Purpose: This article examines high school students' understanding of the welfare state as a political issue and discusses how it can be approached in the classroom. The study was conducted within a social-science educational context and departs from a perspective from which educational goals can be seen as intrinsic (goals closely connected to…

This article reports from an empirical study on the affordances and constraints for using staged socio-political debates for authentic summative assessment of scientific literacy. The article focuses on conditions for student participation and what purposes emerge in student interaction in a socio-political debate. As part of the research project,…

This article provides evidence that it is worthwhile to reconsider the traditional research circle method as a means of involving people in the third age in fulfilling their needs to participate in learning activities and make their voices heard. The findings are based on three cases of research circles consistently driven by the interests of the…