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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.

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. 

We reassess the relation between students’ socioeconomic status (SES) and their achievement by treating SES as multidimensional instead of unidimensional. We use data from almost 600,000 students in 77 countries participating in the 2018 PISA assessment of student achievement in math, science, and reading. The composite measure of SES that PISA uses can be broken down into six component variables that we here use as simultaneous predictors of achievement. This analysis yields several new insights. First, in the typical society, two predictors (books at home and parents’ highest occupational status) clearly outperform the rest. Second, a new composite measure based only on these two components often reveals substantially larger achievement gaps than those reported by PISA. Third, the analysis revealed remarkable differences between societies in the relation between achievement and wealth possessions. In most societies, the independent effect of wealth possessions on student achievement was zero or even slightly negative—but in the least developed societies it was strongly positive. These findings have implications for how SES achievement gaps should be measured and interpreted. Copyright © 2021 Eriksson, Lindvall, Helenius and Ryve.

One of the many things teachers do is to give feedback on their students' work. Feedback pointing out mistakes may be a key to learning, but it may also backfire. We hypothesized that feedback based on students' mistakes may have more positive effects in cultures where teachers have greater authority over students, which we assume to be cultures that are high on power distance and religiosity. To test this hypothesis we analyzed data from 49 countries taking part in the 2015 wave of the TIMSS assessment, in which students in the 4th and 8th grades were asked whether their teachers in mathematics and science told them how to do better when they had made a mistake. For each country we could then estimate the association between the reported use of mistake-based feedback and student achievement. Consistent with our hypothesis, the estimated effect of mistake-based feedback was positive only in certain countries, and these countries tended to be high on power distance and religiosity. These results highlight the importance of cultural values in educational practice.

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 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.

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 thesis is to contribute to the knowledge base on conceptualizations and impacts of teacher professional development (PD) programs. This is done by studying the case of two large-scale teacher PD programs. The first was mandatory for all public elementary school mathematics teachers in a larger Swedish municipality, and the second has been completed by 76% of all elementary school mathematics teachers in Sweden. In the municipality, and during the time frame in which this study was conducted, it was possible to make a comparison between teachers participating in different programs. Data on the programs’ impacts on teachers, instruction, and student achievement were gathered both immediately and one year after the teachers’ participation in one of them. In other words, the context of the study created an opportunity to respond to recent calls for studies that (a) examine the impacts of PD programs implemented on a larger scale, (b) adhere to PD programs’ impacts on teachers, instruction, and student achievement, (c) examine the sustainability of PD programs’ impacts, and (d) attend to variations within and between PD programs’ impacts. The results show that the studied programs are highly similar if characterized according to established research frameworks on what constitutes critical features of teacher PD. At the same time, they demonstrate different impacts, both between the programs and within them. These results suggested an elaboration of two of the five critical features of teacher PD: Content Focus and Coherence. Through the development and application of a more finely grained tool to characterize the programs’ Content Focus, differences between their characteristics were detected. Together with a systematic review of the PD research literature on Coherence, these results formed a basis for discussing plausible reasons for the difference in the programs’ impacts as well as elaborating on the critical features of Content Focus and Coherence. In summary, the thesis contributes: (a) empirical results in relation to large-scale teacher PD programs’ impacts; (b) methodological results in the form of tools for characterizing PD programs’ Content Focus and Coherence; and (c) theoretical results, as it examines established frameworks for characterizing teacher PD programs by using them in practice and, in light of the results, also suggests an elaboration of them.

This study contributes to the ongoing discussion of conceptualizations and measures of teacher professional development (PD). It does so by using data from the TIMSS 2015 teacher questionnaires to study the impact of Boost for mathematics (BfM), a large-scale teacher PD program, on Teacher confidence, Teacher collaboration, and Support from school leadership. The results indicate that BfM has had no sustainedimpact on Teacher confidence and Support from school leadership. A positive impacton Teacher collaboration was found for the 8th grade teachers, but not for the 4thgrade teachers. These results are somewhat contradictory to the ones presentedin national evaluations of BfM and potential explanations for the differences are discussed.

