How could the technicality arising from eleven percent of students being excluded from a PISA test in Sweden trigger a polarized debate followed by investigations by both the OECD and national authorities? This question is explored in the study by drawing on discursive institutionalism, especially the concept of normative background ideas,…

In Sweden, as in many other countries, programming has been added to the curriculum in recent years. This paper explores how and under what conditions programming is transformed into teaching in technology education. Teachers in grade 7-9 were interviewed about what and how they teach about programming in the context of technology education, and…

In Sweden, curricula and syllabi for education are politically determined after public consultations. Thus, these educational documents are discursive trade-offs reflecting research, traditions in the educational system, and political ideologies. This study maps the discourses in the syllabus for Sami as L1 mother tongue for preschool class-Year…

Instructional quality is a research topic that has received increased attention over the past decades. However, despite evidence for its importance to student learning, few studies are designed to examine patterns of prevalent instruction. The present study aimed to enhance the understanding of instructional quality in Swedish lower secondary…

'Quality' in education has become a global phenomenon, and is frequently discussed in transnational and national policy. In such discussions, 'quality' seems to be both worthwhile and demanded, but at the same time, the concept has also been criticised in previous research as it seems to have attained a 'common sense' status. In this context, the…

The aim of this article is to analyse how professionals in special needs upper secondary schools in Sweden -- assistants, teachers and Special Education Needs Coordinators -- understand and define quality in their daily interactions with students who have intellectual disabilities. Our analysis draws on data collected via a digital questionnaire,…

Major policy changes make teachers reconsider how they teach. In Sweden, a new curriculum, a grading system, and national tests were introduced in science education in Year 6 (Y6) for the 2012/2013 academic year. After two years, the national tests were made voluntary, and they ended the following year. In this interview study, we investigate what…

Concise, clear and comprehensive snapshots of vocational education and training systems in EU, Iceland and Norway: this is what the Cedefop Spotlight on VET series offers. Building on individual country Spotlights, this publication provides an overview of VET systems with their distinctive qualities, such as main accession and progression routes…

The current study reported here is one within a research project aimed at the identification of enabling and constraining factors in a two-year school-development project at a large secondary school in Sweden, where all teaching staff were involved in improving the quality of instruction through collaborative analyses. In this project a…

Research suggests that a country does not need inequity to have high performance. However, such research has potentially suffered from confounders present in between-country comparative research (e.g., latent cultural differences). Likewise, relatively little consideration has been given to whether the situation may be different for high- or…

In a radical school choice reform in 1992, Sweden's education system was opened to private competition from independent for-profit and non-profit schools funded by vouchers. Competition was expected to produce higher-quality education at lower cost, in both independent and public schools. This two-pronged study first examines to what extent the…

Latin American students consistently score low on international tests of cognitive skills. In the PISA 2012 results, students in seven Latin American countries had an average score of 395 in mathematics, or about 100 points lower than the average score of 497 in four Scandinavian countries. We estimate the effect of socioeconomic characteristics…

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's (IEA) mission is to enhance knowledge about education systems worldwide, and to provide high-quality data that will support education reform and lead to better teaching and learning in schools. In pursuit of this aim, it conducts, and reports on, major studies of student…

There is an ongoing discussion about what content that should be taught in science education and there are different views among teachers about what represent good science content. However, teachers are not isolated individuals making their own interpretations, but are part of institutionalised systems building on patterns in the selection of…

In this article, we will discuss how circumstances and requirements on a micro-level may be of relevance for the conditions for international student mobility within higher education. This will be done through examining similarities and differences in the organization of degree project courses at universities in Russia and Sweden, and how…