Digitalization in Sweden has been promoted for six decades through national policies aimed at integrating technology into education. However, this ambitious effort has often faced a gap between political goals and actual classroom practices. After the significant "back-to-basics" movement following 2022, which included removing digital requirements and encouraging printed textbooks, this study explores the underlying epistemological and ideological conflicts that emerged. The main goal of the study is to analyze how different perspectives on technology and knowledge are expressed and addressed within the core legal documents of Swedish compulsory education. The methodology employed is Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), emphasizing the macro-level social, structural, and ideological roles of the curriculum language. The corpus includes a deliberately chosen collection of Swedish compulsory education curricula (Lpo94, Lgr11, Lgr22) and their legislative amendments (SKOLFS regulations), from 1994 to 2025. The study traces the policy development through three conflicting discursive phases: the Technocratic-Instrumental discourse, the Digital Competence Hegemony, and the final Recenterment Counter-Discourse. Findings reveal a clear discursive shift, where technology moved from being a practical tool to being an abstract, systemic necessity, culminating in its dramatic legislative removal by the state. The final policy reversal is seen as a direct ideological critique of the previous policy, fundamentally questioning the value of digital resources and re-centering traditional, material knowledge sources, like textbooks. This highlights curriculum law as a key arena for high-stakes political conflict over core educational values.
In this qualitative study, we examine 23 third-grade students' perceptions of choice of various writing tools when using an integrated keyboard on a tablet versus a pencil on paper. The students' reflections on their choice of writing tools are explored, as well as how their choice influences their writing motivation. Focus group interviews with students from two different schools in Northwestern Norway were conducted, where both tablets and pencil and paper were available from first grade. This study has used deductive analysis based on writing motivation research through an ABC-model. The results showed that most of the students in this study would choose the keyboard over the pencil, justifying their preferences based on their perceived proficiency in the writing process. However, the students communicated ergonomic issues associated with the integrated keyboard on the tablet. They claimed that the on-screen keyboard resulted in a poorer working posture, as it was tiring for their arms when typing on the integrated keyboard and expressed a desire for an external keyboard. This physical dimension of tablet use is under-researched in schools. Thus, the study has pedagogical implications, suggesting that teachers should be aware of these issues and vary the writing tools accordingly.
The online school is a county municipal initiative where students in public upper secondary schools can take one or more subjects online at their upper secondary school. The online school has grown in scope over a decade and now has a significant proportion of registered students in the country's county municipalities. This type of flexible education has so far received little attention from politicians and researchers, and in teacher education in Norway. In this study, we explore the online school from a student perspective. Based on a questionnaire, interview and observation of online education in a large county in Norway, we used thematic analysis to investigate how students experience teaching and learning in the online school in upper secondary school. Key findings in the study indicate that students were largely satisfied with the online school. At the same time, there was a gap between students who embraced and would recommend online subject offerings, and those who experienced subjects in the online school as disproportionately demanding. The online school appears to be a good alternative to on-site education for students who have strong academic aspirations, can develop independence in their individual work, and utilise the opportunities for interaction in the scheduled meetings with teachers and fellow students. In this way, the online school contributes to variety and flexibility in upper secondary school.
This article investigates teachers' sense of agency by exploring Norwegian lower secondary school teachers' accounts of being professionals in an increasingly digitalised teaching and learning environment. The analysis draws on a conceptual framework that highlights modalities of agency to explore how teachers use those different modalities when expressing their sense of agency. The findings show that teachers' sense of agency in digitalised teaching environments focuses on transformation and exploration. The article further highlights that teachers' sense of agency is individual yet characterised by being constituted in various intertwined relationships. Thus, the concepts of agentic space and modalic space of agency are introduced and coupled as an analytical tool for exploring the relational aspect of teachers' sense of agency.
In recent years, most of the research on the Flipped Classroom (FC) has primarily focused on examining students' learning outcomes and their perceptions of this approach. However, the present study aims to explore the impact of the FC on students' motivation and engagement by combining both quantitative and qualitative data in a single research effort, addressing the limited existing research in this area. The data for this investigation were collected from student teachers (STs) in the field of English as a foreign language (EFL) in a Norwegian teacher education program. The data collection instruments employed in this study involved a paper-based survey and focus group interviews. An explanatory sequential mixed methods research approach was adopted involving two phases. During Phase 1, a quasi-experimental design was employed, and quantitative data were obtained from two sub-groups: the control group (the non-flipped group) and the experimental group (the FC group). The data was collected through a paper-based survey using the Motivation and Engagement Scale- University/College (MESUC) instrument. Phase 2 of this study involved the collection of qualitative data from the experimental group through focus group interviews. Based on the findings obtained from the two phases, no statistically significant difference was observed between the two sub-groups regarding motivation and engagement. However, participants from the experimental group expressed in the focus group interviews that the FC approach promoted their motivation and engagement when compared to the lecture-based approach.
