The research spans from pre-school, out-of-school activities, and schools to adult education, higher education, university teacher training, and life-long learning. It covers different aspects of learning and assessment, inclusion and new technology, equality, multilinguality and newly arrived persons in the educational system, as well as organisational and education policy aspects.
Research is carried out within several different scientific disciplines. It contributes to knowledge development and reinforces the scientific basis for education.
Examples of research that we fund
At all times, parents have engaged in their children’s schooling, and in school as an institution. But what school issues have parents engaged in? How have they organised themselves, and in what contexts have they put forward their views on school, and in what way? What conflicts have existed between parents and schools?
The purpose of our project is to describe how parents’ relationship with Swedish schools has changed from the 1860s and up to 2012. Our preliminary final year for the investigation is 2012, to include the debate surrounding the 2011 curriculum for the school years 1–9. We focus on trust in school as an institution.
In the 19th century, there was some dissatisfaction and scepticism from parents towards the mandatory elementary school. Children’s upbringing and education had traditionally been conducted at home, under the supervision of the parents. With the mandatory elementary school, responsibility was gradually moved to the school, and the parents lost some of the control over their children.
When the welfare society emerged in the 20th century, the responsibility of the state and municipalities for children increased. In parallel with the emergence of mandatory 9-year schooling, a strong parent organisation also emerged, manifested primarily in the association “Hem och skola” (“Home and school”).
In the late 20th century, the situation changed. With free school choice, the importance of the parents’ associations diminished and a strongly organised parent collective was replaced by more individualised engagement.
Through archive studies of various types of source material, we will follow how the relationship between family and school as an institution has developed. Knowledge of this interplay is of relevance for both historical and current educational sciences research.
Project name: Trust and resistance: Swedish parents´ relationship to school 1861-2012 from an educational history perspective.
Project leader: Sara Backman Prytz, PhD Uppsala University, Department of Pedagogics, Didactics, and Education Studies
Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.
In line with artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT, becoming more commonly used for both writing and editing text, our way of looking at and discussing writing will probably change. AI-driven language tools open the door to new opportunities, but also give rise to questions of how teaching writing and the relationship between the writer and technology are changing.
We want to investigate how AI impacts on writing among children in lower secondary school. In the project, we will be mapping the AI tools that pupils and teachers use, and focus on three primary questions:
- What writing practices develop with AI, and how do they impact on teaching writing?
- How can the relationship between writer and technology be described?
- How does the use of AI affect the writers’ writing process?
We will be using text analysis, observations, and interviews, among other methods. The results from the study will become an input into discussions about ethical and educational consequences of using AI-based technologies when teaching writing.
Project name: Will writing ever be the same? On the impact of AI on writing processes and practices in lower secondary education
Project leader: Eva Lindgren, Professor at the Department of Language Studies, Umeå University
Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.
The leisure time, education, and healthcare of children and young persons is nowadays permeated by artificial intelligence (AI). They therefore need to have knowledge about AI-driven technology and its opportunities, but also about areas such as risks linked to social media, integrity protection, disinformation, and increased digital gaps. This is necessary to enable them to be active and critical members of society.
Educational politicians, policy-makers, and researchers across the world have in recent years discussed how schools are to equip pupils with such knowledge, often described using the concept of “AI literacy”. It is still unclear what AI literacy entails, and also how teachers are to teach educationally and ethically about AI, or even with AI. This discussion is largely lacking in Sweden, but in places such as USA, China and Singapore, national guidelines for pupil AI literacy have begun to be developed.
The purpose of our project is to develop a scientifically grounded national basis for AI literacy, relating to subject content, teaching activities, and educational models. In the first instance, we are aiming for the age group 9–13 years, as children in that age band are increasingly encountering AI in their everyday lives, but the results will be possible to generalise and contribute to the entire span of young persons’ education.
Together with experts within and outside Sweden, we will be defining what AI literacy in a Swedish perspective can and should be. Based on this, we will be developing course modules and educational methods. To evaluate the relevance of the course models’ content and the design of the teaching, we will finally make classroom observations and hold interviews with pupils and teachers.
The project is being conducted by a cross-disciplinary team in AI and educational sciences at Linköping University. It is run in close collaboration with teachers and pupils at schools in a Swedish municipality.
Project leader: Linnéa Stenliden, Associate Professor, Department of Behavioural Science and Learning, Linköping University
Project name: AI Literacy for Swedish Primary Education: A Co-Design Approach
Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.
In this project we will be studying how the government manages a central societal challenge: how to make citizens’ current educational investments interplay with the labour market’s needs in the future.
The government needs to be able to coordinate two tasks that are each difficult to manage: (1) to predict future competence needs in the labour market, and (2) to organise the current education system according to this prediction.
We will be studying both tasks, and focus particularly on the extent to which the forecasts and the plans interplay. Comparisons over time are necessary to investigate the use and precision of future predictions. The period we are studying stretches from 1959, when the labour market forecasts were institutionalised, to 2019.
