The objective of this study was to gain knowledge concerning what up-per secondary students need to learn to be able to construct historical explanations while working with historical sources. The study also explored how teaching could be designed to enhance student’s capabilities. The history didactical framework took its departure in the British Historical Thinking-tradition and the methodology was based on Learning Study, an iterative research method for analysis and enhancement of teaching and learning. Empirical data originates from one Learning Study undertaken in an upper secondary school performed in cooperation with three teachers teaching three different classes. The bulk of data consists of student interviews, video recordings from research lessons and essay texts performed by the students before and after research lessons. Variation Theory was used to analyse teaching and learning with the purpose to identify critical aspects of what characterizes the capabilities and what the students needed to learn to reason about causation, interpret and use historical sources. The historical content was framed on the late 19th century phenomenon known as The Scramble for Africa where the students were supposed to reason on the causes for thescramble while working with a variety of primary sources. The methodological design of the research-lessons was based on a combination of principles from Variation Theory and Learning Activity with the ambition to form an educational practice that would allow students to discern the critical aspects and advance their learning. The results show that the students who participated in this study needed to distinguish the following critical aspects to be able to construct Historical Explanations when working with sources: Cause To distinguish temporal aspects of historical change not to confuse causes and consequences. To distinguish that historical change are caused by societal structures and intervention by historical actors and do not occur by itself. To distinguish that historical change predominantly have their origin in several causes and cannot be reduced to single causes. To distinguish that historical explanations need support from evidence. Interpret and Use Historical Sources To asses sources critically rather than view them as neutral information. To contextualize sources to avoid presentism and literal interpretations. To corroborate sources to be able to validate claims and present different perspectives in a historical explanation. To see that values and limitations of sources depend on the historical questions we seek an answer to. To distinguish the difference between authentic sources and reliable claims.

Studien avser att undersöka vilka kritiska aspekter, nycklar för lärande, som undervisningen behöver synliggöra för att utveckla elevers förmåga att stegvis kommunicera sina skriftliga lösningar på textuppgifter i matematik. Syftet med studien är att få eleverna att urskilja de kritiska aspekterna och därmed utveckla förmågan att kommunicera sina lösningar på textuppgifter på ett välutvecklat och strukturerat sätt. I studien har variationsteorin använts som ramverk för utformning, tolkning och analys. Forskningsmetoden som använts i studien är learning study. I en cyklisk process har vi undersökt vilka kritiska aspekter som behöver synliggöras för studiens eleverna för att de ska förstå det lärandeobjekt som valts i studien, “att skriva lösningar på textuppgifter med flera steg genom att kommunicera sin lösning med hjälp av matematikens språk”. Cykeln bestod av ett förtest med två elevgrupper, planering av forskningslektion, genomförande av lektion med ena gruppen med efterföljande eftertest, revidering av lektion och slutligen genomförande av lektion med efterföljande eftertest med den andra gruppen. Genom analys av förtest, den första forskningslektionen samt eftertest har de kritiska aspekterna utvecklats och forskningslektionen med den andra gruppen reviderats, för att på ett bättre sätt synliggöra lärandeobjektets kritiska aspekter för eleverna. Studiens resultat visar att de kritiska aspekter som synliggjordes var; att eleven förstår uppgiftens innebörd, att eleven redovisar alla tankesteg i sin lösning, att eleven skriver sin redovisning i rätt ordningsföljd, att eleven byter rad vid en ny uträkning och att eleven kontrollerar att hen svarat på uppgiftens fråga. Dessa synliggjordes med hjälp av jämförelser av olika elevlösningar samt med en stegvis instruktion som arbetades fram efter studiens första cykel. I den avslutande diskussionen sammanfattas forskningslektionernas positiva aktiviteter som verkade leda till urskiljning av de kritiska aspekterna.

