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This study analyze data from three national contexts in which teachers worked with the same teaching materials and inquiry classroom activities, investigating teachers' use of strategies to promote interaction and scaffolding when participating in a professional development program. The data material is collected from three case studies from the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, respectively. Each case is from a teaching unit about green plants and seed sprouting. In one lesson in this unit, students were involved in planning an experiment with sprouting seeds, and this (similar) lesson was videotaped in three national settings. The main research question is, as follows: How do primary teachers use questions to scaffold conceptual understanding and language use in inquiry science activities? The data analysis shows that teachers ask different kind of questions such as open, closed, influencing and orienting questions. The open, orienting questions induce students to generate their own ideas, while closed orienting and influencing questions often scaffold language and content-specific meaning-making. However, both open, closed, orienting and influencing questions can scaffold student language and conceptual understanding. Often, teacher questions scaffold both language content-specific meaning-making at the same time. The study shows the subtle mechanisms through which teachers can use questions to scaffold student science literacy and thereby including them in classroom interaction.

While many Vietnamese students are reported to study abroad, the experiences of home-making among Vietnamese returning students are paid scant attention to in current research on Vietnamese international student mobility. Following a Heideggerian perspective on building and dwelling at home, this study explores the sense-making of home through conversations with 13 Vietnamese returning graduates. The analysis of the empirical material shows that home which is constructed and experienced by the returning graduates' use of intersecting materials is socially shared. It is an embodiment of returning migrants' engagement in the world with familiarity and discomfort created by their friction with the interrelated materialistic and discursive aspects of life. Their returns involve incomplete life happenings with diverse emotions and experiences of belonging. The findings of this study add nuance to the extant understanding of home as belonging and challenge the common conceptualization of home as a private space.

Purpose: The article focuses on the contribution of didactics and didactic theory as a distinct strand in research on vocational education and training (VET). Empirical research is reviewed to further explore what characterizes vocational didactics in the Swedish context of Upper Secondary VET. Approach: Semi-structured and flexible review methodology was used to identify didactic research and map its emergent features. An analytic framework was constructed for this purpose and used iteratively throughout the review process. The framework expresses the constitutive simultaneous interdependence of the relationships A-B-C. They refer to A) the ways of how the actors engage with the content as meaning and matter or relationship between the actors and the content, B) the relationship between the actors and the method through interaction with the content, and C) relationship between the methods embedded in work tasks and school assignments and how they underpin the content. A total of 26 sources was identified and thematized as school-based vocational didactics, collaborative vocational didactics, and work-based vocational didactics. Findings: Four distinct features of vocational didactics in Upper Secondary Vocational Education and Training (USVET) are outlined: 1) Diversification of the use of simulation as a method in school-based education pointing to vocational knowledge and skills 2) broadening of instruction (and reflection) as a method by inclusion of several parties (e.g., supervisors, workplace staff, instructors-practitioners), 3) work tasks as a method pointing to vocational knowledge and skills as content, 4) interaction between several parties using verbal and non-verbal means. Despite a growing interest in the importance of work tasks in their dual affordance of meaning and matter, few sources deal with students' learning processes in alignment with the logic of the production of goods and services. Conclusion: The analytic framework we have put forth strengthens the conceptual boundaries of vocational didactics from a point of view of profession-related learning objectives (content), actors, and methods involved. Applying the didactic theories to review empirical research on VET strengthens the integrity of vocational didactics as a particular field.

One of the main objectives of international large-scale assessments is to make comparisons between different countries, education policies, education systems, or subgroups. One of the main criteria for making comparisons between different groups is to ensure measurement invariance. The purpose of this study was to test the measurement invariance of the mathematics intrinsic motivation scale across 14 countries. For this purpose, the "students like learning mathematics" scale, which measures intrinsic motivation for mathematics, was included in the TIMSS 2019 cycle. The study sample consisted of a total of 152992 students, 70192 4th grade and 82800 8th grade students from 14 different countries participating in the TIMSS 2019 cycle. Measurement invariance was tested with Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MG-CFA) and Alignment Method. The mathematics intrinsic motivation scale provides only configural invariance according to MG-CFA at the 4th grade level, whereas the scale provides approximate invariance according to the alignment method. At the 8th grade level, the scale provides configural and metric invariance according to MG-CFA, whereas the scale provides approximate invariance according to the alignment method. The results indicate that the mathematics intrinsic motivation scale provides approximate measurement invariance at both grade levels and that comparisons can be made between the scores of the identified countries.

Fractions are core content of elementary school mathematics, and conceptual knowledge of fractions is essential when developing a comprehensive understanding of fractions. Previous research, however, has indicated limitations in student teachers' fraction knowledge. This study investigated 57 Swedish elementary school student teachers' conceptions of fractions. The data were collected using a paper-and-pencil questionnaire and analysed with an analytical framework building on previous research on four core components of fractions. Using the devised analytical framework, we were able to characterise the conceptual content shown in the student teachers' answers and identify gaps in their fraction knowledge. The most severe gaps were identified in relation to interpretations of fractions, where only the part-whole and the quotient interpretations were identified; the measure, operator, rate, ratio, and number interpretations were missing completely. Aspects of fractions related to representations and procedures were better represented in the participants' conceptions of fractions, but we also illustrate substantial differences between the student teachers. In addition to this quantitative description, we provide qualitative examples. The results raise some questions and implications to be addressed in teacher education programs when developing student teachers' fraction knowledge.

