Educators in a rural charter middle school in the United States were challenged with the reliable assessment of student thinking skills even though the development of higher order thinking was an espoused goal for the school. The purpose of this study was to validate a new rubric based on Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (BRT) to reliably assess student levels of thinking as reflected in the students’ written work. A quantitative, nonexperimental design was used. The focus of the research questions was on the BRT rubric’s reliability and validity. Interrater reliability was assessed using Krippendorff’s alpha. Validity was explored by assessing the relationship between the BRT scores collected in this study to the original teacher scores of students’ archived writing samples. Reliable, unrelated scores would have suggested that the two processes were scoring different constructs. The convenience sample of 8 volunteer teachers scored papers using the new BRT rubric. Each teacher scored 52 writing samples, 2 each from 26 students in the 7th grade. The Spearman correlation coefficient between the BRT and original teachers’ scores was not statistically significant. The teachers’ original scores could not validate the BRT as a measuring tool. Also BRT measure failed to demonstrate evidence of reliability (Krippendorf’s α = .05). A position paper was created to present the results of this study and to explore possibilities for improving the assessment of thinking. Positive social change may be encouraged by the use of a reliable and valid scoring process to quantify levels of thinking. A reliable scoring process for levels of thinking could lead to more balanced curricula, instruction, and assessment ultimately providing a base for customized student learning experiences.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the use of an Alternative-Solution Worksheet (ASW) on American ninth-grade students' problem solving performance, and to determine the extent to which instruction in alternative solutions promotes "look back" strategies. "Look back" strategies are based on Polya's (1973) problem solving steps, and they are an examination of what was done or learned previously. The ASW was designed to encourage students to utilize "look back" strategies by generating alternative solutions to the problems. This mixed-methods study was conducted with two existing groups of ninth-grade Algebra I students. An experimental group of 18 students received instruction in utilizing the ASW for two 55-minute class periods a week for a period of four weeks. A comparison group of 14 students did not receive any instruction. Data for this study were collected by pre- and post-testing, ASWs, focus groups, and one student's "think aloud" process. For the quantitative analysis, a one-way ANCOVA was conducted to determine if there was a significant difference in the mean post-test scores between the experimental group and the comparison group. The students' pre-test score was the covariate. The findings indicated that the experimental group scored slightly better on the post-test, and R2=.345, a medium effect size. There were no significant correlations between the ASW scores and the pre- and post-test scores, but the ASW scores were significantly correlated with the students' EXPLORE9 math and reading percentiles. The qualitative findings indicated that "look back" occurred at all six levels of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy, but it is the "look back" that occurs at the upper three levels, in the context of higher order thinking skills, that results in better mathematical problem solving abilities. In addition, positive affective changes were evident despite little improvement in students' mathematical problem solving abilities. The results of this study indicated that higher order thinking skills need to be practiced regularly so students can use them effectively.

Many educational systems of today are standards-based and aim at for alignment, i.e. consistency, among the components of the educational system: standards, teaching and assessment. To conclude whether the alignment is sufficiently high, analyses with a useful model are needed. This thesis investigates the usefulness of models for analyzing alignment between standards and assessments, with emphasis on one method: Bloom’s revised taxonomy. The thesis comprises an introduction and five articles that empirically investigate the usefulness of methods for alignment analyses. In the first article, the usefulness of different models for analyzing alignment between standards and assessment is theoretically and empirically compared based on a number of criteria. The results show that Bloom’s revised taxonomy is the most useful model. The second article investigates the usefulness of Bloom’s revised taxonomy for interpretation of standards in mathematics with two differently composed panels of judges. One panel consisted of teachers and the other panel of assessment experts. The results show that Bloom’s revised taxonomy is useful for interpretation of standards, but that many standards are multi-categorized (placed in more than one category). The results also show higher levels of intra- and inter-judge consistency for assessment experts than for teachers. The third article further investigates the usefulness of Bloom’s revised taxonomy for analyses of alignment between standards and assessment. The results show that Bloom’s revised taxonomy is useful for analyses of both standards and assessments. The fourth article studies whether vague and general standards can explain the large proportion of multi-categorized standards in mathematics. The strategy was to divide a set of standards into smaller substandards and then compare the usefulness and inter-judge consistency for categorization with Bloom’s revised taxonomy for undivided and divided standards. The results show that vague and general standards do not explain the large proportion of multi-categorized standards. Another explanation is related to the nature of mathematics that often intertwines conceptual and procedural knowledge. This was also studied in the article and the results indicate that this is a probable explanation. The fifth article focuses on another aspect of alignment between standards and assessment, namely the alignment between performance standards and cut-scores for a specific assessment. The validity of two standard-setting methods, the Angoff method and the borderline-group method, was investigated. The results show that both methods derived reasonable and trustworthy cut-scores, but also that there are potential problems with these methods. In the introductory part of the thesis, the empirical studies are summarized, contextualized and discussed. The discussion relates alignment to validity issues for assessments and relates the obtained empirical results to theoretical assumptions and applied implications. One conclusion of the thesis is that Bloom’s revised taxonomy is useful for analyses of alignment between standards and assessments. Another conclusion is that the two standard setting methods derive reasonable and trustworthy results. It is preferable if an alignment model can be used both for alignment analyses and in ongoing practice for increasing alignment. Bloom’s revised taxonomy has the potential for being such an alignment model. This thesis has found this taxonomy useful for alignment analyses, but its’ usefulness for increasing alignment in ongoing practice has to be investigated.