Syftet med denna uppsats var att undersöka att om - och i så all hur - elevers uppfattningar av undervisningsinnehållet ändras, när olika delar av innehållet varieras och framhävs. Det som studerades var två lektioner i samhällskunskap med fokus på representativ demokrati och de deltagande elevernas uppfattningar om detta innehåll före och efter dessa lektioner. Undersökningen gjordes med hjälp av en fenomenografisk metod för att beskriva uppfattningar utifrån ett skriftligt enkätmaterial som användesi en Learning Study. Dessutom användes ett variationsteoretiskt perspektiv på lärande för att analysera hur de olika lektionerna kom att iscensättas med hjälp av kritiska aspektersom analysinstrument och hur relationen mellan lektionen och elevernas uppfattningar kundebeskrivas utifrån slutsatserna om vilka uppfattningar som eleverna hade efter lektionen och hur innehållet hade gestaltats.Slutsatserna var att det gick att hitta samband mellan hur innehållet hade presenterats och unikauppfattningar somelever uppvisade efter lektionerna. Det visade sig till exempel att för att göra en mer problematiserande uppfattning om representativ demokrati möjlig för eleverna att utveckla, så krävdes att innehållet varierades mer och att de kritiska aspekternai innehållet framställdes mer varierat. En annan slutsats var att undervisningsinnehållet var mer komplext och innehöll fler kritiska aspekter av representativ demokratiän de som lärarna i Learning Study-arbete hade identifierat.

"Let knowledge serve the city" reads the golden letters on a pedestrian bridge just 200 feet from my faculty office in Neuberger Hall at Portland State University. Public peace scholarship might allow knowledge to help the polis by keeping it out of war via changing the national discourse toward a strong and informed peace analysis. Educators have an uneasy relationship to public scholarship and mainstream media have a nervous attitude toward public peace intellectuals. Institutions of higher learning are also often either unaware or uncomfortable with a public promotion of a positive peace platform. Academic writing and research is hard to translate into publicly accessible knowledge and time constraints mitigate professorial efforts at such civic engagements. This dissertation looks at the evolving nature of this intersectionality between and among factors and analyzes data derived from research interviews conducted with 12 academics/activists. The conclusion is a grounded theory generated by this process. Key findings include problematic lack of academic freedoms--especially in the promotion and tenure context, overwhelming faculty workloads, infrequent faculty development of public scholarship skills and a spotty distribution/connection system that often fails to facilitate competent and willing faculty to engage as public peace and justice scholars. Policy recommendations attempt to address all these obstacles.

This qualitative case study examined how middle school science teachers conducted collaborative inquiry and reflection about students’ conceptual understanding, and how individual teachers in the middle school science group acted and made reflections in response to their collaborative inquiry. It also examined external influences that affected the teachers’ ability to engage in collaborative inquiry. Observational, written, and interview data were collected from observations of teachers’ face-to-face meetings and reflections, individual interviews, a focus group interview, and online reflections. The results of this study revealed that collaborative inquiry is a form of professional development that includes answering curricular questions through observation, communication, action, and reflection. This approach was developed and implemented by middle school science teachers. The premise of an inquiry is based on a need with students. Middle school science teachers came to consensus about actions to affect students’ conceptual understanding, took action as stated, and shared their reflections of the actions taken with consideration to current and upcoming school activities. Activities involved teachers brainstorming and sharing with one another, talking about how the variables were merged into their curriculum, and how they impacted students’ conceptual understanding. Teachers valued talking with one another about science content and pedagogy, but did find the inquiry portion of the approach to require more development. The greatest challenge to conducting collaborative inquiry and reflection was embedding teacher inquiry within a prescribed inquiry that was already being conducted by the Sundown School District. Collaborative inquiry should be structured so that it meets the needs of teachers in order to attend to the needs of students. A conducive atmosphere for collaborative inquiry and reflection is one in which administrators make the process mandatory and facilitate the process by removing an existing inquiry. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.