In this paper we present findings from an initial phase of a more extensive study focussed on ways in which prospective mathematics teachers negotiate meaning from mathematics teacher education situations. The focus of this paper is on the language of one mathematics teacher educator and specifically the interpersonal aspects from one mathematics teacher education lecture in Sweden for prospective upper-primary school teachers. We draw on the enactivist view of cognition as a theoretical basis for a methodology we develop that utilises Systemic Functional Linguistics as an analytical tool for studying language-in-use. We exemplify our interpretations through a series of extracts from the mathematics education lecture. This initial phase of our study has exposed several important questions about how participating in an initial teacher education situation may contribute to the development of teacher identities, questions we raise throughout our analyses to provoke further investigation as part of our future research.

The aim of this article is to examine patterns in Swedish children's existential questions and worldviews in 2020 in relation to patterns from 1970 and 1987, but also to point towards a further discussion of importance, about possible RE responses to these findings. The material, children's texts, comes both from studies conducted by Sven Hartman and colleagues in the 1970s and 1980s, and from new empirical studies. The children's responses are collected according to the same method, sentence completion tasks, in both cases. Theoretically, the article is anchored in both the tradition of Swedish worldview studies and the new international interest in these perspectives for religious education. Existential questions and worldviews are seen as interdependent in human beings' life interpretations, which are continuously developing and are both sociocultural and existential in nature. The empirical findings show a strong and increasing focus on relationships, but also a recurrent focus on achievements, which relates to school as context and community. In relation to these findings, the article stresses the importance of RE responses, and discusses concretely what such responses might advantageously include. Among other things, the importance is stressed of an RE that offers the student greater awareness of her life interpretations, and encourages her to develop broader repertoires of frameworks, through which the student might have a better chance to be the author of her own life, which is inevitably a collectively shared life.

In this article, ambassadors of the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) Open Educational Resources (OER) Advocacy Committee (OERAC) provide a snapshot of regional and global Open Educational Resources (OER)initiatives. This committee has been active since 2017 with membership renewed biannually. The ambassadors work to further OER awareness and understanding, to increase global recognition of OER, and provide policy support for the acceptance and application of OER. This overview highlights national and regional initiatives associated with the UNESCO OER recommendation and the five action areas that include: building capacity and leveraging OER; developing supporting policies; ensuring equity and effectiveness; encouraging sustainable OER model development; and, promoting and facilitating international collaboration. In addition, monitoring and evaluation of the action areas are suggested to be prioritized. This overview is not exhaustive, and much work remains to implement the OER Recommendation at scale, maximize its implementation, connect these recommendations to the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), along with the futures of education with a new social contract for education, individuals, and the planet.

Following a professional program to ensure qualification for school leadership is a growing trend. However, school leaders have also come to understand and use content from educational programs in widely different ways. There is therefore a need to study how participating school principals experience learning differently within one and the same program. This empirical study uses qualitative methods to examine fourteen compulsory school principals' experiences of how the mandatory Swedish National Principal Training Program contributes to their professional development. The findings show how program elements can be experienced as contributing to professional development of some principals while being experienced as obstacles for others, depending on becoming active or passive driving forces for participants in terms of orientation, reflection, exploration, and interplay. Applying a theoretical framework made it possible to describe and understand their professional development through program participation in a nuanced way. In terms of analytical generalization such knowledge may form the basis for development of school leader programs.

Immigrant minority (IM) languages have a significant presence in certain European regions. Nonetheless, these languages are not usually included in the school curriculum. This paper aims to analyse the studies published between 2010 and 2020 considering IM languages in multilingual European education contexts. The method included a search of academic papers published in the databases ERIC, Web of Science and Scopus, which yielded 42 studies. The studies were analysed by considering: (1) the demographic characteristics of the countries where the studies were conducted, (2) the sociolinguistic or psycholinguistic focus of the papers in relation to the European country, and (3) the characteristics of the bi-multilingual education programme including IM languages. The results indicate that: (1) the demographic characteristics of the country are not strictly related to the number of studies published, (2) most studies have a sociolinguistic approach even though many studies analyse both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors, and (3) only seven multilingual education programmes including IM languages were described in these papers. We conclude that there is a lack of research focusing on IM languages in educational settings and discuss how addressing these gaps could create opportunities for building equitable multilingual communities in Europe.

In the study presented in this article, the aim is to further the understanding regarding the differences between pupils (aged 15-16) from schools with low or high socio-economic status (SES), regarding the amount and diversity of content knowledge in history that they have acquired by the end of compulsory schooling. Following a definition of historical content knowledge, we situate the concept in relation to other aspects of the history school subject. This is done to visualize historical content knowledge's central role in more complex aspects of the subject. The empirical material used in the study is pupils' responses on both selected and constructed response items on the Swedish national test in history. In the study, a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches is used. The results show not only that pupils in low-SES schools provide fewer examples of historical content knowledge. We can also establish that the historical content knowledge of pupils from high-SES schools represents several perspectives while there are few perspectives present in the responses from pupils in low-SES schools. The results are used to discuss how the differences between pupils in low- and high-SES schools may affect their possibilities for educational success and active participation in society.

