance of physics, respectively.

The teacher plays an important role in the Technology and Design (T&D) classroom in terms of guiding students in their design process. By using concepts developed within engineering philosophy along with a framework for teacher-student interactions the design process in a T&D classroom is classified. The material shows that four of six predefined categories of design knowledge and three of seven predefined classes of activity are present in the material. Findings suggest that two categories of design knowledge, fundamental design concepts and practical considerations, are particularly significant in the students' work. The teacher's influence with respect to particularly the first of these categories is crucial for the students' design process. Direct trial is found as the students' dominating activity for solving the technological challenges. The results indicate that it is beneficial for students to be introduced to an operational principle before they can be innovative and develop their own design configuration when they establish their fundamental design concept. Curriculum developers, designers of teaching materials as well as teachers should take into account the students' need of sufficient time to explore their design configuration.

Background: Science teachers need a deep understanding of how science works in modern society. Purpose: This article reports a case study investigating the ways in which a short-term in-service course on a research site of space technology contributes to this understanding. Design and method: The study is performed in three steps: an evaluation immediately after the course, a survey 4-12 months after the course and, finally, in-depth interviews with a selection of course participants. Results: The results show that teachers benefit from the course experience in ways considered important for their professional development as science teachers, despite the fact that the course deviates from current recommendations for professional development: the course is not based on the school's immediate needs, it is short term with no follow-up and it does not engage participants in the epistemic aspects of a research project. The teachers' gains are related to the authenticity of the research site, working and being with professionals and having sufficient time to cooperate with them in solving specific tasks towards the goal of launching a rocket. In this way, the course gave teachers authentic experiences and important insights in the complexity and infrastructure of a specific scientific practice in modern society. Conclusions: Participating in a scientific community of practice is important for the development of science teachers' subject-related identity, and should be recognised as an important part of their professional development. (Contains 2 tables.)

It is widely accepted that to be scientifically literate one needs to have the ability to make thoughtful decisions about socioscientific issues (SSI). This includes critical assessment of scientific claims and arguments involved. In this study we asked 89 science education students with substantial academic qualifications in science, working in groups of two and three, to assess the reliability of scientific claims in an article of their own choice, but related to a socioscientific issue, and to present their evaluation in a short text. In analyzing the students' texts, we focused on the criteria they had explicitly and implicitly used in their evaluations. Through a qualitative analysis, we identified 13 different criteria focusing on empirical and theoretical adequacy, completeness of presented information, social aspects, and manipulative strategies. An inspection of the students' evaluations revealed that they drew upon knowledge of possible institutional interests, different signs of competence and an appreciation of concurrent expert views, but also methodological norms in science, specialized content knowledge, and an appreciation of evidence and disclosure of sources. The number of criteria used and the quality of their application varied, indicating that critical examination of texts with a science dimension needs to be emphasized in science teacher education.

What happens when educational ideas cross national and cultural borders? How do teachers respond to ideas originating in a different school system and a different national culture? This article reports on an empirical study investigating the transfer of ideas from Design & Technology as a subject in England and Wales into Norwegian schools. A sample of teachers participating in a specific project on technology teaching inspired by this subject has been studied by means of interviews and classroom observation. Results of the study show that while some elements of Design & Technology are adopted by the teachers, essential ideas of the subject are significantly transformed. Drawing on Barnes, (1992, "Teachers and Teaching: From Classrooms to Reflection" (pp. 9-32), The Falmer press, London) concept of teachers' professional frames for teaching, it is shown how specific aspects of the national and educational culture have had a considerable effect on the teachers' interpretation of the nature of technology as a subject of teaching and its place in the curriculum. The study illustrates the importance of the cultural context in how educational ideas are interpreted, reshaped and realized in schools.