Although there is a notion of a 'Nordic tradition' of outdoor education in the international literature, research from the Nordic countries is rarely included in research reviews. Therefore, this scoping review provides an overview of empirical studies on outdoor education (grades 1-13) from the Nordic countries. Of the 586 hits, 52 studies met…

What does it mean to promote girls' participation in sports and which girls are seen as needing support? In this article we focus a government-financed sports venture and scrutinize the frames governing what is possible to say about girls and their participation in sports. By analyzing project applications from local sport clubs we investigate how…

Efforts to achieve greater decentralization, deregulation, and management by objectives in the public sector have left an indelible mark on the school sector in Sweden during the 1980s. The experimental scheme of local agencies and free municipalities illustrates two such reforms. Under the free municipality experiment, a number of municipalities…

This newsletter describes a research design enabling descriptive, comparative, evaluative follow-up studies of individual development in social contexts related to schooling. In addition, it describes a research project focusing mainly on evaluative studies of the ability of the educational system to confer, on different individuals in various…

The seven articles of this special issue comment on the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Assessment Reading Literacy Study conducted from 1989 to 1991 in 31 countries. Project design and test instruments are reviewed, and results from the Nordic countries are presented and explored. (SLD)

The public sector in Sweden is under pressure to augment its productivity and cut costs, and the education sector is faced with the same demands. Most people believe that adequately proportioned, efficiently operating schools are essential to Sweden's long-term economic development, but this is seldom mentioned in connection with spending cuts. In…

Major findings from a five-year study of the impact of the Swedish School Leader Education Program (SLEP), a program of leadership development for principals and vice principals, are reported. Despite research design difficulties, results for 35 school management areas and 66 evaluators suggest a positive impact of the SLEP. (SLD)

Because of changes in the Swedish educational system (including formation of a new upper secondary school), as well as changes in other countries, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) is undertaking a new science study to provide evidence for policymaking and for better understanding the…

Modern school research in Sweden has shown that the old selective school has been slowly transformed into an elective school, which in many ways resembles the old selective school with its parallel education systems. It is known that social background and a number of other variables (sex, nationality, type of class, etc.) have a crucial bearing on…

This ongoing project, conducted in four municipalities in Sweden, is investigating the ways in which schools and teaching are affected by various local communities and the ways in which central directives are transformed into a local educational reality. A diverse range of data have been collected, including demographic data from the…