This article concerns how teaching artists, associated with the Swedish Royal Opera, provided aesthetic opportunities to students during a three-year school project. One intervention is scrutinized in which the storybook of Red Riding Hood was used as a starting point for further aesthetic learning, culminating in a shadow theatre performance.…

The outcomes of a longitudinal randomized number sense intervention including pre-, post- and follow-up tests are reported. The intervention was conducted in Grade 0 when children were six years old. Using Concrete-Representational-Abstract principles, a structured explicit 10-week program focusing on numbers and collective reasoning about…

The topic of this article is how primary school students express ideas about the "origins of the nation." The study is based on texts written by Swedish students aged 12-13 about a historical event well embedded in Swedish national mythology, the rise to power of Swedish "founding father" Gustav Vasa. The analysis is inspired…

This article is aimed to demonstrate how language policy at the local school level may create space for translanguaging. Focus is on a Mother Tongue (MT) classroom for Somali in a primary school in Sweden by way of an analysis of layers of language policy, with focus on spatial aspects. The empirical material consists of policy documents,…

This article concerns how teachers can use physical artefacts as mediating means to support emergent bilingual students' learning in science class. The data consist of non-participant observations in a Swedish 3rd grade (9-10 years old) class working with electricity. All students were bilingual, but in different minority languages and the teacher…

An increased focus on standardized testing of students has had the unintended effect of eroding curriculum time allocated to physical education (PE). The empirical literature on increasing the proportion of total curriculum time allocated to PE was reviewed and a series of meta-analyses conducted to estimate the mean effect of doing so on student…

Background: In Sweden, the introduction of new national curricula for primary and secondary schools has implied, for example, that programming has become a compulsory part of mathematics education since August 2018. We study Swedish fifth and sixth graders and the distributions of their motivational values related to studying mathematics with…

This article explores children's development of problem-solving practices through multimodal engagements in digital activities. The study is based on analyses of a video recorded peer group activity in which two children, within the context of a project on computational thinking using the software "Scratch," collaboratively work to solve…

The aim of this paper is to analyse how Swedish grade three children are discursively positioned as pupils when they are taking national tests in mathematics and when they reflect on the testing situation afterwards. With support from theories about affective-discursive assemblages, we explore children's body language, emotions, and talk in light…

This study investigates how Swedish learners make sense of and perceive English instruction and the process of foreign language learning in a target language-only primary school classroom. In small group discussions, 26 learners aged 9-10 were audio recorded while discussing questions related to their language learner beliefs and their classroom…

Purpose: The use of modern technology has many challenges and risks. However, by collaborating with schoolchildren, ideas to effectively promote health and learning in school can be identified. The purpose of this paper is to examine how a participatory approach can deepen the understanding of how schoolchildren relate to and use gamification as a…

It is well-documented that academic achievement is associated with students' self-perceptions of their academic abilities, that is, their academic self-concepts. However, low-achieving students may apply self-protective strategies to maintain a favorable academic self-concept when evaluating their academic abilities. Consequently, the relation…

The paper explores children and youths' perceptions of the reasons for bullying in multicultural schools. How do their different backgrounds explain the variations in those perceptions? The questions will be answered based on data gathered from 9 to 10, 12 to 13 and 15 to 16-year-old students (N = 2781) in Estonia, Finland and Sweden. A survey and…

Programming and computational thinking have emerged as compulsory skills in elementary school education. In 2018, Sweden has integrated programming in mathematics education with the rationale that it fosters problem solving and logical thinking skills and motivates students to learn mathematics. We investigated how teachers introduce programming…

In a scientific effort to understand the reasons for low physical-activity levels among children, there is a need to consider how children perceive and interact with their complex environments holistically. This study outlines an image of the perceived landscape within which children in two lower-socioeconomic contexts engage in daily physical…