Background: Given the disparities in gender representation, efforts are needed to make engineering education more inclusive and attractive to young people. It is important that those entering engineering education are making this decision with sufficient understanding of what it means to be an engineer. This study explored how lower secondary…

This study explores how lived experiences contribute to pre-service and novice teachers' redefinition of prior professional and academic identities in developing a mathematics teacher identity. It focuses on participants preparing to teach or teaching students aged 13-18. A hermeneutic-existential phenomenology perspective compares participants'…

In this article we analyse what happens to career counselling when it is intertwined with the asylum process. A Swedish example is an amendment to the education legislation, regarding residence permits for upper secondary level students. Following the resulting changes in juridical, educational and interpersonal conditions, career counsellors must…

This article poses these questions: How do participants on two different courses in folk high schools in Sweden, a basic course and a theatre course, motivate their educational and occupational choices, and what similarities and differences can be identified? We analyse interviews with students drawing on a narrative approach. Five trajectories…

This article aims to deepen understanding of the trajectories through school and into adulthood of people who did not attain valued qualifications from upper secondary school ("non-completers"), and explore the fruitfulness of careership theory for such analysis. It is based on interviews with 100 young Swedes: 81 non-completers and 19…

There is little research into the career trajectories and occupational aspirations of rural youth with immigrant backgrounds in Europe. This article presents new research based on field observations and interviews with five young immigrants of Persian descent in one rural town in Sweden. The findings highlighted gender differences in how the…

This study aims to explain why boys and girls in secondary education choose different educational tracks. We argue that adolescents internalise gender expectations as to what is "appropriate" male and female behaviour in their gender ideology. Gender ideology can affect educational choices by influencing (1) how adolescents evaluate…

In Sweden, and in most other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, post-16 education is a general requirement to succeed in adult life. By the late 2000s, after about two decades of policies for student choice and publicly funded free schools, students' results in the Programme for International Student…

The purpose of this study was to investigate Finnish high school students' and teachers' perceptions of the effects of short-term Nordic study abroad programs in which they had participated. The data presented were based on a "mixed-methods strategy." The data set consisted of responses from 158 students and 92 teachers to a specifically…

This article investigates the function served by embarking on a teaching career in the Latin school system for recruitment to the clergy in early modern Sweden. The study is restricted to the eighty-nine teachers serving at Pitea Grammar School in Northern Sweden in the period from 1650 to 1849. The investigation pays considerable attention to the…

RAND Europe has performed a study for the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. This study aims to increase the understanding regarding the influence of societal developments and policy initiatives on the attractiveness and uptake of science and technology (S&T) in higher education. This study consists of an international…