The Education Act from 2010 states that education in Sweden ought to be based on scientific knowledge and proven experience. The aim of this study is to explore practice-near school research published by Swedish researchers in the wake of the Education Act with the focus on the participation of teachers in research. As a background, the…

This research project aims to investigate how students in lower secondary school experience work with socioscientific issues (SSI). The six socioscientific cases developed and used in this project are relevant according to characteristics of SSI and to the national curriculum. Approximately 1,500 students in Sweden have worked with one SSI case…

In this article we describe and discuss the analyses of a developmental research project that took place in Sweden during 1998 to 2002. We carried out four different analyses in order to explore the learning outcomes from the project that could inform long term curriculum change and teacher collaboration in vocational education in Sweden. The…

This paper aims to outline findings from a research project that has investigated an initiative to stimulate youths to become more entrepreneurial. The concept of summer entrepreneur has been developed in the last decade in a Swedish county. It was developed out of the idea that youths should have a possibility to run their own companies as…

In the international policy debate, environmental education and education for sustainable development seem to be moving away from a focus on behavioural modifications to more pluralistic approaches. This article illuminates a Swedish example of a strategic interplay between evaluation, development and research that relates to this shift, involving…

This article reports on the outcomes of an action research project on gender and science education carried out in two upper secondary schools in Sweden. The article focuses on how student voices draw on wider societal discourses when they talk about what it means to be natural science students at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The…

We describe a case study of an in-service professional development project with four experienced biology teachers in two upper secondary schools. The objective was to better understand the role of laboratory work (labwork) in science education with a special emphasis on assessment. Research questions include the following: 1. What does the teacher…