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Vi ger i denna rapport en översikt till forskning om effekter av lärares kompetensutveckling på undervisning och elevers lärande, samt värderar några kompetensutvecklingsmodeller och deras möjliga omsättning i nationell kompetensutveckling i Sverige.

Rapportens slutsatser och rekommendationer är sammanfattningsvis:

1. Det finns gott forskningsstöd för att högkvalitativ kompetensutveckling kan förbättra undervisning och elevers lärande, medan den kompetensutveckling som lärare vanligtvis deltar i sannolikt inte leder till sådana effekter.

2. Kompetensutveckling som förbättrar elevers lärande är med stor sannolikhet samhällsekonomiskt lönsam.

3. Vi lämnar tre huvudsakliga rekommendationer, oavsett vilken modell för lärares kompetensutveckling som väljs:

a. Lärare bör få stöd genom flera olika mekanismer eftersom det ökar sannolikheten att lärare på ett kvalitativt och varaktigt sätt omsätter nyvunna kunskaper till undervisningen.

b. Modellen bör bestå av fristående delar med relativt kort varaktighet eftersom insatser inte behöver ha lång varaktighet för att uppvisa effekter på undervisning och elevers lärande och insatser med kortare varaktighet är mer sparsamma med lärares tid och skolans resurser.

c. Modellen bör rekommendera undervisningssätt med gott stöd i tillförlitlig forskning om vilka undervisningssätt som förbättrar elevers lärande (med hänsyn till faktorer såsom skolämne, årskurs och kontext) eftersom det annars är osannolikt att elevers lärande förbättras.

4. För att öka sannolikheten att nationell kompetensutveckling förbättrar undervisning och elevers lärande bör Skolverket:

a. Utveckla strukturer för att värdera forskningsstöd för kompetensutvecklingens innehåll, t ex vilka undervisningssätt som gynnar elevers lärande, med hänsyn till faktorer såsom skolämne, årskurs och kontext.

b. Använda effektvärdering inom ramen för försöksverksamhet som underlag för utvecklingsarbete innan insatser skalas upp nationellt, samt värdera effekter av uppskalade insatser.

In this report, we provide a review of research on the effects of teachers’ professional development (PD) on teaching and student learning, and evaluate some PD models and their potential application in national PD in Sweden.

The report’s conclusions and recommendations can be summarized as follows:

1.     There is strong evidence that high-quality PD can improve teaching and student learning, while the PD that teachers typically participate in is unlikely to lead to such effects.

2.     PD that improves student learning is very likely to be economically beneficial for society.

3.     We present three main recommendations, regardless of which model for teacher PD that is chosen:

a. Teachers should receive support through several mechanisms because this increases the likelihood that they will qualitatively and sustainably apply newly acquired knowledge to their teaching.

b. The model should consist of parts with relatively short duration because PD programs do not need to have long duration to produce effects on teaching and student learning, and shorter interventions use teachers’ time and school resources more sparingly.

c. The model should recommend ways of teaching that are well-supported by reliable research on which ways of teaching improve student learning (considering factors such as subject, grade level, and context), as it is otherwise unlikely that student learning will improve.

4.     To increase the likelihood that national PD improves teaching and student learning, the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket) should:

a. Develop structures to assess the research support for the content of PD, for example, which ways of teaching benefit student learning, taking into account factors such as subject, grade level, and context.

b. Use impact evaluation within the framework of pilot programs before scaling up initiatives nationally, as well as evaluate the effects of scaled-up initiatives.

IntroductionIs the socioeconomic gap in academic achievement larger among boys than girls? Several scholars have proposed such an interaction between socioeconomic status (SES) and gender. Prior empirical studies have yielded mixed evidence, but they have been conducted almost exclusively in Western countries. Here we propose the hypothesis that the SES-gender interaction is stronger in less gender-equal societies.MethodsWe estimated the SES-gender interaction in 36 countries using data from two international large-scale assessments (PIRLS and TIMSS). The degree of gender equality was measured by the Global Gender Gap Index.ResultsConsistent with the hypothesis, the SES-gender interaction was stronger in societies with less gender equality.DiscussionOur findings suggest that cultural factors determine how the socioeconomic achievement gap differs between boys and girls.

We examine the effects of a year-long national-scale professional development (PD) program on mathematics instructional quality. In contrast to previous studies examining the effects of this program on instruction by comparing before and after participation or participants and non-participants, we examine whether instructional quality changed during the program. More specifically, we conduct an analysis of 174 video-recorded mathematics lessons given by 52 teachers during their year of participation. Contrary to previous studies, the results demonstrate that the instructional quality did not improve over the course of the PD. We suggest that the explanations for the diverging results concern how, when, and to what extent instructional quality changes in PD programs. Specifically, we discuss how the explanations may illuminate the significance of PD duration for PD effects, and how these effects may be mediated by features concerning the PD content and the scale at which the program is implemented.