The aim of this study has been to investigate students’ understanding of fractions when they occur in the practical subject home economics. In order to investigate this, the learning study method was used. Learning study can be understood as a method to gain deeper understanding of what is learnt by students during a lesson to increase learning outcome. The variation theory framework has been utilized to analyze the results of this study. The object of learning was chosen to be addition of fractions bigger than one half when they appear in home economics. The results indicate that in order for the learners to experience the object of learning it requires that they discern some critical aspects; to distinguish between quarters and four parts, the relationship between the part and the whole in fractions, varied presentations of the same fraction along with an understanding of the meaning of the concept to double.   Moreover the students have carried out a math test which tested the students’ theoretical understanding of fractions to see whether they can transfer the knowledge from one learning context to another. The result evinces that most of the learners show a good understanding of fractions in a theoretical context as well as a practical. The learning study has increased the students learning according to the object of learning

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Lärare som undervisar i matematik förväntas kunna mer avancerad matematik än vad de undervisar om. Men formell matematikkunskap anses inte vara tillräckligt för att lärare ska kunna undervisa så att ämnesinnehållet blir begripligt för eleverna, de behöver även pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Begreppet belyser en speciell form av ämneskunskap för undervisning och skiljer sig från den matematikkunskap som används av andra välutbildade vuxna. Det har föreslagits att olika arrangemang av kollegialt och praktikbaserat lärande kan utveckla lärares PCK. Ett exempel på ett sådant arrangemang är learning study. Den här avhandlingen handlar om den kunskap om lärande och undervisning i matematik som studiens lärare utvecklar då de deltar i learning studies och utforskar sin praktik utifrån ett variationsteoretiskt perspektiv. Det yttersta syftet med en learning study är att utveckla elevernas lärande om specifika lärandeobjekt, genom att undersöka vad som kan vara kritiskt för elevernas lärande. I ett samarbetsprojekt med fyra högstadielärare genomfördes två learning studies i matematik, under ett år. Lärargruppen undersökte vad eleverna behöver lära för att de ska förstå i) varför en kvot kan vara större än talet i täljaren och ii) olika representationer av konstanterna k och m i räta linjens ekvation. Under learning study-arrangemangets olika steg samlades studiens empiri in och denna består av filmade lektioner, inspelade möten där lärargruppen planerade och analyserade undervisning och elevers lärande, skriftliga elevtest samt elevintervjuer. Studien har en variationsteoretisk utgångspunkt, vilket innebär att lärande förklaras ske när en person ser något på ett nytt och mer kvalitativt sätt, genom att personen urskiljer aspekter som han/hon inte tidigare har urskilt. Studien visar de två lärandeobjektens kritiska aspekter samt hur de kritiska aspekterna gradvis förändrades och specificerades. Förändringen var ett resultat av att lärargruppen fick syn på avgörande detaljer om på vilket sätt eleverna förstod ämnesinnehållet samt hur skilda sätt att förstå kunde användas i undervisningen för att utveckla elevernas lärande. Där av titeln att få syn på avgörande skillnader. Denna form av utvecklad kunskap om lärandeobjektet kan ses som ett bidrag om PCK och vad det kan vara. / It is a common view that teachers need more than formal content knowledge to teach and to make the content comprehensible to others. They also need pedagogical content knowledge, or PCK (Shulman, 1986). It has been suggested that different teacher collaboration approaches may support teachers’ development of PCK (Chapman, 2013, Davis & Renert, 2014; Steele & Rogers, 2012). This thesis aims to provide insights into the kind of knowledge about teaching and learning mathematics that teachers develop through their participation in a specific collaboration approach called learning study. Four teachers of mathematics and their 74 students (aged 15−16 years) participated in two learning studies over the course of one year. The foremost aim of a learning study is to enhance student learning about specific objects of learning and to identify what is critical for the students’ learning (Marton & Tsui, 2004). The objects of learningin the two learning studies were to understand that dividing with a denominator between 0 and 1 gives a quotient larger than the numerator and to understand different representations of the constants b and m in the equation of the straight line. During the two learning studies data were collected from 8 video-recorded lessons, 2 written student tests, student interviews, and 14 audio-recorded sessions in which the teachers and I (PhD student) planned, analysed and revised teaching and student learning. The analysis was based on variation theory (Marton & Tsui, 2004) and focused on what participants considered to be critical aspects of the objects of learning and on the components embedded in that knowledge. The result shows the identified critical aspects of the two objects of learning and, furthermore, how the teachers’ knowledge about those critical aspects gradually changed and became more refined and specified in relation to their students’ understanding. The thesis provides an insight into the value of the teachers’ enhanced knowledge of the object of learning, in relation to how PCK can be understood.

