This study aims to deepen the understanding of how computer programming is taught and assessed in Swedish schools by focusing on teachers’ perspectives. It explores how technology teachers (teaching years 4–6, students aged 10-12) perceive their roles and responsibilities in teaching computer programming, primarily within the technology subject, and examines what computer programming content is taught and assessed. The research is based on a survey and interviews with seven experienced teachers who taught computer programming before it became mandatory. The findings reveal similar views among the teachers but also significant variation in assessment practices, categorized into four distinct personas, ranging from a strong disciplinary content and product focus to a weaker disciplinary content and process orientation. The discussion reflects upon how these variations may be influenced by teachers’ backgrounds, computer programming knowledge, and unclear policy documents. The conclusions suggest that, due to this variety, Swedish students may not be equally equipped with the digital skills needed for participating in a digitalized society. To enhance equity, we argue that teachers need better preparation to effectively integrate computer programming skills across subjects. Additionally, we recommend clearer national guidelines on how to teach computer programming and how to assess this subject content in compulsory education.

This study explores the practical feasibility of Adaptive Comparative Judgment (ACJ) as a summative assessment method in legal education, focusing on a Property and Intellectual Property Law course at a Norwegian university. Eight examiners assessed 300 student responses using ACJ within traditional time constraints, performing pairwise comparisons to rank submissions by quality. Findings reveal that examiners completed fewer comparisons than required for reliable rankings, primarily due to time management issues and workload variability. The study highlights differences in assessment strategies based on examiner experience, with less experienced examiners focusing on structural elements, such as organization and readability, and experienced examiners prioritizing legal reasoning and argument development. We critically examine the challenges inherent in translating ACJ rankings into grades and providing legally compliant justifications, given ACJ’s dependence on relative comparisons, raising important concerns about transparency, fairness, and consistency in high-stakes assessments.

Sweden has established itself as a global leader in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), integrating sustainability principles across all levels of education. The national curriculum for compulsory and higher education emphasizes key ESD competencies, including systems thinking, critical evaluation, future-oriented decision-making, collaboration, ethical awareness, and sustainable action. Sustainability is embedded across subjects and is reflected in the general approach of schools and society, with the three dimensions of sustainable development—environment, economy, and society—woven into educational practices. This is achieved through interdisciplinary curriculum integration, active student participation in sustainability projects, global and local perspectives, and continuous teacher professional development. Swedish schools have autonomy in implementing ESD, allowing educators to integrate sustainability in diverse ways. However, while initiatives such as the Whole School Approach and the Eco-School model have helped foster sustainability competencies, challenges remain. Reports indicate that ESD implementation is inconsistent, with many schools not fully utilizing the extensive support materials provided by the Swedish National Agency for Education and other stakeholders. Additionally, some ESD approaches may inadvertently reinforce gender disparities, with boys demonstrating lower engagement in sustainability topics. Despite Sweden’s strong policy framework and student-led movements such as Fridays for Future, many young Swedes do not view sustainability as a viable career pathway. This disconnect highlights the need for stronger links between sustainability education and future professional opportunities, ensuring that sustainability is not only an academic priority but a long-term societal commitment.

This paper presents a study on the practical application of Adaptive Comparative Judgment (ACJ) in assessing student exams within legal education at the University of Bergen, Norway. ACJ is a method used to evaluate and compare the quality of qualitative work, involves assessors judging pairs of items relative to each other. Unlike traditional assessment methods, which rely on absolute judgments, ACJ requires assessors to assess items in pairs, determining relative quality rather than absolute quality. The study examines the feasibility of integrating ACJ into existing educational frameworks, addressing key challenges such as resource allocation, grading transparency, and assessing exams with multiple tasks. Specifically, the research focuses on assessing student exams within an undergraduate course on Property and Intellectual Property Law, with a total of 300 exam papers and eight examiners participating in the study. Utilizing RM Compare as the ACJ software, each assessor was instructed to dedicate 35 hours to comparative judgment, aiming to establish a reliable rank order of the exam papers. The findings reveal several challenges associated with the practical implementation of ACJ, including issues of resource allocation, grading transparency, and the assessment of exams with multiple tasks. Potential solutions to these challenges will be discussed.

Technology education internationally has for some time struggled to achieve continuity between what is depicted in policy and curricular documents and the reality of day-to-day practices. With its focus often articulated through the nature of activity students are to engage with, technology teachers are recognised as having significant autonomy in the design and implementation of their practices. From this, it is important to understand teachers’ beliefs about technology education, as their conceptions of the subject will inform practice. As such, this study sought to investigate teachers’ conceptions of the purpose of teaching technology through reflection on their enacted practices. A constructivist grounded theory methodology was employed for the design of the study and analysis of data. According to our analysis, despite similarities between the nature of student activity that teachers designed and implemented, teachers represented the purpose of the subject in different ways. Three different conceptions of the purpose of teaching technology were identified; obtaining knowledge and skills for application, ability to act in a technological way, and ability to think in a technological way. Central to the three conceptions were contentions in the representations of what constituted subject matter knowledge in the subject, and the role that different application cases played in teaching technology. Without consideration and explicit articulation of the purposes for teaching technology, this lack of clarity and differences in rationale for teaching technology are likely to continue.

The poster will present the outline of an ongoing findings from a study on the use of adaptive comparative judgment by examiners as a method for assessing, ranking, and grading student exams. The study aims to investigate if and how this method may support examiners in making better judgments when assessing student works for grading. In this study, approximately 300 essays will be assessed by 8 examiners using adaptive comparative judgment. These essays have already been assessed and graded using a traditional criteria-based approach with one examiner per 30 essays. These grades will serve as a point of reference for the study. The examiners using comparative judgment will use the same assessment criteria as in the traditional approach, but the essays will be assessed in pairs. In this pairwise comparison, the examiners chose which essay is better and justify their choice based on assessment criteria for each pair. Using learning analytics, the judgment of all essays will be ranked in terms of quality. The professors will then read through the ranking and try to identify the benchmarks for the lowest quality work for each grade. The benchmarking will be based on the professor’s assessment of quality considering the assessment criteria, not on a normal distribution. 

The poster will present findings on the formative use of comparative judgment and criteria-based assessment in a course on administrative law as part of a master's program in legal education. Students used the two assessment approaches to assess the quality of administrative decisions. A student population of 300 was divided into two cohorts and given six administrative decisions of varying quality to assess. One cohort assessed the decisions using a comparative judgment approach, and the other used a criteria-based assessment. In both cases, the students assessed the legal decisions focusing on a) method, b) language, and c) content and ranked them from best to worst. Before the assessment activity, the students had practiced writing administrative decisions on their own and participated in a lecture that prepared them for the assessment activities. After the assessment activity, the students discussed the quality of the decisions they had assessed in groups with participants from both cohorts. The focus of the study was to investigate whether and how the students experienced the two assessment approaches contributed to developing their understanding of quality in administrative decisions. Data was collected through a student survey and the student ranking of the legal decisions.