We are currently witnessing an increase of international interest in mathematics education, fueled partly by the growing concerns of students’ declining results, but also by changed perceptions of what mathematics students should master. In response, many initiatives have appeared in order to move away from traditional to more inquiry based approaches to teaching. Though several small-scale studies have contributed much to our understanding on how to support teachers in this work, there is still a lack of research conducted on a larger scale. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to add to our knowledge of how to support instructional improvement at scale. This is done by focusing on two common approaches to support mathematics teachers’ development of reform based practices: teacher professional development [PD] programs and curriculum materials. The thesis builds on four papers which are all connected to a project aiming at improving the mathematics instruction in a large Swedish municipality. The project includes a PD-program for almost 400 elementary teachers and the mathematics curriculum materials that teachers are using play a central role in the program. The first two papers focus on curriculum materials either by using surveys to compare teachers’ views of the support offered in the materials and their reported mathematics instruction, or by conducting textbook analyses to characterize how some commonly used materials communicate about, for example, goals of lessons. The results demonstrate that teachers using different materials experience different levels of support from them and also show variations in their reported instruction. These differences are further reflected in the textbook analyses which show that the materials offer teachers various support, for example regarding how they communicate about goals. The last two papers focus on teacher PD-programs either by comparing the effects of two programs on student achievement, or by using surveys to examine teachers’ views of one of the programs and its impact on their reported instruction. The results indicate that the two PD-programs have affected students’ achievement in different ways, demonstrating both decline and improvement. Even within the programs differences are revealed between students at the primary and secondary levels. These variations are further present in the teacher surveys, where the results show differences between teachers from different grade-levels. By drawing on the literature review and the results of the papers, the thesis ends with a discussion of possible elaborations of a widely used core conceptual framework for studying teacher PD.

This article reports on two professional development programs for mathematics teachers and their effects on student achievement. The projects’ design and their implementation within a larger municipality in Sweden, working together with over 90 teachers and 5000 students in elementary school, are described by using a set of core critical features of teacher professional development as identified in the research literature. Data on student achievement were collected at the beginning of the projects as well as one year after their implementation. The results demonstrate a significant interaction effect between year and intervention for grades 2, 8, and 9. Upon a closer examination of the descriptive statistics, the first project points at slight improvements for students in grade 2, while the results for grades 8 and 9 indicate a declining trend. The results for the second project are markedly different and indicate an improvement for student achievement in grades 8 and 9, while the results for grade 2 suggest a deterioration. Considering that both projects are conducted within the same context and are very similar when it comes to several of the critical features of professional development as identified in the research literature, these variances in results are noteworthy. Therefore, building on a closer examination of the projects’ critical features, the Swedish educational context, and results from teacher evaluations, the article ends with a discussion of possible explanations for the variations found between, as well as within, the two projects’ differing impact on student achievement.

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.

By comparing two large-scale professional development programs' content and impact on student achievement, we contribute to research on critical features of high quality professional development, especially content focus. Even though the programs are conducted in the same context and are highly similar if characterized according to established research frameworks, our results suggest that they differ in their impact on student achievement. We therefore develop an analytical framework that allow us to characterize the programs’ content and delivery in detail. Through this approach, we identify important differences between the programs that provide explanatory value in discussing reasons for their differing impacts.

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.

Lately, scholars have argued that there is a consensus on a number of critical features of effective teacher professional development (PD). This study presents the results of a systematic review of one of these features: coherence. The analysis and synthesis of 95 papers show that coherence in PD is conceptualized in various ways, and thus that the aforementioned consensus can be questioned. For example, should PD (1) be coherent with external factors, such as standards and assessments; (2) be internally coherent, for example that activities within PD programs should be aligned; or (3) create coherence between goals that are either predetermined or negotiated together with teachers? The different conceptualizations of coherence all implicate how teachers are positioned in relation to PD programs and, in the light of our results, we argue that teachers are primarily seen as implementers expected to align their instruction with external and predetermined goals and practices. 

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.

For mathematics teachers to achieve an instruction where students have the opportunity to develop different mathematical competencies is difficult without access to adequate support. The most commonly used supportive tools are by far mathematics textbooks. However, in Sweden, there is very little research available on the characteristics of these materials. In this paper we aim to examine the relationship between teachers’ (K–6) perceived support from the curriculum materials and their mathematics instruction, looking for patterns associated with commonly used textbooks. Our analysis of teachers’ responses to a questionnaire (n=278) showed major differences regarding perceived support for teachers using different textbooks. This pattern was also evident when the teachers were to report about their mathematics instruction.

Lärarhandledning till läromedel i matematik för årskurs 1

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.

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.

Research‐practice partnerships (RPPs) have drawn a great deal of attention as promising structures for bringing educational research and practice closer together. However, promising as RPPs may be, challenges still exist and there have been calls for studies investigating how research can be used within RPPs, and how to include practitioners more in the generation of research evidence. We address these calls by conducting a systematic review of the research literature on RPPs. Our review of 57 articles shows that research is used in various ways to inform both the methods and content for facilitating school improvement in RPPs. For instance, research on effective PD can be directly applied to a Professional Development (PD) programme to inform the methods of the intervention, or research findings can be used as the content of an intervention to facilitate teacher learning. Moreover, the results suggest that the type of research used to inform RPPs affects the kinds of opportunities for research use that are presented to practitioners; ranging from applying research directly to practice (instrumental use), to using research to extend understanding (conceptual use), or using research methods and methodologies in order to increase practitioners’ capacity for improving education (process use). Based on the results, we argue that the presented opportunities for research use in interventions strongly affect teachers’ opportunities to participate in the generation of research evidence and thereby achieve a more democratised evidence system.