The aim of this study was to generate knowledge about how teachers embark on new subject content and how their understandings of ecosystem services evolve and change in teaching practice, and also what it means to be able to discuss the relationship between the ecological and social in terms of ecosystem services in a teaching practice in middle school. The teachers used the learning study model and variation theory to explore the object of learning, by trying to design an instruction that offers fifth grade students the possibility to develop their knowledge of ecosystem services. The learning study model is an interventionist approach, where the focus is on an object of learning. A group of teachers worked together and tested students, planned lessons and implemented, evaluated and refined the lessons in an iterative process. The theoretical framework, variation theory, is a theory of learning that focuses on how discernment of aspects affects the way we perceive our world and how variation can be used to promote learning. However, since the study aims at contributing to enhancing our knowledge of how teachers can develop their skills and their meanings of a new content in practice, the empirical data from learning study was then analyzed with the help of activity theory, and the cycle of expansive learning. The result of the study shows that it can be complicated to introduce a new educational content. However, the learning study model proved to be aneffective tool for developing teachers' knowledge of ecosystem services and how to teach this. Ecosystem services were developed as teachers worked systematically with the content in their practice. For example, when the students did not respond to the exercises and to the reasoning of the ecosystem services that the teachers had planned, contradictions were created and changed the learning object's meaning for the teachers. The recordings from the lessons made the contradictions that arose during the lesson visible. Ecosystem services were developed from being primarily a tool to describe the human needs of the non-human nature to a tool to be able to discuss sustainability issues and the relationship between ecological, economic and social dimensions.

Educators are increasingly focused on the process over the content. In science especially, teachers want students to understand the nature of science and investigation. The emergence of scientific inquiry and engineering design teaching methods have led to the development of new teaching and evaluation methods that concentrate on steps in a process rather than facts in a topic. Research supports the notion that an explicit focus on the scientific process can lead to student science knowledge gains. In response to new research and standards many teachers have been developing teaching methods that seem to work well in their classrooms, but lack the time and resources to test them in other classroom environments. A high school Physics teacher (Bradford Hill) has developed a unit called Patterns in Nature (PIN) with objectives relating mathematical modeling to the scientific process. Designed for use in his large public school classroom, the unit was taken and used in a charter school with small classes. This study looks at specifically whether or not the PIN unit effectively teaches students how to graph the data they gather and fit an appropriate mathematical pattern, using that model to predict future measurements. Additionally, the study looks at the students' knowledge and views about the nature of science and the process of scientific investigation as it is affected by the PIN unit. Findings show that students are able to identify and apply patterns to data, but have difficulties explaining the meaning of the math. Students' show increases in their knowledge of the process of science, and the majority develop positive views about science in general. A major goal of this study is to place this unit in the cyclical process of Design-Based Research and allow for Pattern in Nature's continuous improvement, development and evaluation. Design-Based Research (DBR) is an approach that can be applied to the implementation and evaluation of classroom materials. This method incorporates the complexities of different contexts and changing treatments into the research methods and analysis. From the use of DBR teachers can understand more about how the designed materials affect the students. Others may be able to use the development and analysis of PIN study as a guide to look at similar aspects of science units developed elsewhere.