This article reports a meta-synthesis of 14 qualitative studies on how teachers can support students' musical learning. The aim of the article is twofold: to (1) contribute to empirically grounded knowledge in music education, and (2) advance the methodological development of meta-synthesis in qualitative research. All included studies have a common unit of analysis: teacher-student interaction. In the synthesis of the studies, four aspects emerged as crucial for students' musical learning: (1) the framing of the teaching, (2) taking the learners' perspectives, (3) teachers' scaffolding strategies, and (4) representations of sounding music. Further, three pedagogical tensions were identified: (a) using local versus expansive language, (b) following the students' or the teacher's perspectives and interests, and (c) ways of approaching musical content through representations. The article also contributes to the methodological development of meta-synthesis by elaborating on how some of the challenges involved are tackled.

This paper studies grade 7 (age 13) students' expressed understanding about the equal sign/notion of equivalence in order to investigate what aspects of the concept that could be seen as an established knowledge at lower secondary school/middle school. Using items from different instruments and combining these to a new one that covered a broad spectrum of procedural and conceptual knowledge, we collected data from 159 students. The different statistical tests showed that if focusing only on separate items, it could confirm that students could be seen either having operational or relational understanding of the equal sign. However, when taking all results into account using several analyses, students' understanding appear to be much more complex. Instead of a dichotomized view, students' expressed knowledge of mathematical equivalence should be seen as a continuum.

One consequence of the widened participation in higher education (HE) is that the social demarcation line that once existed at the entrance to HE has moved inside the HE system. This study investigates how students experience social friction when demarcation lines are crossed and how such friction develops over time. This was achieved by repeated interviews with the same 10 HE students during their time at university. The study deploys habitus and hysteresis to explain how social dispositions from social origins are challenged but able to change when they are exposed to unfamiliar social situations. The study reveals how social friction in relation to both social background and to the HE system, progresses in terms of either fading or amplifying. These findings are concluded in a model that offers a systematic way of investigating how students experience HE over time in relation to social background.

Education in segregated settings for pupils with intellectual disability (ID) has often been portrayed as a unified form of schooling. There is a risk of providing a simplified picture of these settings and of what pupils with ID need to learn. This is generally stipulated in policy documents, leaving room for staff in school to interpret curricula and form learning environments. The aim of this study is to explore how four different learning environments are constructed in segregated settings where pupils with ID are educated in Sweden. The study was conducted as a multiple case study, using observations and interviews with teachers and pupils in four special classes for pupils with ID (SCIDs). Drawing on curriculum theory, the four learning environments, in the results named as Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta class, respectively, appeared to be characterized by different ideas of schooling, labelled as knowledge-mediating, socializing, functional life skills and caring as well as teacher-centred classrooms. The study contributes to a deepened understanding of the complexity of education for pupils with ID in segregated settings.

Peer victimization in schools most often occurs in the presence of bystanders. When bystanders intervene on behalf of the victims, they are often successful in stopping the victimization. Defender self-efficacy (i.e., the belief in one's ability to successfully defend victims) has consistently been associated with greater defending and less passive bystanding in peer victimization. However, the lack of longitudinal research designs has resulted in a limited understanding of how these relationships develop over time. This five-wave longitudinal study involving 2507 Swedish students addressed this gap by examining longitudinal associations of defender self-efficacy with defending and passive bystanding. Participating students answered a self-report questionnaire once a year, from fourth to eighth grade. Our findings provide partial evidence for reciprocal associations among the variables. Moreover, there were more significant associations in the traditional than in the random intercept model, thus favoring between-person interpretations of the longitudinal associations. The findings highlight the importance of understanding the link between defender self-efficacy and bystander behavior of peer victimization, and that schools in their efforts in preventing school violence and bullying support students in increasing their defender self-efficacy and capacity in defending.

This ethnographic study in education, based on observations, audio-visual recordings and interviews, explored pupils' supportive interactions in a year eight class at a Swedish school. Goffman's dramaturgical theory of the presentation of self was used as a theoretical framework with a focus on the pupils' interactions with their classmates in backstage spaces when they prepare performances in the form of writing assignments to be handed in to teachers. Some pupils took responsibility for having an assignment to hand in to teachers, but not for their learning process in planning their work and writing the assignment themselves, in line with the formal requirements of a goal-oriented school system. The findings showed that pupils applied informal social strategies when managing formal individual assignments. Some examples of these strategies were: swapping computers with classmates during lessons and writing for peers, logging in to peers' Google Classroom accounts and writing for them, and forwarding pictures of completed written assignments to peers to be reformulated in their peers' "own words". The intention of these interactions was to portray a favourable impression of themselves and their abilities to the assessing teachers. The pupils' strategies tended to reinforce classic socially reproductive patterns and generate inequalities between pupils; pupils with higher levels of social and economic capital seemed to profit more and achieve better grades than others. These informal networking strategies co-existed with, and were in opposition to, the formal school context, and were difficult for teachers to detect due to their taking place backstage, out of teachers' sight.

