The importance of introducing students to mechanistic reasoning (MR) early in their schooling is emphasised in research. The goal of this case study was to contribute with knowledge on how early primary students' (9-10 year-olds) MR in chemistry is expressed and developed in a classroom practice framed by model-based inquiry. The study focuses on…

Although elected representatives play an imperative role for the functioning of a formal democracy, educational research has so far not given much attention to the education and training offered to this group of people. A democratic dilemma may arise in the design and organisation of this education that relate to local governance and policy…

Statistical mechanics has received limited attention in physics education research and remains a relatively underrepresented topic even in research on upper-division physics courses. The purpose of this study was to explore potential challenges that physics students encounter when they solve statistical mechanics problems in groups. Adopting a…

Cosmology presents students with ideas that stimulate their curiosity and brings together various concepts from STEM that call on a variety of reasoning types across multiple representational modes, involving subtleties of spacetime relations, a variety of models and evidence requiring multiple lines of high precision observations. This study…

This qualitative study focuses on Grade 6 students' possibilities to engage in disciplinary writing practices in history teaching in a school located in a socially disadvantaged and linguistically diverse area. The aim is to contribute knowledge about how students negotiate different literacy expectations in the teaching. The researcher used…

In these times, described as an ´post-truth´ era where we are faced with information overload, it is a challenge to help students find relevant information, support their knowledge building and engage them in thinking critically about information and knowledge from different perspectives. This study investigates how a visual analytics interface…

The purpose of this study is to describe, critically analyse and discuss the Swedish system of assessing ethics education in compulsory school through national tests. The publicly available tests from 2013 for grades six and nine have been studied as have the assessment instructions for teachers. Staff responsible for the test construction have…

This study explores first-year university students' reasoning as they learn to draw Lewis structures. We also present a theoretical account of the formal procedure commonly taught for drawing these structures. Students' discussions during problem-solving activities were video recorded and detailed analyses of the discussions were made through the…

This study examines Swedish upper secondary school teachers' gendered conceptions about students' mathematical reasoning: whether reasoning was considered gendered and, if so, which type of reasoning was attributed to girls and boys. The sample consisted of 62 teachers from six different schools from four different locations in Sweden. The results…

A growing body of research has examined the experiential grounding of scientific thought and the role of experiential intuitive knowledge in science learning. Meanwhile, research in cognitive linguistics has identified many "conceptual metaphors" (CMs), metaphorical mappings between abstract concepts and experiential source domains,…

In Sweden, special needs of high-ability individuals have received little attention. For this purpose, adult Swedes with superior general mental ability (GMA; N = 302), defined by an IQ score greater than 130 on tests of abstract reasoning, answered a questionnaire regarding their views of themselves and their giftedness. The participants also…

A Swedish interview study of how deaf pupils reason about phenomena in a science context revealed significant variation in the extent to which pupils used scientific principles for reasoning about science phenomena, which suggests that for some pupils, school science offers little as a framework for reasoning. (Contains references.) (DB)

The development of critical ability, or cognitive criticism, is being studied in a two-year Swedish project described in this progress report. Cognitive criticism is valuable in all occupational fields, but especially futurology and technology assessment. This project proposes to make concrete the aims of critical training, and to identify and…

The purpose of this study was to compare traditional classification training for a set of abstract concepts with multiple-relations training consisting of inference practice and the use of a content diagram. To examine this, 200 undergraduate and graduate psychology students completed a Web-based tutorial covering the abstract concepts of a…

Ninety Swedish teenagers and adults with varying levels of formal education were interviewed about their own learning experiences and techniques. Subjects were then asked what they actually meant by learning. The concept was variously defined as: (1) an increase in knowledge (merely a synonym for the word learning); (2) memorizing; (3) an…