This article argues that many key theoretical concepts and core areas of study in the educational sciences are couched in paradigmatically vague terms. The shared features of vague terms and two different readings of vagueness are discussed. "Practice", which is widely used both as a theoretical and an empirical term in the field of…

In this article I discuss how to create personal narratives in life history research methodology. People tell stories of their lives, and the researchers make these stories into life histories. Based on theoretical perspectives on "discourse" inspired by Michel Foucault, narratives are seen as ways of positioning oneself as a…

In the 25 years since narrative inquiry emerged as a social science research methodology, it has been rapidly taken up in the social sciences. In what is sometimes called a "narrative revolution," researchers with diverse understandings have co-opted the concept of narrative inquiry and used narrative inquiry or narrative research to…

There is a widespread idea that in grounded theory (GT) research, the researcher has to delay the literature review until the end of the analysis to avoid contamination--a dictum that might turn educational researchers away from GT. Nevertheless, in this article the author (a) problematizes the dictum of delaying a literature review in classic…

There is a variation in terms of how researchers perceive the nature of research work. Previous research has mainly looked at the members of academia who already have established themselves in the scholarly community. We aimed at exploring the ways in which doctoral students perceived their thesis project and further, the relations of such…

Current international demands to strengthen the teaching profession have led to an increased development and use of professional content standards. The study aims to provide insight in the construct validity of content standards by researching experts' underlying assumptions and preferences when participating in a delphi method. In three rounds 21…

Current educational evaluation is institutionalized as an element in national educational policy in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. This article analyses how higher education and primary and lower secondary education have adopted and institutionalized educational evaluation. The analysis shows similarities and differences in organizing and practicing…

This article reviews ten predictive validity studies of the Swedish Scholastic Assessment Test (SweSAT). A primary result is that the predictive validity of the SweSAT seems to be highly dependent upon the study programme being examined; that is, the predictive validity is better at some programmes than others. When compared with the…

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…

The aim of this article is to introduce some theoretical frameworks which may develop the research going on within phenomenography and variation theory. Central concepts from the epistemological and cognitive theories of Charles S. Peirce, Niklas Luhmann and Margaret Boden are presented and their implications for phenomenography and variation…

What new tendencies can be made out in Swedish educational research in the last three decades? Briefly, the following developments are described: In the 1970s, a long-prevailing emphasis on quantitative research was challenged by a number of different qualitative methods. Traditional sociology of education, meanwhile, was challenged by the new…

The study aimed to investigate the pedagogy and beliefs of Icelandic pre-school and first-grade teachers during times of immense changes in the policy and trends of early childhood education. The practices of 2 pre-school teachers working with the oldest pre-school children and 2 primary school teachers working with the youngest primary school…

The purpose of this article is to critically examine some stated discrepancies between qualitative and quantitative research by taking actual studies as a starting point. It is argued that in ordinary empirical research within psychology and education, both approaches should be considered based on critical realism, and that the ordinary validity…

The purpose of the present paper is to emphasise the importance of inferences in an empirical study and to demonstrate how the inferences depend on a wider context. For that purpose a metamodel of central inferences is proposed, where each inference is characterised according to three dimensions: relevance, legitimacy, and validity. The relevance…

Relatively little is known about students' conceptions of research and, in particular, whether there are conceptually discrete patterns of variation that can be used to model this phenomenon in terms of research-as-learning outcomes. The present study explores the dimensionality of students' conceptions of research from two complementary research…