This article reports on teachers' experience of working during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis is based on a thematic analysis of group interviews with 76 teachers working throughout the Swedish school system, i.e., preschools, primary, secondary school, and municipal adult education. The interviews were conducted during autumn 2021. Conceptualizing teaching and working during the pandemic as a breakdown of infrastructures, the article focuses on how teachers talk about changes in institutional, social, technological, and pedagogical aspects of teaching and learning. The results show that changes in institutional aspects mainly concern teachers' communication with colleagues, custodians, and school leadership. Social and pedagogical aspects are emphasized, while technological aspects are not as prominent in the teachers' accounts. Commonly taken-for-granted aspects are brought to the fore, and their importance for teaching and learning has implications for the new normal and for what is of importance when creating future infrastructures for teaching and learning.

In order to include all outlooks and perspectives on the world prevalent in contemporary society, countries like Sweden have replaced traditional religious education with worldview education. However, current worldview theory fails to make justice to two important facts concerning the contemporary religious landscape. Firstly, a great many people are semi-secular rather than traditional believers or atheists. Secondly, many have non-doxastic attitudes such as hope or acceptance instead of belief. We therefore suggest that worldview education needs to include semi-secularity, and that it needs to clearly separate the content of a worldview from the variety of epistemic attitudes a person might have towards that content.

Prior research about pupil welfare teams have identified problems at several levels: those of leadership, interprofessional cooperation, cooperation between the pupil welfare team and teachers, and type of work carried out. Perhaps most importantly, teams seem to work primarily with 'firefighting', i.e. acting reactively when problems already have occurred, rather than in a health promoting and preventive way. On the one hand, health promotion and prevention are endorsed as desired ways to work (e.g. SFS 2010, 800); on the other hand, reactive measures seem to dominate in practice. In order to try to bridge this gap, we carried out a study of a pupil welfare team in Sweden that we had reason to believe worked more in line with the health-promoting and preventive manner of working that is recommended. Since we could not know a priori whether the team studied worked in a qualitatively different way than other teams studied in prior research, we were led by two overarching research questions: (1) Is the studied team working in a heath promoting and preventive way? and (2) If so, how did their way of working emerge and how is it sustained? Our overriding purpose is to increase our knowledge concerning whether and how pupil welfare teams can become more health promoting and preventive in practice. More specifically, we are interested to find factors that contribute to the development and sustainability of health promoting and preventive work in pupil welfare teams.

Contemporary vocational education and training (VET), both initial and higher, is strongly market oriented, and governments shape systems with significant roles for employers. The study presented in this article aims at examining how employers are positioned in the practice of VET provision in such a system. Specifically, it recognises and interprets how employers are positioned in the provision of state-funded Swedish higher VET as expressions of relative power and control. The study was conducted using interviews with educational personnel and observations of meetings between employers and VET programme providers.

We report results from children learning to read in one of four different languages: Croatian, English, Estonian and Swedish. The languages all have an alphabetical script but vary greatly on the dimension deep-shallow (or complexity-simplicity, or opacity-transparency), i.e., how close orthography and phonology are related. These languages also vary in the complexity and type of grammatical structure. We used tasks to measure phonological awareness, morpho-syntactic processing, word and pseudoword identification speed, working memory, and reading comprehension. In English, Swedish, and Croatian, fluency was the most significant predictor of reading comprehension. In Estonian, morpho-syntactic awareness was the most significant predictor, although reading fluency was a close second. Fluency was of primary importance in reading comprehension because the limitations of working memory result in fast decay of input information. Therefore, it is important to read with fluency for proper text comprehension.

This article presents and discusses findings from a qualitative study of Swedish adult education, with focus on meetings between counsellors and students and how counsellors translate and enact different expectations from policies and ethical guidelines, as well as from adult students. The results show that counsellors have an important role in the marketised and complex system of adult education in Sweden, both to guide people during the encounter with adult education and to guide and support them as students. A policy enactment emerges where counsellors are in conflict between different guidelines and are forced to compromise between the ethical ideal that they, as counsellors should always start from individual needs, and policy requirements concerning e.g. skills supply and labour-market integration.

Purpose: This study identifies gendered disparities among women students participating in work-integrated learning and explores the effects of the disparities on their perceptions on perceived opportunities, competencies, sense of belonging, and professional identity. Design/methodology/approach: A series of semi-structured focus groups were run with 59 participants at six higher education institutions in four countries (Australia, Canada, Sweden, United Kingdom). All focus groups were designed with the same questions and formatting. Findings: Thematic analysis of the transcripts revealed two overarching themes, namely perceptions of self and interactions with others in work placements. Theme categories included awareness of self-presentation, sense of autonomy, perceived Allies, emotional labour, barriers to opportunity, sense of belonging, intersections of identity, and validation value. Originality/value: This study fills an important gap in the international literature about gendered experiences in WIL and highlights inequalities that women experience while on work placements.

The salience of education for better life outcomes is well accepted, but people with disabilities continue to be underrepresented in higher education. Building on Weedon's approach to the intersection of impairment with socioeconomic factors, this paper identifies the facilitators and barriers encountered and/or experienced by young people with disabilities along their diverse pathways to and through higher education in Sweden. The data comes from longitudinal ethnographic case studies of persons with ADHD. While the findings show similarities in impairment-specific barriers, such as transition and inadequate support available at university, they make even more visible the existing heterogeneity among people with ADHD and the inadequacy of support structures at higher education institutions. Parents, economic security and individual factors, such as ease of learning and belief in one's own capacity, were found to be strong facilitators. ADHD and socioeconomic disadvantage together magnified vulnerabilities and hurdles faced while aspiring to and accessing higher education. The article concludes by highlighting the urgent need for universities to change entrenched structures that perceive students with disabilities as a homogeneous group and disability as an individual problem, in order to enable participation of all.

