This article presents a reflection on what the qualitative interview method conducted with students can provide to (mathematics) education research in terms of in-depth knowledge and what critical methodological points should be taken into consideration. Repeated interviews with the same students in relation to research quality is considered. The…

This article studies issues of coloniality in so-called capacity-building projects between universities in Africa and Scandinavia. Even fifty years after independence, the African higher education landscape is a product of the colonial powers and subsequent uneven power relations, as argued by a number of researchers. The uneven geography and…

In Swedish preschools teachers seem to struggle with the concept of "teaching" in their day-to-day practices. A three-year collaborative research project involving preschool teachers, managers and researchers therefore aimed to describe and further develop knowledge about what could characterize teaching and co-assessment based on…

The design research programme learning by imitative and creative reasoning (LICR) studies whether, how and why tasks and teaching that enhance creative reasoning lead to a more productive struggle and more efficient learning than the common but inefficient task designs based on imitating given solution procedures. The purpose of this paper is to…

In the research on education, the field roughly covered by the concept of Bildung has seen a wide-ranging discussion philosophically but less has been said and done from an empirical and vocational perspective. Bildung includes matters such as: formation of character, ethical and aesthetic knowledge/capability, capacity for wise deliberation and…

Science teachers have differing views about what students should learn. Their teaching experience often leads them to develop habitual answers to students' questions, such as--why should I learn this? Some teachers argue that students need to learn more "canonical" science knowledge so that they can become scientists, while others tell…

Background: Research indicates that physical education teacher education (PETE) has only limited impact on how physical education (PE) is taught in schools. In this paper, our starting point is that the difficulties of challenging the dominating subject traditions in PE could be due to difficulties of challenging certain epistemological…

Unlike other disciplines in the social sciences, there has been relatively little attention paid to the structure of the undergraduate political science curriculum. This article reports the results of a representative survey of 200 political science programs in the United States, examining requirements for quantitative methods, research methods,…

Papers from the proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society was submitted in two volumes. Volume 1 contains papers submitted at the conference held in Sofia, Bulgaria, June 14-17, 2016. Volume 2 contains papers submitted at the 4th International Partner Conference of the International Research Centre…

Many universities with a strong research tradition have courses or modules examining the tradition's philosophies and methodologies to prepare their students to undertake research programmes. Recently, however, authors have called for wider debate concerning how these courses are taught and this paper aims to make a contribution to this debate.…

This report is an outline of the content of a 3-year project which is divided into seven phases. Through a review of the literature and interviews with circle leaders, Phase I investigates what knowledge exists on study circles. Phase II presents information on the educational psychology of the study circle gathered through questionnaires,…

Brief description of the focus of five areas of research into higher education conducted by the National Swedish Board of Universities and Colleges are presented. These five research or problem areas are as follows: the role of higher education in society, higher education as a system (structure and governance), the environment and working methods…

As expressed in this essay, the basic aim of pedagogical research on teaching methods should be to describe existing practices and to work out theories which will allow researchers to explain the causal relationships leading to extant teaching practices, which in their own turn reinforce the existing educational pattern. Research in the area of…

The purpose of this paper is to improve knowledge of the interaction between the learner, the teaching arrangement, and the content. For practical purposes the combination of the teaching arrangement and the content has been called the task, as these cannot successfully be treated separately in the teaching-learning process. Through analysis of…

Sweden's present school curricula emphasise personal flexibility, creativity, responsibility for learning and suggest new understandings of quality in learning, where individual freedom of choice is meant to help produce creative, motivated, alert, inquiring, self-governing and flexible users and developers of knowledge. These curriculum changes…