Pupils’ perceptions of grades: a narrative analysis of stories about getting graded for the first time

The starting point for this article is changes in the Swedish assessment system which stated that pupils are to receive grade reports in school year 6 (12–13 years old) during the academic year 2012–2013. Since the 1970s, compulsory school pupils have received their first grade reports in grade 7 and/or 8. The issue here is to present pupils’ narratives about the possible future significance of grade reports in school year 6. Pupils were interviewed about their experiences of getting their first grade reports, and a narrative analysis was conducted. More specifically, we investigated pupils’ conceptions of themselves as pupils and of their future possibilities, as described in their stories of getting their first grade report. The findings show that pupils perceive grades in year 6 differently, showing both adaption and resistance to the new grading discourse. Our conclusion concerns pupils’ learning and well-being when national assessment policies are changed.     

School climate and psychosomatic health: a multilevel analysis

This study examined the importance of aspects of the school climate for adolescents' psychosomatic health using multilevel modelling. Analyses were based on 18,571 ninth-grade students distributed over 1,026 classes and 284 schools in the greater Stockholm area in 2004 and 2006. Both individual- and contextual-level associations between aspects of the school climate and student health were explored. While most of the aspects of the school climate under study were related to health at the individual level, only 2 of them seemed to convey an additional contextual effect reaching beyond the students who were directly affected. Thus, better health was found in classes where many students reported getting immediate teacher help with their schoolwork, and worse health was found in classes where harassment was more commonly reported. These findings remained when a number of school-contextual characteristics were adjusted for.     

Learning Practices in Vocational Education

The article describes the learning practices created by 12 vocational teachers from five programmes by the tasks they give their students to work with. 'Classroom tasks' were observed and analysed according to their content, their forms, and the tools used. Further, the texts used for/written in connection with the tasks were classified. Three types of tasks were identified: school tasks, simulation tasks and vocational tasks. Many tasks in all three categories required the students to read quite a lot. The texts the students were to read were of two kinds: school texts and vocational texts (manuals, handbooks etc.). Most of the texts were vocational and were part of the tools the students were supposed to use in their daily work. This indicates that vocational education is often assumed to be 'practical'--as opposed to 'theoretical' programmes that prepare for further studies--also increasingly rely on texts. The texts you read and how you read them are, however, specific for each vocational area. The different learning practices, represented by the tasks in this study, can be described as bridging from one social practice, that of the school, to another--that of the vocation.     

Childhood social status in society and school: implications for the transition to higher levels of education

While research into educational inequalities emphasises childhood socio‐economic status, this study adds another dimension of status into the analysis; namely, the child’s own social position among its peers. The aim was to examine whether socio‐economic status and peer status can both be linked to educational transitions and, if so, whether they constitute overlapping paths. In a second step of analyses, the relationship between peer status and adult unemployment was investigated. Data were derived from a longitudinal study using a 1953 cohort born in Stockholm, Sweden. Our results suggest that children with higher socio‐economic status and children with higher peer status are consistently more likely than their lower status peers to proceed to the next level of education, and that the effects of socio‐economic status and peer status hardly overlapped at all. Furthermore, educational differences by peer status seem to involve consequences for the studied subjects’ contemporary labour market opportunities.     

School climate and exposure to bullying: a multilevel study

This study investigates associations between aspects of school climate, measured by students’ assessments aggregated to the class level, and exposure to bullying, measured at the individual level. The data were derived from the Stockholm School Survey of 2006–2010 with information from 16,418 ninth-grade students (aged 15–16 years) distributed over 871 classes and 259 schools. Three-level binary logistic regression was applied. Two of the studied school climate aspects in particular were linked with the occurrence of bullying: In classes where a high proportion of students claimed to be aware of the school rules and in classes where a high proportion of students stated that adults intervene against bullying, fewer students reported having been bullied. The findings imply that striving toward a school climate characterized by transparent rules and clear disapproval of harassments may help to reduce bullying.     

Cross-sex friendship in children: Gender patterns and cultural perspectives

An understanding of cross-sex friendship patterns can highlight male-female interactions in ways not revealed through investigations of same-sex friendships. Therefore, children's cross-sex friendship choices in two cultures were studied to explore culture- and gender-related biases in the socialization of sex roles. Fifth graders in America and Sweden responded to two sociometric questions about help with schoolwork and secret-sharing. Differences across gender and culture lines provided support for the existence of biases in gender-role training that may differ among cultures. Questions were raised regarding the role of social agents in the development of social cognitions, the amenability to change of traditional sex-typed behaviors, and the differences among cultures that might influence social-cognitive development. The fact that some children make cross-sex choices suggests that socialization practices do not influence all children uniformly. These differences bear further study.     

School performance,school segregation,and stress-related symptoms: comparing Helsinki and Stockholm

This study investigates cross-cultural differences in the interrelation between school performance, school segregation, and stress-related health among 9th-grade students in the greater Stockholm and Helsinki areas. Contrary to the Swedish case, it has been proposed that school performance in Finland is largely independent of the specific school attended and of socioeconomic background. Finland also stands out as a contrast to Sweden considering their better performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys. Our first 2 hypotheses explore whether there is a greater degree of school segregation in Stockholm than in Helsinki, and our second pair of hypotheses test whether Finland’s school success has come at a price in terms of increased student stress. Our results largely confirm that Stockholm schools are less “equal” and more segregated than those in Helsinki. We also find that school performance is more strongly linked to stress-related complaints among students in Helsinki than in Stockholm, especially among Finnish girls.