This article explores emotional aspects of national grade policies in Sweden as they are enacted in feedback practices at middle school level. Policy measures such as standardized testing and grades have over the last decades put emphasis on academic outcomes in Sweden. However, research suggests that this emphasis can impact students' emotions…

The present paper delves into how symbolic boundaries in a school that is undergoing a desegregation process come to shape social boundaries of 'we-ness' and 'otherness'. The theoretical framework of the study starts from an interest in analysing whether symbolic and social boundaries emerge in new encounters during a desegregation process and…

Relating to world culture theory, this article aimed to discern similarities and differences between the South Korean national curriculum (1981, 2015) and the Swedish national curriculum (1980, 2018) and a set of complementary documents, both more broadly and with special emphasis on middle school level mathematics education. The findings suggest…

The politicization of history education relating to colonialism in former major colonial powers, like Britain and France, and former colonies has for obvious reasons received ample scholarly attention. But how is colonial history represented in educational materials aimed at primary school students in countries with a less evident connection to…

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…

Health is a resource for pupils' learning. Including health in the curriculum and teaching will enable pupils to understand the connection between health and learning. Action research has proved to be effective from a learning perspective. Our purpose was to explore whether, and how, using action-oriented research methods in a middle school-based…

The aim of the current study was to examine whether students' perceptions of teacher support at an individual-level, teacher support and well-functioning class climate at classroom-level, and teacher support and well-functioning class climate at school-level were associated with peer victimization. Data were obtained from a Student School Survey…

Programming has recently become part of Swedish technology education; pupils should now be able to analyse existing programmed technological solutions, and be able to design new ones. Teachers facing this curriculum change need guidance on how to teach and what to address, based on how pupils understand the content. The aim of this study is to…

This study explored disciplinary writing in grades 4-6 and the potential of writing to learn and learning to write across the curriculum to prepare the pupils for their future writing. Using Ivanic's discourses of writing as an analytical framework, observation protocols from 104 observers in 374 lessons in 76 Swedish schools were analyzed…

This study focused on the relationships between teacher characteristics and students' mathematics achievement in EU countries, including Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Slovenia, Sweden, and Turkey, which are the only EU countries participated in TIMSS 2015 at the eighth-grade level. The data consisted of the sample of 31,969 eighth-grade…

Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted immensely on individuals and societies around the world. This study aimed at delineating Swedish middle school (10-12-year-old) pupils' understanding of bacteria and viruses, thereby illustrating the influence of the pandemic at schools and in society. Data was collected by semi-structured, individual…

Schools are institutions responsible for teaching children new skills and knowledge, the ability to think about future targets, and, when problems become complex, how to apply explorative thinking and inborn creativity to solve them. Even so, scholars point to the fact that school curriculums do not support ways to facilitate explorative learning…

The COVID-19 pandemic had an immense impact on communities around the world. We know that new epidemic-prone diseases will emerge in the future. Consequently, it is important to investigate what impact the current pandemic had on school children's understanding of infectious diseases in order to develop biology education based on that novel…

This case study explores how 12-13-year-old students encounter proportional reasoning while working with geometric patterning tasks using concrete materials. The focus is on the students' use of spontaneous concepts when first dealing with such patterns in the context of collaborative work. Based on video recordings of a single lesson, a…

This cross-national study examined students' evaluation of strategies for solving linear equations, as well as the extent to which their evaluation criteria were related to their use of strategies and/or aligned with experts' views about which strategy is the best. A total of 792 middle school and high school students from Sweden, Finland, and…