Previous studies investigating how the school choice paradigm shapes school segregation have found that students' ethnic school preferences drive school segregation by leading students to rank and change current schools following ethnic homophily orientations. This study investigates an intermediate moment in which these preferences contribute to…

In Sweden, as in many other countries, programming has been added to the curriculum in recent years. This paper explores how and under what conditions programming is transformed into teaching in technology education. Teachers in grade 7-9 were interviewed about what and how they teach about programming in the context of technology education, and…

In Sweden, compulsory school grades determine admission to upper-secondary school. The article maps grading outcomes in compulsory school for 1990-2017, when three different grading scales were used, in terms of students' distribution across grading steps. Statistics of grades for all Swedish grade 9 students (all school subjects) are used.…

When we give meanings to a physical space, we engage in place-making. With technologies, the place-making activities can be extended to virtual and hybrid spaces. In games, actual or virtual space can gain narrative and meaning transforming into a playce (i.e., a place for play). We suggest that playce-making (i.e., transforming a space into a…

In this article, I report a two-year study of working closely with science teachers and examining perceptions of Year 9 (12-13 year olds) students in 13 New Zealand secondary schools. The Constructivist Learning Environment Survey (CLES) was used. The questionnaire was administered to 327 students in the first year and 362 students in the second…

The transition from elementary to secondary school presents challenges for students, including the shift from a streamed to a destreamed mathematics curriculum. This paper explores the Ontario context, where all students began taking the same grade 9 mathematics course in 2021-2022. The Grade 9 Mathematics Research Project investigated current…

This study examined changes of test anxiety under the reform of the examination system in Taiwan. We sampled 46,361 Grade 9 students in Taiwan for 9 consecutive years starting from 2011 to collect data on their test anxiety, cram school attendance frequency, and academic achievement. Students' test anxiety level was compared between three periods:…

Extracurricular learning plays a key role in shaping students' interest in (not only) biology. The research examined which extracurricular areas related to biology can make biology more attractive for the participating Finnish and Czech students. A 5-point Likert scale questionnaire was administered to 178 Finnish and 195 Czech 9th-grade…

The aim of this study was to investigate how principals (n = 4) and teachers (n = 20) from four lower-secondary schools perceived and evaluated sustainable professional development processes in their schools. To understand their experiences and perceptions, interviews and focus group conversations were conducted at the end of a one-year research…

In the socioscientific issues (SSI) classroom, students need to cross the border between the subcultures of science (i.e., school science vs. everyday science). Traditional school contexts tend to present science as positivistic knowledge and unshakable truth unaffected by sociocultural factors. In contrast, everyday science, including SSI, is…

In the context of implementing a physical activity policy as part of a national school reform in Denmark, the purpose of this study was to explore lower secondary teachers' interpretations and perceptions of the physical activity policy with a focus on movement integration. In total, 14 teachers from four different schools were selected to take…

Based on the wide-ranging liberal reforms introduced in the early 1990s, Sweden has become one of the most prominent realizations of Milton Friedman's proposal for market-based schooling. From 1991 to 2012, the percentage of Swedish ninth-grade students attending independent, voucher-financed, private schools increased from 2.8% to 14.2%. A recent…

The study investigated student experiences of teaching practices in grade 9 at 2003, 2008 and 2014 after the Swedish education reforms of the 1990s. Teaching practices in both municipal and independent schools were related to student achievement and family background. Data from three nationally representative cohorts within the ongoing Swedish…

International large-scale assessments (ILSAs) have become an important part of the Swedish evaluation system. It is therefore of crucial importance to validate national measures of Swedish students' achievement with their ILSA test scores. Here, we offer results from such a validation study based on Swedish students' test scores in IEA's Trends in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the significance level of problems experienced in the transition from elementary to secondary education by using the rank-order scaling method. The study was conducted using a mixed-methods design. Forty-two eighth-and ninth-grade students from different types of public schools and 15 teachers were selected…