This paper explores whether and in what way “dual learning” can develop understanding of the relationship between structure/judgement and explores audit student’s perceptions of the audit profession. Work Integrated Learning (WIL) module, serving as a tool of enabling dual learning, represents the context for this exploration. The study is based on a focus group and individual interviews conducted with students performing their WIL. Our data and its analysis indicates that when in a WIL context, students develop awareness of the use of standards and checklists on the one hand and the importance of discretional judgement on the other. Based on these results, we theorise as to how dual learning manifests itself in students’ experiences and understanding of the relationship between structure and judgement.

In this article we report on one of four schools involved in a research project aiming to develop knowledge about the way in which teaching knowledge is conveyed with the help of information and communication technology. A particular interest was issues of fundamental values. Two classes in Grade 9 of Swedish compulsory school were studied, by observations and interviews, when seeking information about international conflicts on the Internet. The results show that most students searched for and collected information with a focus on mainly one dimension: the temporal dimension of the conflict in question. How this focus on chronologically ordered historical events affected the students' ability to develop the capacity for individual standpoints on questions concerning ethics, morals, equality, and democracy by way of studying conflicts is discussed.

Educational arenas are important sites for understanding how diversity and democracy become operationalised since they constitute and at the same time must attend to students' different needs. This article focuses on diversity from two specific angles: how research activities allow for particular ways of understanding human differences and how human pluralism is conceptualised in the organisation of education. These discussions emerge from the position that our use of language itself shapes human realities. The organisation of the segregated Swedish special schools for the deaf and research that focuses on this specific “human category” are used to illustrate and discuss issues pertaining to diversity and democracy. Pupils in special schools are conceptualised both as “handicapped” as well as belonging to a “linguistic-minority” group. Democratic tensions related to maintaining a separate school and conducting research on the human category defined on the basis of “deafness” are discussed and alternatives raised. Implications regarding (the lack of) pluralism in research perspectives and agendas are also discussed and the need for integrating studies of marginalisation into mainstream academia is highlighted.

Internationally, education reform has been directed towards describing educational goals that go beyond topic and content descriptions. The idea of mathematical competencies describes such goals. National tests have been seen as one way of communicating these goals and influence teaching. The present study analyses Swedish national tests in mathematics, and seeks evidence about the extent to which they represent these competencies and may play a role in reforming teaching. The results show that the national tests assess all competencies. However, the study also shows a limited focus on the competencies’ interpretation and evaluation aspects. Thus, the tests do not fully capture the complex nature of the competencies. This may cloud the reform message and restrict the possibilities for the tests to function as levers for reform.

The present study concerns Swedish teachers' practices with regard to individual development plans (IDPs), which are mandatory for all students in compulsory school. The conceptual points of departure are taken from Wartofsky's distinctions between primary, secondary, and tertiary artifacts and the concepts of inscription and translation. A total of 15 interviews were carried out with teachers at various stages of Swedish compulsory school grade levels. A typology of three qualitatively different ways of perceiving and working with IDP emerged. The ways in which teachers implement the use of IDPs—that is, their IDP practices—vary depending on perceived purpose and local contextual conditions. In the discussion section, it is argued that the creation of a typology as a way of categorizing practices should be viewed as a way of conceptually generalizing the empirical material. Finally, the results are problematized in terms of the possible implications different practices may have for students.

Children today live in different cultural settings. The pre-school culture is one of them and the media culture outside the pre-school another. These cultures are in different ways characterised by opposite and often even conflicting traditions. This article shows how educators and children handle this dilemma by using interaction as a tool to bring changes into the discourse in an educational setting while making stories in the pre-school by means of the multimedia functions of the computer. The interactional processes from three observations are described. In the discussion a comparison with another study with a constructivist point of departure is made. The comparison between the two studies showed contrasting results. The use of a socio-cultural perspective in the presented project make the context and the community visible, while the other study with its underlying assumptions of individually constructed knowledge make context and community invisible.

Within the phenomenographic research tradition, the object of learning depicts the capability that is to be learned by the learner. It has been argued that the object of learning cannot be fully known in advance since what is to be learned depends on the learners as well as on the content taught. The object of learning and its nature needs to be explored. In this paper, we analyze how a group of teachers collaboratively investigated an object of learning when they planned, enacted, analysed, and revised a mathematical task. We describe distinctions made by the group in the inquiry into teaching and learning, and how delimitations and distinctions made transformed the teaching and meaning of the object of learning.

This study shows that students, teachers, and parents in Swedish schools ascribe differing meanings and significance to students' participation in school in relation to academic achievement. Students see participation as mainly related to social interaction and not academic achievement, whilst teachers view students' participation as more closely related to activity and academic performance. Despite these differences, teachers and students are in close agreement regarding activities of a social nature. Teachers' and parents' ratings of parents' involvement in school demonstrate a higher agreement, but also correlate negatively with the academic achievement of the student. This is likely because communication is more frequent with parents of underachieving students than students demonstrating high academic performance. The partly inconsistent results in previous research regarding the relation between participation and academic achievement can here be explained by the choice of raters, as this connection only exists in ratings carried out by teachers.

A recent development of phenomenography, variation theory, is illustrated using a video recorded case of learning. From a variation theory perspective, to learn is to be aware of critical aspects of what is learned. The way we experience or understand something depends on what aspects we are aware of and can discern simultaneously. The possibility for the learner to discern and focus on these aspects is critical for learning. But we can only discern an aspect if we experience a variation in that aspect. Thus the possibility of experiencing variation in critical aspects is a necessary condition for learning. Variation theory is proposed to be a powerful means for describing and revealing conditions critical for learning in a pedagogical setting.

This paper is a retrospective descriptive content analysis of all identified school documents for 90 ninth-grade students with a history of truancy, collected from two Swedish compulsory schools. The study investigates individual, school, and psychosocial factors in the documents and three analyses are presented: (1) a general analysis of the documents, (2) a comparison of truant students with and without learning difficulties (LD), and (3) a comparison between students with LD who received no special educational support and those who did receive support. Predictors for truancy were credits in the fall of the eighth grade, difficulties in mathematics, and relationship problems. For 50% of the students, frequent truancy first became evident after the seventh grade. No connections were found between documented educational and social support, learning difficulties, and level of truancy.

The aim of this article is to examine the role of children’s awareness of the function of language use in expressing understanding. Preschool and elementary school children were asked two questions presenting a problem that could be described in classical mechanics and basic astronomy. They were then encouraged to reflect on their own language use when expressing their conceptions of the physical phenomena they had discussed. The article concerns learning from a phenomenographic perspective, with emphasis on the interplay between language use and meaning-making when developing understanding. Understanding is seen as an activity, while awareness of language use in understanding is regarded as an important aspect. 40 children in preschool and elementary school (six and ten years old respectively) participated in an empirical, qualitative investigation. A particular dialogue format was used, that has been developed within the intentional-expressive approach. Dialogue excerpts where the children expressed awareness of their own language and understanding were selected from the empirical material, and contextual analysis was used to delimit qualities of awareness expressed in these excerpts. The qualities of awareness were grouped in four descriptive categories: 1) awareness of the relation between language form and language meaning; 2) awareness of the nature of understanding; 3) awareness of the expressive function of language for new meaning; and 4) awareness of the function of language use in understanding. A widened definition of language awareness is proposed and discussed, in which awareness of the close relationship between language use and meaning-making is taken into consideration.