The aim of this study is to investigate the assessment practices of civics teachers in upper secondary school. The main purpose is to analyze, using Bloom’s revised taxonomy, which kind of knowledge civics teachers test in their written test examinations. The analyses show that they mainly test factual and conceptual knowledge. Procedural knowledge is tested in other ways, mostly by means of essays. Metacognitive knowledge is not found in this study. In contrast to earlier findings the teachers in this study test a variation of cognitive processes. Between 50 and 90 percent of test questions relate to the category remember, but there are also questions testing the categories to understand, analyze and evaluate, only a few test apply and create. There is a good alignment in teachers’ knowledge of the grading criterions and the curriculum. There are however discrepancies between this knowledge and their testing practices, which causes some problems concerning the validity of their tests. As the tests mainly are used for summative purposes, teachers varying practices lead to problems with grade equality. Frame factors may explain differences in practices. Mainly administrative factors such as working hours and schedule are significant, since teachers need time to prepare and to mark the tests and pupils need time to write them. Pupils also wish to have written tests and teachers adapt to this. Still, the significance of these factors is decided by teachers’ freedom of action. Most teachers know how to and want to make valid tests, but they need the time, both to prepare and to mark them, and the possibilities to extend lessons when more writing time is needed.

Grammatikundervisningens innehåll och metoder har kritiserats. Forskning har belyst att det finns ett glapp mellan teori och praktik när det kommer till synen på grammatik och grammatikundervisning. Språkvetenskapen förordar en deskriptiv grammatik och att grammatiken kopplas till sammanhang där den skapar betydelse medan praktiken återspeglar en preskriptiv och formfokuserad grammatik. Skolans undervisning ska bygga på vetenskaplig grund och beprövad erfarenhet (SFS 2010:800). Forskning kring grammatik bör därmed ligga till grund för grammatikundervisningen i skolan. Syftet med studien är att med stöd av Blooms reviderade taxonomi bidra med kunskap om relationen mellan synen på grammatik och grammatikanvändning i ämnesplanen för svenska på gymnasiet med fokus på Svenska 2 och synen i två nya läroböcker riktade mot kursen Svenska 2. De läroböcker som analyseras är Svenska 2 helt enkelt (Nilsson & Winqvist, 2021) och Punkt. Svenska 2 (Helldén & Svärd, 2021). Studiens frågeställningar är: Vilka kognitiva processer och kunskapsdimensioner lyfts i ämnesplanen och kursen Svenska 2? Vilka kognitiva processer och kunskapsdimensioner fokuserar grammatikövningar i läroböcker för Svenska 2? Hur ser relationen ut mellan de kognitiva processerna och kunskapsdimensionerna som lyfts i ämnesplanen och kursen Svenska 2 och de som fokuseras i läroböcker för Svenska 2? Genom kategoriseringen i Blooms reviderade taxonomi analyseras den syn på grammatik och grammatikanvändning som framträder. Resultatet visar att ämnesplanen återspeglar en funktionell syn på grammatik och grammatikanvändning som ligger i linje med språkvetenskapens syn på grammatik. Endast en av de undersökta läroböckerna återspeglar samma syn och uppvisar samstämmighet med ämnesplanen. Att synen på grammatik skiljer sig mellan läroböcker som tar sin utgångspunkt i samma ämnesplan utgör ett intressant resultat i studien. Slutsatsen som dras utifrån resultatet är att ämnesplanens funktionella ansats är otydlig och skapar utrymme för tolkningar som kan leda till ett fortsatt glapp mellan teori och praktik. / The content and methods of grammar teaching have been criticized. Research has highlighted that there is a gap between theory and practice when it comes to views on grammar and grammar teaching. Linguistics advocates descriptive grammar and linking it to contexts where it creates meaning, whereas practice reflects a prescriptive and form-focused grammar. School teaching should be based on science and proven experience (SFS 2010:800). Research on grammar should therefore form the basis for the teaching of grammar in schools. The purpose of the study is to use Bloom's revised taxonomy to contribute knowledge about the relationship between the view of grammar and grammar use in the syllabus for Swedish subject in upper secondary school with a focus on the course Swedish 2 and the view in two new course books for the course Swedish 2. The course books analyzed are Svenska 2 helt enkelt (Nilsson & Winqvist, 2021) and Punkt. Svenska 2 (Helldén & Svärd, 2021). The questions of the study are: Which cognitive processes and aspects of knowledge are highlighted in the syllabus for Swedish and the course Swedish 