This thesis is a study about wether first year students in Swedish senior high schools understand the learning intentions and the matter of the subject of history specified in GY 11 introduced in July 2011. The overall question that this master tries to answer is: Do the students understand what and why they are studying history? Three classes studying the first history course in the new system answered a survey regarding five of the specified learning intentions for the course and their overall opinion of grades and level of knowledge and intentions. By measuring the level of understanding and the students’ general opinion the conclusion is following. The students understand the majority of the intention mentioned in GY11 although in the areas of ”historical consciousness” (historiemedvetande) and ”source criticism” (källkritik) the survey shows that the students’ understanding is poor. They also think that is is important to clarify the learning intentions, not only in history but in other subjects in school as well. If that is done the students think both that their grades would be higher and their knowledge would be greater. Even though the students understand the importance of their knowledge in history they have trouble specifying why. They do however point out that if the intention of the subject is made clear, their interest of the subject would increase, and that itself would lead to a higher level of knowledge and understanding.

The aim of this study is to investigate how learning intentions are sheared and clarified during lessons, as a part of formative assessment. Studies have shown that the capability of formative assessment is an important part of teacher quality and that clarifying the intention with the lessons promotes the activity in the classroom. My study is going to focus on mathematic in a second grade class. The three questions that I am going to investigate are: How learning intentions and criteria for success are sheared and clarified in the instruction in mathematic? How do the pupils describe what the learning intentions in mathematic are? How do the pupils describe how they get to know the learning intentions in mathematic?   The method that I have used to investigate the first question is observation of eight lessons in mathematic, in two different mathematic groups. The second and third questions focus on the pupils and interviews with pupils are therefore used to investigate them.   Formative assessment and strategy one, clarifying and shearing learning intentions and criteria for success are used as a theoretical framework in the analyze of the results. The conclusions I have reached are that the mathematic book is a big prat of the lessons and both the teacher and the pupils make it seem like the main intention of the lessons. A summative test was done during the study and it indicated that high scores seem to be more in focus than the knowledge and understanding. Almost all the pupil that I interviewed describe their IUP-intentions (plan for individually developing) that they have been given in the beginning of the year. The pupils were not sure what the intentions meant and told me that they never used them after they get them, which they do in the Swedish education.