Purpose: Investigate first- to third-graders' understandings of the police. Design/methodology/approach: Phenomenography is used to analyze elementary students' understandings of the police as a social institution Findings: The results indicate three qualitatively different ways of understanding the police. The police as: attributes, activities…

The interaction between student language use and sensemaking is an area in science learning that needs further elucidation in order to meet government standards in science education. In this study, concept mapping was used to explore the relationship between scientific language use and sensemaking defined as the interaction between the scientific…

This longitudinal study investigated the development of oral narrative skills in monolingual Swedish-speaking children (N = 17). The MAIN Cat/Dog stories were administered at four timepoints between age 4 and 9. Different narrative aspects were found to develop differently. In story comprehension, the children performed high already at T1 (4;4)…

Given young children's frequent use of the internet and the expectations formulated in policy documents such as the Swedish national curriculum, teachers need to promote critical awareness about information found online, even in the earliest years of schooling. Responding to the need for more information about how first-graders understand the…

In this chapter we are interested in how undergraduate physics students in three countries experience the equations they meet in their education. We asked over 350 students in the USA, Australia and Sweden the same simple question: How do you know when you understand a physics equation? Students wrote free-text answers to this question, and these…

Multilingual children living in areas with low socioeconomic status (SES) are at an increased risk of having speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). Many multilingual children with SLCN in Sweden have insufficient basic vocabulary knowledge in the majority language, preventing them from achieving the school's learning goals. However,…

Evolutionary theory explains a wide range of biological phenomena. Proper understanding of evolutionary mechanisms such as natural selection is therefore an essential goal for biology education. Unfortunately, natural selection has time and again proven difficult to teach and learn, and students' resulting understanding is often characterized by…

Prompted by the evidence of international tests of achievement that Swedish students have poor equation solving skills, this paper presents an interview study of upper secondary students' understanding of the topic. Students, from both vocational and academic tracks in two typical suburban upper secondary schools were invited to explain how a…

Technology is a compulsory subject at Swedish elementary schools and, according to the syllabus, helps students develop their ability to examine different technological solutions and reason how these solutions affect society, environment, and humans. An important challenge for educational research is to analyse and understand the consequences and…

Purpose: Intelligibility is a core concept of speech-language pathology, central both to the assessment of speech disorders and to intervention in such disorders. One purpose of this study was to investigate the reliability and usability of a single-word assessment procedure, the Swedish Test of Intelligibility for Children (STI-CH), in a clinical…

Effective feedback presupposes that students understand the task on which feedback is given. But what about the teachers formulating and assessing the task? Do they always understand it as intended? And if so, feedback on what? The purpose of this study is to examine how university teachers individually understand tasks distributed to students.…

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the intelligibility of children's atypical speech in relation to listeners' language background. Method: Forty-eight participants listened to and transcribed isolated words repeated by children with speech sound disorders. Participants were divided into, on the one hand, a multilingual group (n = 29) that…

Teachers around the world have started teaching programming at the K-9 level, some due to the formal introduction of programming in the national curriculum, others without such pressure and on their own initiative. In this study, we attempted to understand which skills -- both CT-related and general -- are developed among pupils in the process of…

Children with a history of developmental language disorder (DLD) entering school are a challenge for classroom teachers. Teachers are often not very familiar with DLD, and language difficulties in school age children are often not obvious in context-supported everyday language. However, their language is still vulnerable. The teachers' way of…

Although school attendance in Sweden is mandatory, there are numerous absentee students. Research studies have recognized that several of the absentee students have neuropsychiatric disabilities. However, few studies have focused on the voices of these specific students. Therefore, this study focused on their experiences of being out of school.…