In 2017, two Norwegian universities, the University of Stavanger (UiS) and Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), faced the same challenges related to expectations of the increased digitization of teaching and learning. They had both chosen to implement a new digital Learning Management System (LMS) and therefore saw a unique opportunity to accompany each other through the implementation process. Both had ambitions to see this as a lever to put the digitization of teaching and digital learning environments on the agenda. As part of this collaboration, a follow-up research project was established to jointly collect and analyse data from the implementation process. The comparative analysis shows that the different implementation processes of the new LMS system at OsloMet and at UiS have resulted in different types of challenges and opportunities related to both structural conditions and the anchoring and institutionalization of changes.
During the last decades, digital devices have been introduced as a new medium for writing instruction, even in first-grade classrooms. The introduction of digital devices might change what writing activities teachers choose to engage their students in. This study addresses the question: Is there a difference when comparing teacher-reported writing activities in handwriting classrooms to classrooms using a digital device and postponing handwriting and classrooms utilizing a combination of digital writing and handwriting? A teacher questionnaire was administered to 33 Norwegian first-grade teachers, representing three different conditions: traditional handwriting instruction, digital device and postponing handwriting, and a combination of handwriting and digital writing. The teachers report on the writing activities they engage their students in. Writing activities include letter learning, amount of handwriting and digital writing, and amount of meaningful writing. Results confirm that the three conditions vary in the extent to which teachers allow their students to use different writing mediums for writing and learning letters; there is a slight tendency for teachers from the digital condition postponing handwriting to devote more time to meaningful writing.
This article ventures into the realm of digital game-based learning (DGBL) from the perspective of teachers, exploring how they envision and plan their future use of DGBL. The article draws on Actor-Network Theory, focusing on scenarios, and Jasanoff's concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. The analysis examines how a group of practising and preservice teachers has envisioned future DGBL practices and potential benefits. We study short, reflective texts written by this group as part of a DGBL course. They express visions about future activities that form an emerging sociotechnical imaginary. The article introduces a novel theoretical framing that illuminates the features of scenarios and emerging sociotechnical imaginaries. It offers fresh and valuable insights into how teachers interested in DGBL envision their future use of it. The texts also underscore the roles of teachers as leading classroom actors, as managers and mediators of digital games for learning.
A number of meta-analyses have compared traditional teaching and tutoring with Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and have discovered that ITSs can perform well in one-on-one tutoring for students. However, the existing ITSs have not handled the Norwegian language, and although large language models like GPT-4 are not developed as ITSs, they have clear similarities. The purpose of this position paper is to address how GPT-4 handles multilinguistic and cognitive challenges with Norwegian as an exam/test language, descriptive-procedural questions, and various exam and test contexts. This includes exams in medicine, nursing, psychology, dentistry, a theory test for military service, the Norwegian driving test, the Swedish university entrance test, the Norwegian citizenship test, and a national teacher exam in mathematics. A key concern is to investigate what kind of implications this could have for education. The results show that GPT-4 handles multilinguistic challenges well and performs remarkably well in Norwegian within both academic exam tasks and generic IQ and social tests, with elements of both descriptive and procedural questions. With an average precision rate of 94.26%, GPT-4's performance demonstrates a high degree of reliability. This is partly consistent with the international knowledge base in some areas, but the study differs from this by confirming that it also masters Norwegian exam and test contexts very well. Thus, it has the ability to adapt linguistically and culturally, something conventional ITSs do not possess. GPT-4 (Spring 2024) is also capable of conducting multimodal analyses of medical images in Norwegian, and handles minority languages in Sami, which ITSs usually cannot do. Despite certain limitations, the position paper claims that such findings contribute to a broader understanding GPT-4's multilinguistic and cognitive capabilities in formative and summative assessment contexts. Therefore, this position paper argues that it has significant implications for various aspects of the educational sector.
This article investigates students' expectations and negotiations concerning the plot of the narrative videogame Gone Home (Fullbright, 2013). The Norwegian term << spillnovelle >> [videogame short story] (Skaug et al., 2020) describes videogames of its kind, where reduced demand is put on the players' << operational literacy >> (Bourgonjon, 2014), a term describing one's ability to interact with the game. Together with cultural and critical literacy, these can be understood as extensions of Blau's (2003) literacy components. A key hypothesis is that lower operational literacy requirements will enable a clearer focus on the game's narrative, thereby demonstrating the applicability of such videogames as teaching resources in first-language subjects. If videogames are to be understood as << ergodic literature >>, as suggested by Aarseth (1997), it follows that literary modes of understanding and analysis can be applied to videogames. Through Peter Brooks' (1992) concept of plot, in particular plot expectation, students' individual experiences and interpretations-cultural and critical literacies-can be conceptualized as << reader composites >>, which shapes how a story is approached. Data collection was done through participatory observation as groups of students played Gone Home. Students were subsequently anonymized, and observations grouped by categories of literacy. As a consequence of my participation in the activity being observed, a post-qualitative approach was chosen to collate data, modelled on MacLure's (2013) concept of << glowing data >>. Significant findings include the importance of diverse experiences and literacy levels in order to create productive negotiations about the plot, and that plot expectations both within and outside the medium of videogames play a marked role in the interpretive work done by the students. Low operational literacy prevents neither the experience of plot nor game completion. However, high operational literacy engenders a distracting focus on mechanical criteria of success. This suggests that the intertwined narrative and ludic dimensions of a videogame present certain unique challenges to their employment as L1 teaching materials.
