Researchers and policy-makers have recognized the importance of including and promoting socioscientific argumentation in science education worldwide. The Swedish curriculum focuses more than ever on socioscientific issues (SSI) as well. However, teaching socioscientific argumentation is not an easy task for science teachers and one of the more distinguished difficulties is the assessment of students’ performance. In this study, we investigate and compare how science and Swedish language teachers, participating in an SSI-driven project, assessed students’ written argumentation about global warming. Swedish language teachers have a long history of teaching and assessing argumentation and therefore it was of interest to identify possible gaps between the two groups of teachers’ assessment practices. The results showed that the science teachers focused on students’ content knowledge within their subjects, whereas the Swedish language teachers included students’ abilities to select and use content knowledge from reliable reference resources, the structure of the argumentation and the form of language used. Since the Swedish language teachers’ assessment correlated more with previous research about quality in socioscientific argumentation, we suggest that a closer co-operation between the two groups could be beneficial in terms of enhancing the quality of assessment. Moreover, SSI teaching and learning as well as assessment of socioscientific argumentation ought to be included in teacher training programs for both pre- and in-service science teachers.

Based on the EU FP 7 project, PROFILES, this article presents our findings from a three-round Delphi study conducted in Sweden that aimed at establishing a consensus on how science education should be developed for citizens to enhance civic scientific literacy. A total of 100 stakeholders (9th graders, school teachers, scientists, and science education researchers) were involved in our Delphi study in 2012-2013. The results revealed that there were some highly ranked consensus ideas: environmental issues, inquiry skills, motivation/interest, and holistic comprehension. The conclusions of our research imply the importance of involving different stakeholders in the educational reconstruction process; we suggest that schoolteachers in particular should play a vital role.

This study aims to explore students' argumentation and decision-making relating to an authentic socioscientific issue (SSI)-the problem of environmental toxins in fish from the Baltic Sea. A multi-disciplinary instructional module, designed in order to develop students' skills to argue about complex SSI, was successfully tested. Seven science majors in the final year of their upper secondary studies participated in this study. Their argumentation and decision-making processes were followed closely, and data were collected during multiple stages of the instructional module: group discussions were audio recorded, the participants wrote reports on their decision making, and postexercise interviews were conducted with individual students. The analysis focused on the skill of evaluation demonstrated by the students during the exercise and the relationships between the knowledge, values, and experiences that they used in their argumentation. Even though all of the students had access to the same information and agreed on the factual aspects of the issue, they came to different decisions. All of the students took counter-arguments and the limitations of their claims into account and were able to extend their claims where appropriate. However, their decisions differed depending on their background knowledge, values, and experiences (i.e., their intellectual baggage). The implication to SSI teaching and learning is discussed.

During the past decade, numerous schools in Sweden have implemented education for sustainable development (ESD) as an explicit guiding approach in teaching. In this paper, we investigate the effect of this approach in comparison with that of pupils taught in ordinary schools. Accordingly, we introduce the concept of sustainability consciousness to represent the holistic view of sustainability. Within the concept of sustainability consciousness, we combine and investigate the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainable development in terms of sustainability knowingness, attitudes, and behavior. A Likert-scale questionnaire with 50 items was developed to evaluate pupils’ sustainability consciousness through a nationwide study in Sweden. A total of 1773 pupils from the 6th and 9th grades participated. The results indicated that the ESD profile schools had a small positive effect on the pupils’ sustainability consciousness, while in grade 9 the effect was negative. The implications for further ESD implementation are discussed.

Researchers have shown a growing interest in science teachers' professional knowledge in recent decades. The article focuses on how chemistry teachers impart chemical bonding, one of the most important topics covered in upper secondary school chemistry courses. Chemical bonding is primarily taught using models, which are key for understanding science. However, many studies have determined that the use of models in science education can contribute to students' difficulties understanding the topic, and that students generally find chemical bonding a challenging topic. The aim of this study is to investigate teachers' knowledge of teaching chemical bonding. The study focuses on three essential components of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK): (1) the students' understanding, (2) representations, and (3) instructional strategies. We analyzed lesson plans about chemical bonding generated by 10 chemistry teachers with whom we also conducted semi-structured interviews about their teaching. Our results revealed that the teachers were generally unaware of how the representations of models they used affected student comprehension. The teachers had trouble specifying students' difficulties in understanding. Moreover, most of the instructional strategies described were generic and insufficient for promoting student understanding. Additionally, the teachers' rationale for choosing a specific representation or activity was seldom directed at addressing students' understanding. Our results indicate that both PCK components require improvement, and suggest that the two components should be connected. Implications for the professional development of pre-service and in-service teachers are discussed.

Numerous of sustainable development related challenges are emerging today, e.g. flooding problems. Our group has developed ’the flood walk’ project since 2010 to convey flood risk knowledge in an authentic context. Considering the limitation of time and space to educate people the flood risk knowledge, we tried to transform the physical flood walk field trip into a Web-based virtual trip. In this study, we aim to examine whether the Web-based flood-walk environment can help participants to achieve the same learning outcome as its authentic counterpart. A total of 65 upper secondary school pupils participated in this study. The results illustrate that a physical experience is irreplaceable, and the importance of providing physical experiences for learners in both formal and informal education needs to be emphasised.

The current Swedish curricula for compulsory school (Lgr11) emphasize inquiry-based science teaching to develop pupils’ critical thinking while the Swedish laboratory teaching tradition emphasize laboratory work to gain students conceptual understanding. The aim of this study is to illuminate how a group of teachers within the Swedish teaching tradition, based on the prevailing condition, met the external expectations of involving pupils in inquiry-based science teaching. During a teacher professional development program, the entire group of lower secondary science teachers within a school district, twelve in total, participated in group reflections about own inquiry activities. The results indicated that teachers, despite shortage of activates, wanted to involve pupils in inquiry-based science teaching to meet the curricula’s’ and national tests’ request for such activities. The teachers did this through hybridization, in which the teachers opened up and transformed existing laboratory activities; and by imitation, in which they imitated how investigative inquiry is carried out on national tests. Inquiry-based science teaching, as it emerges in this study, possessed several characteristics might limiting the potential for pupils to develop an understanding functional for critical thinking in private- and public lives. 

The Swedish curricula, as well as researchers and policy makers worldwide, have recognized the importance of promoting and including sociscientific argumentation in science education to promote scientific literacy. However, to teach socioscientific argumentation in not an easy task for science teachers and among the difficulties is the assessment practice. In this small-scale qualitative study, we have, investigated and compared how science and Swedish language teachers, participating in a SSI-driven project, assess students’ written argumentation about Global warming. The Swedish language teachers have a long tradition of teaching and assessing argumentation and therefore it is of interest to identify possible gaps between these two groups. The results indicate that the science teachers focus on students’ ability to reproduce content knowledge within their respective subject that they have been teaching. The Swedish language teachers include students’ abilities to select and use content knowledge from trustable reference resources, in addition to the structure of the argumentation and the form of the language used. In fact, the Swedish language teachers’ assessment correlates more to previous research about quality in socioscientific argumentation and we suggest that a closer co-operation between these two groups can be beneficial to enhance the quality of assessing students’ socioscientific argumentation.

Research has indicated that both context- and inquiry-based approaches could increase student interest in learning sciences. This case study aims to present a context- and inquiry-based combined teaching approach, using a three-step teaching model developed by the PROFILES project, and investigates Swedish students' responses to the activity. A Likert scale questionnaire was used for the data collection. The results of a total of 105 15-year-old students showed that, overall, the students were highly positive about this science teaching module.