The study and resulting book Undervisningskvalitet i svenska klassrum (Teaching Quality in Swedish Classrooms) presents a descriptive analysis of prevalent teaching practices in language arts, mathematics and social science in Sweden. The book's editor, Michael Tengberg, discusses the insights gained from the research.
What was the purpose of this study?
The initial purpose was to try to link specific features of instruction to students’ achievement over time. The study was a replication of the LISA Norway study, and it’s designed in the same way, using the same instruments and measures. We studied 38 classrooms in language arts, 35 in mathematics and eight in social science.
It turned out that linking instruction to achievement was rather difficult, but the descriptive analyses of classroom practices are interesting enough in their own right.
If you want to develop the quality of instruction, you first need to know something about its current status, its strengths and weaknesses. And truth is we have limited knowledge about the everyday practices of teaching in Nordic classrooms.
In Sweden, as far as we know, there have been very few, if any, large-scale studies based on observations of ordinary teaching practices in the last couple of decades. We wanted to demonstrate that it is possible to do this, that it is possible to use a different type of research methodology in order to gain a more systematic understanding of the patterns of teaching and learning in Swedish classrooms.
Did you see any differences between the Norwegian and Swedish school systems?
The general impression at a system level is that Norway and Sweden are very similar in terms of predominant teaching practices. In specific areas, however, you can spot minor differences. In literature instruction, for example, we know that Norwegian students often read shorter texts while we found that Swedish students would more often read novels in whole-class readings. Norwegian teachers also seem to focus more on literary style and often treat literature as a prelude to their students’ future writing assignments. Swedish teachers on the other hand would focus their analysis on the themes of stories or on story comprehension more generally.
However, the big picture is still the extent to which teachers in both Norway and Sweden use scaffolding practices, or the extent to which they challenge their students intellectually etc. And this is quite similar in the two countries.
What did you find out the practices taking place in classrooms?
One rather striking pattern from our analysis is that teachers are generally very good at organizing the lesson. They instruct their students on what to do, what kind of tasks they're supposed to solve, how much time they get to do it, who to work with and so on. They provide clear directives to organize lessons, and they do this very well.
But when it comes to the pedagogical scaffolding – for example providing students with content-related strategies to solve a particular task effectively, or connecting new lesson content to previous lessons or students’ prior knowledge – that type of instruction is much less structured, and less explicit. So what we observe is a rather distinct contrast between those two aspects of pedagogical leadership in the classroom.
Another interesting finding of the study was that there were quite large differences in teaching quality between classrooms, even between neighbouring classrooms at the same school. Since the study included multiple classrooms from all schools in the sample, we were able to examine both between-schools and between-classrooms differences on all variables.
It turned out that the differences in terms of quality of teaching could vary significantly between two classrooms at the same school, even when the teachers had been doing the lesson planning together.
Any ideas on what to attribute that variation to?
The short answer is no. We don’t really have the data to explain these differences. In fact, large classroom variation was also found in terms of average achievements and in students’ perception of their teachers’ teaching.
We did examine whether variation of teachers’ practice related to age, education, or length of teaching experience. It turned out that in language arts, older teachers scored significantly higher on PLATO.* In mathematics, the results were a bit difficult to interpret. Teachers in their 40s (aged 40-49) scored significantly higher than both younger and older colleagues in mathematics. Length of education had some effect in language arts whereas length of experience had no effect in either language arts or mathematics.
Was there anything that stood out about classrooms in Sweden?
One thing that perhaps stood out a bit was the results from the student survey, where students reported that they thought their teachers were good at explaining content which they found difficult to understand. Teachers were good at helping students understand difficult content.
This is not surprising from a research perspective – actually it is something that student surveys have reported about Swedish teachers for several decades – but if you listen to the public debate about teachers’ competence, this aspect is very rarely mentioned. In this case, Sweden also stands out a bit in comparison with the other Nordic countries; Swedish students were actually more likely to report this than students in the other Nordic countries were.
Another thing that stood out was that the Swedish students seem to feel that they're not allowed to contribute to deciding on methods and content during lessons. I think a common assumption about teaching in the Nordic countries is that students have a lot of say in how things are done in the classroom, but apparently the students don't see it that way themselves.
Undervisningskvalitet i svenska klassrum is published by Studentlitteratur and is available for purchase here.
*PLATO (Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observations) is a classroom observation system designed to capture features of classroom instruction.
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