Consensus is often a prerequisite for communities to develop initiatives to improve practice and create a future together. We investigated the consensus around the perceived educational inclusion of autistic and other neurodivergent students, their caregivers, and their teachers. Seventeen triads of informants plus two single students from mainstream secondary and high schools in Sweden underwent the standardized INCLUSIO interview operationalizing educational inclusion domains. Inclusive practice was reported across groups to be poorly to sufficiently developed for different domains and measures. Discrepancies were extensive between informants and most pronounced for students and parents versus teachers. The findings highlight limited consensus about inclusive education in practice and suggest enhanced participation of neurodivergent students and their parents to improve inclusive education implementation.

This article focuses on a Swedish school company and its operations in India, examining how setting up and operating schools in another national place forge particular spatial imaginaries. It contributes to literature on the Global Education Industry by focusing on international moves of commercial non-Anglo-Saxon actors. Drawing on interviews and extensive fieldwork in India, we show how the 'marriage' between the global (represented by the Swedish company) and local (the 'Indian') are manifested in the spatial imaginary of the 'glocal school', encompassing hierarchical otherings rooted in discourses of both globalisation and colonialism.

The aim is to describe the development of a novel interdisciplinary graduate school, using the Swedish National Graduate School for Competitive Science on Ageing and Health (SWEAH) as a case example. We explore doctoral students' perceptions of being part of SWEAH and provide implications for practice. Written self-reports reflecting 78 students' experiences and perceptions were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings reveal that affiliation with SWEAH is highly valued. The students emphasized the tailored courses and learning activities and reported that it was instrumental in deepening their knowledge and broadening their research perspectives. The findings demonstrate how students navigate between disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts and become enculturated with intellectual mindset and understanding of the importance of network building. The graduate school adds an interdisciplinary layer of learning, influenced by peers and researchers, and demonstrates the importance of community building within interdisciplinary environments and how it can be achieved.

The aim of this study is to explore what happened -- and why -- in a collaboration between ourselves as researchers and school leaders from two different schools in Sweden. The theory of practice architectures is used to frame the study. The goal of the collaboration was to enhance the scientific foundation of school practices, which motivated the use of action research as the methodological approach for designing the collaboration. The results allow us to propose a number of critical aspects to take into consideration when establishing a collaboration between researchers and school leaders. The first aspect concerns aiming for "co-ownership" and an "equivalent collaboration." These involve trustful and respectful relations, empowering individuals in their professional roles. The second aspect is linked to attention to "local infrastructures" and the importance of organisational settings that facilitate a holistic approach and a shared understanding of the aims of both the research and the collaboration. The third and final aspect is related to "school leaders' legitimacy to organise research-based school improvements." School leaders are responsible for educational quality in schools, and this makes them best suited for leading school improvements. However, theoretical frameworks and methods introduced by researchers can support the ambition to enhance the scientific foundation of school practices. We advocate the development of practices inhabited by school practitioners and school researchers within the "educational complex." In addition, we promote the creation of healthy environments in the form of arrangements that create spaces where equivalent collaborations, shared responsibility and co-ownership may grow.

This article aims to explore educational infrastructures for superintendents' and deputy superintendents' professional development and to analyse what kind of professional development these infrastructures bolster. The article builds on a qualitative case study focusing on the central municipal level in Sweden. Findings are based on data from digitally conducted interviews with superintendents and deputy superintendents. The results show that prevailing infrastructures mainly emphasise rational understandings of knowledge and people and practical skills, making it possible for superintendents to carry out their everyday tasks. To a lesser extent, infrastructures support questioning the taken-for-granted understandings on school leadership and challenge and reshape collective professional knowledge in partnership with other professionals. Therefore, the results indicate that theory and research are seldom used as a basis for professional development. In addition, the analysis also showed that superintendents' professional development is more linked to personal initiatives and motivation rather than planned initiatives the municipal and/or state-level administration designed. The article concludes that infrastructure design, at different levels of the school system, must consider different approaches for professional development given the complexity of and expectations on superintendents' work.

This article explores students' experiences of intellectual, social, and emotional growth during the first year at university and the extent to which these experiences can be considered transformative (Mezirow, 1981). The study is a qualitative interpretive multiple-case study built on semi-structured interviews with students in two higher education contexts, Argentina and Sweden. The results show that most students experience similarly interrelated changes concerning self-confidence, knowledge- and language-abilities, critical thinking, and values and beliefs. For some students, these changes lead to profound shifts in how they perceive themselves and their possibilities. Such transformative experiences are emancipatory and empowering, giving students more control over their lives. Other students are gradually changing, experiencing growth in knowledge, literacy, and self-confidence. However, they do not yet experience profound changes in their worldview and how they perceive themselves. Contextual factors related to family life and future profession affect the significance students attach to experienced changes.

