This article explores emotional aspects of national grade policies in Sweden as they are enacted in feedback practices at middle school level. Policy measures such as standardized testing and grades have over the last decades put emphasis on academic outcomes in Sweden. However, research suggests that this emphasis can impact students' emotions…

This paper studies grade 7 (age 13) students' expressed understanding about the equal sign/notion of equivalence in order to investigate what aspects of the concept that could be seen as an established knowledge at lower secondary school/middle school. Using items from different instruments and combining these to a new one that covered a broad…

Health is a resource for pupils' learning. Including health in the curriculum and teaching will enable pupils to understand the connection between health and learning. Action research has proved to be effective from a learning perspective. Our purpose was to explore whether, and how, using action-oriented research methods in a middle school-based…

The aim of the current study was to examine whether students' perceptions of teacher support at an individual-level, teacher support and well-functioning class climate at classroom-level, and teacher support and well-functioning class climate at school-level were associated with peer victimization. Data were obtained from a Student School Survey…

Programming has recently become part of Swedish technology education; pupils should now be able to analyse existing programmed technological solutions, and be able to design new ones. Teachers facing this curriculum change need guidance on how to teach and what to address, based on how pupils understand the content. The aim of this study is to…

We present an empirically based model for modeling the quality of pre-service teacher reflection. Conversations from twelve groups of a total of 47 pre-service teachers were video recorded and transcribed verbatim. First, we analyzed their conversations through practical epistemology analysis and an operationalization of Dewey's definition of…

Many children nowadays do not meet the recommended amount of physical activity during a day and are more sedentary, which is accompanied by decreased physical and social health, and well-being. For some children, the school can be the only outlet for playful and organised physical activity. Almost all children attend school for a large part of…

Historically, the Swedish school system has been designed to level out differences between pupils. There has also been scepticism about assessing pupils. However, new school reforms in Sweden centre on performance and tests. This article focuses on pupils (year 6) in Swedish elite schools and their perceptions of assessment. The pupils are in an…

This article focuses on Swedish students' understanding of study trips to Holocaust memorial sites. Although about a quarter of all Swedish teenagers visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum each year, with the majority visiting as students as part of their school curriculum, this study is the first to examine these study trips from a student…

The study identifies the perceptions, knowledge and expectations of school pupils between 14 and 18 years of age concerning the European Union, as well as their openness to European diversity, in France, Germany, Italy, Romania and Sweden and the European Schools in Brussels. Desk research and a survey across approximately 30 schools, 6 EU…

Deliberate practice and having a growth mindset have been hypothesized to increase school performance. But previous studies are few, have been limited to very short interventions, and on average resulted in small effect sizes on school performance. This study compared the attitudes, performance, and behavior of 130 7th-grade students taking part…

This article reports on the outcomes for students who experienced a strongly inclusive learning environment as a means for all to succeed. This Swedish lower secondary school dramatically improved its results, and the article reports the outcomes from the students' perspectives. Social capital, with its emphasis on relationships, was used to…

This study explores how aspects of teacher quality are related to student achievement and students' perceptions of instructional quality on the basis of eighth grade TIMSS 2011 data for Sweden. Indicators of teacher quality are coursework in mathematics as measured by the number of semesters of studying mathematics, years of teaching experience…

As leisure-time reading among adolescents declines in the western world, stakeholders try to increase students' motivation for school-related reading. We examine the relationship of students' autonomous and controlled reading motivation with their amount and experiences of school-related reading in four school subjects, controlling for students'…

It is often assumed that students' personal achievement goals are most beneficial when they match the goal structures of the classroom, but interaction between achievement goals and goal structures is not well researched. In this study, we aim at providing a nuanced picture of the direct, interaction, and nonlinear effects of achievement goals and…