Many countries, including Sweden, teach gifted students in mixed-ability classrooms and teachers often need to differentiate their teaching. Gifted students have specific needs and for the subject technology these needs are described in terms of complexity, autonomy, support and authenticity (CASA-framework, Brink, submitted). How the subject technology can meet these needs is described using the CASA-framework, however, there is a lack of knowledge to what extend the subject actually offers CASA to gifted students. 

Therefore, we conducted a content analysis on the three existing educational textbooks for lower secondary school (age 13-15) in Sweden. Krathwohl’s framework (2002) was used to capture the knowledge type and the cognitive processes involved in the text, tasks and other content in the textbook.  

Our preliminary results show that complexity is offered to some extent. Autonomy is addressed occasionally through home-assignments. Support is not made explicit and authenticity is apparent throughout all textbooks. However, tasks result in a school-related product and rarely impact the wider society outside school. At the conference, we will present an overview of our findings and show examples of where and how the textbooks meet gifted students´ needs.