Academic Literacies elucidates how undergraduate students with diverse skillsets can effectively engage with socially constructed and discipline-specific knowledge(s) "through" writing. Over the last two decades, language specialists and education researchers have developed a robust, student-focused epistemology. However, it remains unclear how lecturers understand and teach Academic Literacies in their courses. This article shifts the focus by exploring how we -- a teaching team in International Relations at a Swedish university -- translated the knowledge claims and ideological commitments of Academic Literacies into an applied pedagogy. We employ collaborative, reflective practice to investigate how we progressively integrated Academic Literacies in an introductory, bachelor's level course from 2010-2019. Specifically, we illustrate how we used formative feedback, peer assessment, and reflective journaling to teach International Relations "through" academic writing. We conclude with a discussion of the best practices and unresolved challenges of our evolving pedagogical design.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore existing and desired methodologies for systematic quality work to promote quality in preschools from the principal's perspective. Design/methodology/approach: A collaborative approach was used in this research project, and principals were asked to complete portfolio assignments. Their answers to those portfolio assignments were analysed by the research team and subsequently compared to total quality management values. Findings: Existing and desired methodologies for systematic quality work are presented and sorted into 13 and 17 groups, respectively. The principals desire four times more methodologies than they are presently using to promote systematic quality work, and the results show that they must extend their methodologies to support TQM values. Research limitations/implications: This research is based on answers collected from 18 principals in one municipality in Sweden. Practical implications: The use of the cornerstone model provides a framework to illustrate the application of TQM in preschools. Originality/value: Principals struggle to find time for systemic quality work. The presented results can be used to work systematically with quality in preschools and other organizations.

Many science students struggle with using scientific language and making sense of scientific phenomena. Thus, there is an increased interest in science education research and public policy with regard to understanding and promoting scientific language use and sensemaking in science classrooms. However, there is a lack of comparative studies on how upper-secondary school students of different achievement and language levels use scientific language to make sense of phenomena. The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between achievement level, scientific language use, and sensemaking in chemistry for students being set a sensemaking task while constructing concept maps on the topic of chemical equilibrium. The concept maps were collected from five different upper-secondary schools in Sweden from two school systems (Swedish and International Baccalaureate). Using content analysis, these concept maps were examined for scientific language use as well as structuring of sensemaking. A majority of the students had difficulty structuring sensemaking in their concept maps, independently of achievement level. These difficulties included unstructured reasoning, symbolic representations being used as explanations, surface-level learning, and linear reasoning connected to rote learning. There appeared to be a connection between learning context and student individual structuring of sensemaking as expressed in the concept maps. The results also showed a clear relationship between scientific language use and achievement level in the student sample. The results indicate that the structuring of sensemaking and scientific language use are not always connected processes. In conclusion, teachers may need to adopt a teaching practice that includes directed and differentiated support for scientific sensemaking.

In this paper, we investigate how professional cultures and situated, material and external contexts relate to dynamic low- and underperforming schools in Scandinavia, particularly how the leadership is constructed through the leader, the followers and the situation. The first school studied was a low-performing school in Norway called "Toppen", which has shown improved student outcomes. The other school, Seaside, is a Swedish school that is considered underperforming because student outcomes are lower than expected based on the contextual prerequisites. Our results show that Toppen can be described as a turnaround school and Seaside can be described as a cruising school. Analysis reveals that, at Toppen, the principal has been developing a culture that can be described in terms of community and motivation. At Seaside, on the other hand, the culture can be described in terms of individuality and conservatism. From this analysis, we can detect how different contexts impact two low- and underperforming schools and how they are affected by different prerequisites linked to the situated, material, external and professional contexts. However, the development of a collective professional culture with a shared sense of commitment seems to be an important tool to plan and communicate organizational improvement strategies.

This study detected patterns in teacher educators' and pre-service teachers' beliefs and practices regarding the degree project. Requirements in policy documents were also considered. The analysis centred on validity, teacher cognition and grounded theory. Conversations were conducted with instructors and students at three departments for teacher education in Sweden. Findings showed inadequacies with regard to construct- and consequential validity for instruction and learning, timing, pre-service teachers' prior knowledge and attitudes to educational research. Recommendations for improvement involved having teaching practice and the project run parallel and part-time during a term. Further proposals tallied with national regulations about autonomy and academic literacy for teachers. For example, the pre-service teachers responded positively to introducing crash courses and providing opportunities for supervision prior to the course. Improved validity was deemed imperative for developing long-term literacy and motivation towards incorporating science and empirical data in the teaching profession.

Purpose: This study aimed to uncover the values that underlie farmers' strategic choices for business development. In particular, we uncovered farmers' values related to business development through farm diversification and compared these with values regarding business development through non-diversified farm activities. Methodology: We considered diversified and non-diversified farm activities as two possible strategic orientations related to farm development. For each strategic orientation, the study systematically uncovered its values grounded on in-depth interviews with 23 farmers in Sweden, using the Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique. We analyzed values in terms of use- and non-use values related to the choice of strategic orientation. Findings: The results suggested that a heterogeneous set of use- and non-use values guide choices for farm strategic orientation. Particularly, for non-diversified farm activities, we identified eight values, of which three were categorized as use values and five as non-use values. For diversified farms, we found four values, all of which were categorized as non-use values. Practical Implications: Our results highlight that policymakers need to approach farm development differently for each strategic orientation, considering that the underlying values between these two groups differ. Also, for farm advisors, results can be useful for improving and adapting the communication and interaction with farmers, which can further improve the content and influence of advisory services. Theoretical Implications: The Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique expands the methodology of eliciting farmers' values and especially regarding farmers' strategic choices. Originality: This paper extends the knowledge of the driving forces that underlie farmers' choices for farm business development.