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are emerging as a promising approach for educational change by closing the gap between educational research and practice. However, these partnerships face several challenges, such as addressing cultural differences as well as relationship-building in a historically unbalanced relationship between researchers and practitioners. Scholars have argued that these cultural differences, also called boundaries, have learning potential if approached constructively, but that we need to know more about what characterizes them in an educational context. The aim of this study is to contribute to our understanding of frameworks for RPPs. By analysing 45 hours of video recordings from meetings in an RPP between four researchers and 300 practitioners, the study offers a characterization of seven different boundaries organized into three different boundary themes: a) prerequisites for collaboration, b) collaborative practices, and c) collaborative content. Moreover, the different boundaries affect the positioning of different actors in the RPP. For example, depending on the boundary expressed, teachers are positioned as either flawed implementers or co-inquirers. We argue that the boundaries and different participant positions within the RPPs they reinforce may affect their learning potentials.

This study examines the effect of teachers’ participation in mathematics and science professional development (PD) on student achievement in nationally representative settings. We use data from all OECD countries in the 2003 through 2019 cycles of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and apply student fixed effects to control for unobserved student characteristics and school quality. We find a small negative average effect of PD participation, with negative effects concentrated among high-performing students. We discuss potential explanations of these results and suggest ways PD studies may inform the PD in which teachers typically participate.

The aim of this study is to characterize upper secondary school teachers’ views on and use of digital learning resources (DLR) for teaching and explore whether there are differences between teachers’ profiles in relation to demographic aspects. The data was collected through an online survey from a sample of 243 teachers from 23 upper secondary schools in Sweden. The survey included questions on why and how teachers used DLR for teaching. The data was analysed using exploratory factor, cluster, and post hoc analyses. Five different teacher profiles were identified: high, high general, medium, medium general, and low DLR capacity. These profiles differed significantly concerning self-reported skills, use, and purposes of DLR. Moreover, the five profiles also differ significantly on demographic factors such as teacher degree. These findings have important implications for the design of in-service teacher training and pre-service teacher education programs concerning teachers’ skills, didactic purposes, and use of DLR.

In this article, we discuss the methodological implications of data and theory integration for Theory-Based Evaluation (TBE). TBE is a family of approaches to program evaluation that use program theories as instruments to answer questions about whether, how, and why a program works. Some of the groundwork about TBE has expressed the idea that a proper program theory should specify the intervening mechanisms underlying the program outcome. In the present article, we discuss in what way data and theory integration can help evaluators in constructing and refining mechanistic program theories. The paper argues that a mechanism is both a network of entities and activities and a network of counterfactual relations. Furthermore, we argue that although data integration typically provides information about different parts of a program, it is the integration of theory that provides the most important mechanistic insights.

The number of books at home is commonly used as a proxy for socioeconomic status in educational studies. While both parents’ and students’ reports of the number of books at home are relatively strong predictors of student achievement, they often disagree with each other. When interpreting findings of analyses that measure socioeconomic status using books at home, it is important to understand how findings may be biased by the imperfect reliability of the data. For example, it was recently suggested that especially low-achieving students tend to underestimate the number of books at home, so that use of such data would lead researchers to overestimate the association between books at home and achievement. Here we take a closer look at how students’ and parents’ reports of the number of books at home relate to literacy among fourth grade students, by analyzing data from more than 250,000 students in 47 countries participating in 2011 PIRLS. Contrary to prior claims, we find more downward bias in estimates of books at home among high-achieving students than among low-achieving students, but unsystematic errors appear to be larger among low-achieving students. This holds within almost every country. It also holds between countries, that is, errors in estimates of books at home are larger in low-achieving countries. This has implications for studies of the association between books at home and achievement: the strength of the association will generally be underestimated, and this problem is exacerbated in low-achieving countries and among low-achieving students. 

By examining the effects of a national-scale teacher professional development (PD) program on instructional practices and student mathematics achievement, we contribute to calls for empirical studies investigating the impacts of such programs conducted at scale. The program corresponds well with core critical features of high-quality teacher PD and mathematics instruction identified in the literature, and the results indicate that it has had a small but statistical significant impact on teachers’ instructional practices. However, no effect was found for student achievement. These results raise questions as to the importance of the critical features and how programs incorporating all of them affect instructional practices and student achievement.

There is an increasing movement in education towards closer collaboration between researchers and practitioners and research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are seen as one promising approach. However, some challenges still exist. To work in a new collaborative context such as RPPs, researchers and practitioners must adjust their roles in relation to each other. To better inform this movement, we conducted a systematic literature review of 80 articles investigating what roles researchers and practitioners are described to assume in RPPs. The results demonstrate eight different roles for researchers and practitioners, respectively, which reflect variations in both the main processes and tasks for school improvement in RPPs, as well as how these tasks are divided between the participants. Further, based on how tasks are distributed, the different roles provide varying opportunities to pursue a democratisation of evidence.