This is an unresearched area. As it is about historically oriented social science, we base it on theories that are sensitive to time, theories that discuss change on different levels. The forecasts and planning documentation can be subject to continuous minor adjustments (“everyday period”), more thorough political attempts to change (“reform period”), and sometimes also be affected by structural economic crises (“system shift period”).
We are particularly interested in investigating how the predictions of competence needs, and the associated attempts at planning the educational system according to the predictions, is affected during periods of political and economic turbulence, with rapidly changing preconditions.
We will primarily be using public materials, such as Arbetskraftsbarometern (“The labour force barometer”), appropriations directives, Government budget bills, and yearbooks on education statistics.
Project leader: Martin Gustavsson, Associate Professor in Economic History, Stockholm University
Project name: The right education at the right time. A longitudinal study of the relation between labor market prognoses and educational planning, 1959-2019
Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.
Today, cartoon magazines are more varied than they have been for many decades, in terms of text and illlustrations, and also of the characters populating the pages. Some of them also touch on subjects such as ethnicity, gender, and class in engaging and provocative ways. This makes cartoons an excellent starting point for discussing issues relating to norms and norm criticism. Their visual form also makes them an easily accessible story format for many pupils.
In this project we want to investigate how cartoons can be used in lower and upper secondary schools to engage pupils in norm-critical discussions. The reason we have chosen these school years is partly because pupils still often read cartoons for children, at the same time as they are discovering cartoons for young persons and adults. At this age, many also have a need to discuss and question matters relating to identity, lifestyle, and norms.
Through video observations, our research team will study how pupils and teachers interact in the classroom: How do the cartoons contribute to challenging or reinforcing pupils’ social norms? What questions about gender, ethnicity and class, for example, do the reading give rise to, and how do the participants argue about them?
We see capturing the ability of cartoons to inspire discussion of such issues as an important contribution to classroom teaching and classroom research.
Project leader: Robert Aman, Associate Professor at the Department of Behavioural Science and Learning, Linköping University
Project name: Costumed Heroes in the Classroom - Using Comics for Engaging in Norm-critical Discussions in School
Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.
Schools set aside considerable resources annually for competence development, in the form of both teacher time and money. According to studies from USA, three per cent of school costs are used for this. Against this background, it is of course important that the competence development leads to beter teaching and pupil results.
There are studies that indicate that this is the case, but they have primarily been conducted during favourable conditions in USA, so even if the studies themselves are reliable, it is unclear to what extent they can be generalised to other countries and circumstances.
The purpose of our project is to investigate the effects of competence development on teaching and pupil results under conditions that are representative for teachers in general.
We will be using two decades’ worth of data from the international knowledge measurements TIMSS (2003–2019) and PIRLS (2001–2021). Most of the studies of competence development that have been based on these knowledge measurements have investigated individual years using statistical methods that cannot isolate the effect of competence development from other differences between the countries. Nor can these statistical methods determine whether effects measured are dependent on the competence development in itself, or the fact that teachers under some circumstances participate more in competence development.
In this project, we will instead be using quasi-experimental methods, such as difference-in-differences analysis, where the effects of competence development are compared within countries over time. In this way, the effects of competence development are isolated from effects of differences between school systems. Because the analyses will be based on national averages, the effects of competence development are also isolated from differences dependent on teachers with differing characteristics taking part in competence development to differing extents.
In addition to the causal effects of competence development on teaching and pupil results, we will also be analysing whether the effects vary due to the contents, duration, and intensity of the competence development, and what efffects circumstances at teacher and school level have on the effects of competence development.
Project leader: Nils Kirsten, Researcher at Mälardalen University College and Senior Lecturer in Special Paedagogics at Stockholm University
Project name: Studying the effects of teachers’ professional development through quasi-experimental analyses of TIMSS and PIRLS
Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.
Previous studies show that teaching can contribute to societal engagement by showing actions that can be taken by citizens and pointing out solutions that entail several actors acting. A central starting point for our project is that education and knowledge are important for giving young persons hope and tools to act.
The purpose of the project is to develop social sciences teaching about climate change, and how we can reduce climate-related emissions and adapt society to climate change in various ways. The Swedish National Agency for Education and many organisations in Sweden work towards the sustainable development goals, and our project contributes knowledge that can develop and support teachers in this work.
In conjunction with social sciences teachers in Year 9, we will be focusing on teaching how environmental problems arise, and what can be done to solve them with the help of politics, economics, and law. Together wih teachers, we will plan, implement, and revise teaching in consultation with an international expert team.
We consider it important to develop social sciences teaching in these areas, and at present there is hardly any research at all with this focus.
Project leader: Cecilia Lundholm, Professor of Education focusing on teaching and learning in social sciences subjects, Stockholm University
Project name: Climate change - developing social science teaching for advancing knowledge, action and hope
Read about the project in the Swecris database External link.
Research review of the field
Every four years, we produce a research review for educational sciences. It provides a picture of the current position of Swedish research in the area, and looks forward 5–10 years.
It also includes recommendations for initiatives to promote research in Sweden.
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