In teacher education mentoring pre-service teachers is a critical factor. With background in research around mentoring pre-service teachers in connection to a training school project, this study aims to contribute knowledge about and identify mentors' experiences of mentorship in the setting of a training school. Through focus group interviews and semi-structured interviews, foregone by a survey aiming at identifying general views of mentoring, helping to create interview guides, data has been collected for 11 months. Through an interpretative phenomenological analysis, the results show two key themes emerging from mentoring in a training school where the first is strengthening the role as a mentor through three distinct experiences: collegiate learning, structure, and competence development. The second theme, challenging in the role as a mentor, involves four distinct levels of experiences: assessment, planning (linked to the mentoring situation), workload and diversity. The conclusions show that the general experience is positive, but that there are some factors concerning stress and workload; a reworked structure that need to be put into consideration.

Statistical mechanics has received limited attention in physics education research and remains a relatively underrepresented topic even in research on upper-division physics courses. The purpose of this study was to explore potential challenges that physics students encounter when they solve statistical mechanics problems in groups. Adopting a grounded approach, we video recorded and analyzed nine small student groups engaging in collaborative problem solving on the topic. The analysis involved iterative thematic coding, which gave rise to ten emergent categories of challenges. These were later divided into two broad groupings: "challenges with concepts" and "challenges with problem-solving strategies." In the first grouping, we list seven identified categories related to the concepts of macrostates and microstates, distinguishable and indistinguishable particles, temperature, entropy, energy, equilibrium, heat bath, the Boltzmann distribution, and the partition function. In the second grouping, we list three categories related to the inappropriate application of common relations, difficulty managing tensions between calculated results and qualitative reasoning, and coming up with definitions of new and inconsistent concepts. Some of our findings are supported by existing research on the topic, and others are previously unreported. Based on our findings, we propose that future research should investigate the relations between the identified challenges on one hand, and students' epistemological framing, reasoning, and use of multiple representations on the other. Finally, we suggest that teachers should spend time engaging students in a conceptual discussion of the central ideas of statistical mechanics, motivating the choice and pointing out limitations of commonly used toy models, and linking course content to real-world phenomena.

In this qualitative study, we draw on theory and practice in relation to the concepts of "fixity" and "fluidity" in language education (i.e. the simultaneity of bounded, named languages; and the need to transcend language boundaries). We use data from focus group interviews to investigate the entangled ideological dilemmas facing four teachers in a Language Introduction Programme in an upper secondary school in Sweden, as they enacted literacy pedagogies (fluidity) against the backdrop of high stakes standardised tests, age-out limits, and residency criteria (fixity) for youth from refugee backgrounds. We asked: What ideological dilemmas do language teachers in an introductory programme perceive relative to the language needs of youth from refugee backgrounds as they strive to implement promising practices? Our thematic analysis revealed three dilemmatic themes concerning 'what' to teach, 'what' resource materials to use, and 'how' to implement literacy pedagogies. From the lessons learned in our findings, we conclude with six thoughts for future consideration as teachers attempt to reconcile seemingly disparate perspectives on language teaching and learning in their local contexts.

Students experience the research-teaching nexus differently as they progress through their first three years of undergraduate study depending on the discipline. The question is if students, within the same discipline, experience the nexus differently depending on the profile of the institution where they study. The present study explored students' experiences of the research-teaching nexus (RT-nexus) during their undergraduate studies at one research-intensive and one teaching-intensive university. A survey (n = 340) was distributed among business students at two Swedish universities. One finding is that students from both universities reported on a progression in how they experience the nexus, and in learning outcomes. Students also rated what teachers do and what they themselves do higher, than what their peers do. The main gap between students from the two universities was that students from the research-intensive university generally perceived a stronger connection between teaching and research than did students from the teaching-intensive university. They also to a higher extent found that a close connection between research and teaching in their education would be important to them in their future work life, whereas students from the teaching-intensive university were more unsure.

Using a three-wave (mean age 14.4, 17.4, and 20.4 years) longitudinal design (N = 1,834; 55.6% females), we set out to map direct and indirect effects of adolescent peer victimization and mental health on academic achievement in early adulthood, and the buffering effect of positive family relations. Data was collected in Sweden 2012 to 2018. We found concurrent ([beta]s = 0.13-0.28) but no longitudinal transactional effects between peer victimization and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and conduct disorder (CD). Peer victimization, depression, and CD had longitudinal direct effects on poorer academic achievement in early adulthood ([beta]s = 0.09-0.11). Positive family relations did not moderate the effects. The results indicate that prevention and interventions against peer victimization and poor mental health may contribute to a higher proportion of individuals graduating from high school.

Problem solving in chemical kinetics poses substantial challenges for university students since it often involves significant use of mathematics as a tool and language, with challenging translations and transitions between chemical phenomena and mathematical representations. In this paper, we present key findings from a study investigating chemistry students solving tasks centred around the steady-state approximation. Building upon the mathematical modelling cycle (MMC), qualitative analysis of the data collected using a think-aloud protocol led to the development of the extended MMC. This empirically derived extended MMC offers a more detailed account of the processes involved in mathematical modelling of chemical phenomena, highlighting aspects such as the occurrence of deliberation and evaluation throughout the modelling cycle, as well as the varying characteristics, points of activation and roles of extra-mathematical resources during problem solving. We further introduce and use problem-solving trajectories as a tool for visualising and analysing the complex and diverse approaches used by students in their attempts at reaching a solution. Overall, the extended MMC provides a finer-grained model of the cognitive and metacognitive activities that students engage in, offering further insights for research and practice.

