Context: Vocational education and training (VET) plays a key role in reducing early leaving from education and training, and integrating youth at risk in upper secondary education. To ensure that more young people complete upper secondary education, the OECD suggests designing interventions that address the specific needs of youth at risk such as…

Observations seem particularly susceptible to rater error due to the level of subjectivity involved in assessment. Thus, the present paper aims to investigate: (1) inter-rater agreement (IRA) using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System -- Secondary version (CLASS-S) and (2) the CLASS-S factor structure in a Norwegian context. Inter-rater…

This article presents a study of how teenage immigrant students, newly arrived in Norway, constructed themselves discursively through a number of identity texts. Drawing on theories from New Literacy Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Social Semiotics, we analyzed a corpus of 97 multimodal identity texts. The study aimed to explore how the…

This paper reports findings from a project called "The National Panel of Raters" (NPR) that took place within a writing test programme in Norway (2010-2016). A recent research project found individual differences between the raters in the NPR. This paper reports results from an explorative follow up-study where 63 NPR members were…

This paper asks whether a European entrepreneurship programme called the "Company Programme" (CP) has an impact on young women and men with regard to career preferences, and perceptions of business skills and the likelihood of having a company. CP is taught to 270,000 students in 39 European countries, and approximately 15% of Norwegian…

Many European countries have launched policy strategies for entrepreneurship education in the past decade. The result is a significant increase of entrepreneurship education in schools and higher education institutions in Europe. Entrepreneurship education is supposed to promote entrepreneurial abilities and improve academic performance. This…

The overarching question addressed in this paper is the following: Can Dialogos dialogues conducted over time lead to the development of respect, mutual understanding and friendship among participants with diverse cultural and life stance backgrounds? Dialogos is a pedagogical approach to practical philosophy aimed at enhancing human maturity and…

This paper asks whether the Pupil Enterprise Programme (PEP) is a suitable working method for improving academic performance among pupils with special needs. Overall, 20% of pupils participate in PEP at some point during lower secondary school. Results from multilevel regression modelling indicate that pupils with special needs who have…

The empirical basis of this article is the reconciliation process in a destructive conflict between students of different cultural and religious backgrounds in upper secondary education in Norway. The Dialogos approach to dialogical philosophizing was tried out through an action research process in order to bring about reconciliation, letting the…

The United Nations' declaration on climate change education in December 2014 has sparked a renewal of policies and programs initiated during the "Decade of Education for Sustainable Development" (DESD, 2005-2014), aimed at promoting awareness, understanding, and civic action for environmental sustainability within learning communities…

The REDCo project addressed the question of how study of religions and values in schools could contribute to either dialogue or tension in Europe. Researchers in the humanities and social sciences co-operated in order to gain better insight into how European citizens of different religious, cultural and political backgrounds could enter into…

This paper explores how and to what extent digital multimodal text production can play a role in project work. The focus is upon describing and understanding how teachers and learners view multimodal text production as part of a learning process. Group-based project work has been used extensively in Norwegian schools since the 1970s. One criticism…

This article presents two developmental studies of discourse patterns in student writing. Results from two projects are presented: (1) the NORDWRITE project (1986-1989; Norwegian argumentative material from grades eight and nine) and (2) a comparison of argumentative writing in grades eight and nine with foreign language argumentative writing at…

In the Norwegian DoCTA and DoCTA NSS projects, we aimed to bring a theoretical perspective to the design of ICT-mediated learning environments that support the sociocultural aspects of human interaction and to evaluate their use. By taking a sociocultural perspective on learning activity focussing on the interpersonal social interaction in…