2? Which cognitive processes and aspects of knowledge do the grammar exercises in course books for Swedish 2 focus on? What is the relationship between these cognitive processes and aspects of knowledge as highlighted in the syllabus and the Swedish 2 course, and those which are focused on in the course books for Swedish 2? Through the categorization in Bloom’s revised taxonomy, the view of grammar and grammar use that emerges is analyzed. The results show that the syllabus reflects a functional view of grammar and grammar use which is in line with a linguistic view of grammar. Only one of the investigated course books reflects this same view and shows compliance with the syllabus. The fact that the view on grammar differs between course books which are based on the same syllabus is an interesting result of the study. The conclusion drawn from the results is that the functional approach of the syllabus is unclear and leaves room for interpretations that can lead to a continued gap between theory and practice.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Physics / Dean Zollman / As part of a collaborative study of the science preparation of elementary school teachers, we investigated the quality of students’ reasoning and explored the relationship between sophistication of reasoning and the degree to which the courses were considered inquiry oriented. To probe students’ reasoning, we developed open-ended written content questions with the distinguishing feature of applying recently learned concepts in a new context. We devised a protocol for developing written content questions that provided a common structure for probing and classifying students’ sophistication level of reasoning. In designing our protocol, we considered several distinct criteria, and classified students’ responses based on their performance for each criterion. First, we classified concepts into three types: Descriptive, Hypothetical, and Theoretical and categorized the abstraction levels of the responses in terms of the types of concepts and the inter-relationship between the concepts. Second, we devised a rubric based on Bloom’s revised taxonomy with seven traits (both knowledge types and cognitive processes) and a defined set of criteria to evaluate each trait. Along with analyzing students’ reasoning, we visited universities and observed the courses in which the students were enrolled. We used the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) to rank the courses with respect to characteristics that are valued for the inquiry courses. We conducted logistic regression for a sample of 18 courses with about 900 students and reported the results for performing logistic regression to estimate the relationship between traits of reasoning and RTOP score. In addition, we analyzed conceptual structure of students’ responses, based on conceptual classification schemes, and clustered students’ responses into six categories. We derived regression model, to estimate the relationship between the sophistication of the categories of conceptual structure and RTOP scores. However, the outcome variable with six categories required a more complicated regression model, known as multinomial logistic regression, generalized from binary logistic regression. With the large amount of collected data, we found that the likelihood of the higher cognitive processes were in favor of classes with higher measures on inquiry. However, the usage of more abstract concepts with higher order conceptual structures was less prevalent in higher RTOP courses.

1 Abstract This dissertation concludes teaching experience of several years which was dedicated to examining the possibilities of role playing in history teaching. The theoretical part offers an excursion into the area of didactic literature and observes the importance which is attributed to role playing by general teaching methodology, teaching methodology of history, personal and social education as well as drama education. The author focuses especially on recent examples of role playing in history teaching, she comments and interlinks them. The rules and principles for practical usage of role playing in history teaching are provided at the end of the theoretical part. The empirical part describes the progress of two-phase action research realized during the years 2007-2011 at grammar school with four-year study programme. At the beginning of the empirical probe there were two general questions: Can the role playing in history teaching help the development of students' personality? Can the role playing in history teaching help to fulfil the educational goals of history teaching? These were gradually more specified and modified according to the progress of action research. The main subject of interest was observing the students' development in the area of working in groups of different sizes, role playing...