The importance of introducing students to mechanistic reasoning (MR) early in their schooling is emphasised in research. The goal of this case study was to contribute with knowledge on how early primary students' (9-10 year-olds) MR in chemistry is expressed and developed in a classroom practice framed by model-based inquiry. The study focuses on the first lesson in a sequence of six that was developed as part of a design study. The teaching was designed to ensure student agency and create conditions for the students to develop, test, and evaluate simple particle models in interaction with observations cooperatively and under teacher guidance. During the lesson, students were encouraged to express their tentative explanatory models in drawing and writing, and to act as molecules to dramatize the expansion of air. A mechanistic reasoning framework based on the characterisation of system components (entities, properties, activities, organisation) was developed and used to analyse children's mechanistic reasoning. The framework included multimodal analysis of communication (speech, gestures, writing, drawing, bodily motion) and evaluation of student reasoning based on "e.g.," the presence of gaps in terms of explanatory black boxes or missing pieces. The results show that: (1) In model-based inquiry, young children can navigate across different representational levels in their reasoning and engage in MR; (2) children's black-boxing can be seen as an indication of epistemic work in the process of model-based inquiry; and (3) asking students to engage in multiple modes of representations support the development of student MR in model-based inquiry.

Purpose: This study focuses on 7- to 9-year-old children attending primary school in Swedish areas of low socioeconomic status, where most children's school language is their second language. The aim was to better understand what factors influence these children's narrative listening comprehension both in an ideal listening condition (in quiet) and for the primary school classroom, a typical listening condition (with multitalker babble noise). Method: A total of 86 typically developing 7- to 9-year-olds performed a narrative listening comprehension test (Lyssna, Förstå och Minnas [LFM]; English translation: Listen, Comprehend, and Remember) in two listening conditions: quiet and multitalker babble noise. They also performed the crosslinguistic nonword repetition test and a digit span backwards (DSB) test. A predictive statistical model including these factors, the children's degree of school language exposure, parental education level, and age was derived. Results: Listening condition had the strongest predictive value for LFM performance, followed by school language exposure and nonword repetition accuracy. Parental education level was also a significant predictor. There was a significant three-way interaction effect between listening condition, age, and DSB performance. Conclusions: Multitalker babble noise has a negative effect on children's narrative listening comprehension. The effect of multitalker babble noise could be explained by age differences in the ability to allocate working memory capacity during the narrative listening comprehension task, suggesting that younger children may be more vulnerable for missing information when listening in background noise than their older peers.

The aim of this study is to examine what it means to be a student in a vocational education and training programme in the municipal adult education system in Sweden and how the interplay between school and working life affects students' identity formation. To achieve this, 12 students from two different programmes have been interviewed at the end of their education: one group of assistant nurses and one group of floor layers. The results show that learning a vocation and developing a vocational identity is a journey through different practices with whom students both identify and dis-identify themselves. In these processes of identification, students can also undergo personal development in a broader sense or develop an identity as an adult. Understanding adult student identities, in particular how they see themselves as learners, can be beneficial for those working with and in adult learning. Furthermore, what the school teaches may conflict with the expectations and daily demands of working life, creating a divide between practices. Understanding the divide between school and working life, and how students are affected by this divide, can also facilitate the understanding of their vocational identity development process.

Distance education has received a lot of attention in contemporary policy as something that makes it possible for more students to participate, but also involves a certain set of challenges. When it comes to distance education, Swedish municipal adult education (MAE) stands out with its long history of flexible education, often provided on distance. Applying Bacchi's poststructural WPR approach, the aim of this study was to scrutinise how distance education is construed, and the discursive effects of this, in comments by MAE school leaders and staff during a quality audit. The analysis shows that it becomes difficult to question or think differently about distance education within the flexibility discourse in adult education. Moreover, the blame for students' lack of goal attainment and increased dropouts seems to be put on external providers, municipalities, and the students rather than on the way that the adult education system is organised or the demands around flexibility in adult education policy. What seems to be left out is a discussion about the pedagogical and didactical implications of distance education.

The aim of the present study was to contribute knowledge about how adult L2 learners perceived their possibilities to use and develop the target language (Swedish) when formal language teaching was combined with placements. Situated in the context of Swedish for Immigrants (SFI), the study drew inspiration from action research and ethnographic methodology. A thematic analysis was conducted underpinned by the systemic-functional linguistic concepts of field, tenor and mode. The findings showed that the students highly valued interaction with L1 Swedish speakers outside of the classroom. Several of the students described rich opportunities to interact socially, which, however, also entailed anxiety about their status as L2 speakers. A few of the students reported accessing field-specific language and literacy practices that aligned with their current career goals. However, students with placements relating to kitchen, garage and warehouse work voiced feeling isolated and having little opportunity for social interaction. While students in the first of two course instances found it difficult to discuss and exemplify language they had learnt, a vocabulary assignment developed for the second course instance facilitated discussions about placement-related words and expressions. Implications for teaching are discussed, including using authentic examples of workplace discourse as preparation for placement visits.