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- Borgström, Eric, 1982-
(author)
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Skrivbedömning : om uppgifter, texter och bedömningsanvisningar i svenskämnets nationella prov
- 2014
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The main purpose of this dissertation, and the four studies it includes, is to investigate some ways in which the concept of writing ability is rendered concrete in different national writing tests. The dissertation combines two theoretical approaches. Assessment theory serves as a framework for the approach to national tests. Tests are understood as a practice aiming at providing evidence for the inferences teachers need to draw about students’ writing ability, in order to make decisions that are part of school practice, such as giving grades. I examine the tests from the perspective of an anthropological theory of text that takes dialogism as its point of departure and views texts as culturally valued utterances. The analyses focus on the relations between writing task, students’ texts and assessment criteria, and how these can be both in alignment and in conflict with the claims on score meaning made by different test constructions.In the first study, four students’ texts from the national writing test in upper secondary school are closely analyzed to show how a writing task regulates students’ scope for action in their texts as regards global inner structure and perspective on content. The second study investigates how a national writing test was carried out in two classrooms in primary school, and highlights the relations between the task, students’ texts and assessment criteria. In the third study, I argue that a pursuit of reliability in writing tests becomes misguided unless it takes as its starting point the definition of writing ability the tests are made to measure. In the fourth study I examine the writing tasks of the tests in upper secondary school from 2007–2012. The analysis brings four distinct and recurrent task types to the fore, from which a reconstruction of the target domain of writing within the school subject of Swedish is made.Overall, the dissertation contributes to critical reflection on the understandings of writing expressed by test constructions, and points at possible further development of writing tests, given the theoretical perspective on writing that the dissertation employs.
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- Karlsson, Anna-Malin
(author)
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Skriftbruk i förändring : en semiotisk studie av den personliga hemsidan
- 2002
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In this thesis, the phenomenon of personal homepages on the Internet is explored. While the general purpose of the study is to provide a description of the personal homepage and its use, the more specific aim is to characterise it as a product of literacy. Theoretically, the homepage is viewed as a multimodal text product situated within two layers of context: the context of situation, where homepage use can be described in terms of literacy practices and textual norms, and the context of culture, where the conceptual dichotomy between new and old visual literacy can be seen to constitute the overall frame for the investigation. The main material consists of 26 personal homepages assembled in 1998. The owners of these pages form the major part of an informant group involved throughout the study.The methods combine text analysis on different levels with online field work and experimental interviews. As one result of these analyses, a typology of homepage sections is established and each page category is given a description which reveals what may be called a prototypic structure. Based on the established page categories, the homepage as a format is characterised as a heterogeneous collection of pages with different textual structures and different functions. Another result is a set of literacy practices, generalised on the basis of the informants’ utterances about activities around the homepages. Of these judging and being judged, promoting the page and socialising with friends are practices that are especially dependent on writing, whereas practices such as looking for inspiration and making plans and producing, where the page is more in focus, are more genuinely multimodal. A third kind of results emanates from the text analyses. The semiotic components, i.e. the visual elements, of different page types are identified and analysed, different principles of textual relations between visual elements are explored and the cohesion of a genuinely multimodal page is described. By means of this analysis, certain specialised uses of the two different modalities, language and the non-linguistic visual resource, can be pointed out. In sum, the personal homepage is characterised as highly heterogeneous, relating to both traditional language-based literacy and a less established multimodal text culture.
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- Sahlée, Anna, 1977-
(author)
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Språket och skolämnet svenska som andraspråk : Om elevers språk och skolans språksyn
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Since the school subject Swedish as a second language was established in the Swedish school system in the mid-1990s, the organization of the subject has varied widely across schools, and the outcomes have been poor. This thesis investigates these problems linguistically. The main objective is to explore the school subject Swedish as a second language in relation to the language of students taking the subject. Another aim of this thesis is to illuminate the complex relation between the Swedish language and the use and conception of Swedish as a second language. A critique of the concept of ‘language’ and of language attitudes in the school context is a recurring theme in the thesis.The thesis contains four papers addressing different aspects of the school subject Swedish as a second language. Paper I examines texts and oral presentations from a group of students born in Sweden, analyzing their language from a normative, mainly grammatical, perspective. Paper II develops a model for analyzing text as activity. In Paper III, the model from paper II is applied to analyze students’ narrative texts written as responses to an assignment, focusing on texts that received failing grades. Papers I and III include comparisons with Swedish as a language and as a school subject. Paper IV, finally, analyzes views of language in policy documents.One critical result of the thesis is the identification of a need for a raised awareness about language in schools and society. In the current situation it is hard to establish a discrete boundary dividing the language of students in the subject Swedish as a second language from the language of students in the subject Swedish, but differences can be observed, which in some sense resonates well with the definition of the subject given by the policy documents. Swedish as a second language in schools can be vaguely defined as Swedish with non-Swedish or foreign markers. The vague definition of the subject and the many linguistic conditions built into the subject entail that Swedish as a second language does not seem well-suited for anyone. Employing a combination of a traditional and an alternative view of language, as proposed in this thesis, may be a fruitful way to accommodate all students.
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- Edberg, Hélène, 1952-
(author)
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Kreativt skrivande för kritiskt tänkande : En textanalytisk fallstudie av studenters arbete med kritisk metareflektion
- 2015
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- I högskolesammanhang finns en tendens att betrakta fantasi och känsla som hinder för kritiskt tänkande. I denna studie, som har en högskoledidaktisk utgångspunkt, prövas tvärt om att se subjektivitet som resurs. Studien prövar lärande genom skrivande. Den prövar också hur man kan analysera den skrivna texten för att se vilka läranderesultat som följt avskrivandet. Närmare bestämt är det kreativt skrivande som metod för att öva kritiskt tänkande som undersöks. På en högskolekurs i kreativt skrivande får studenter i uppgift att skriva berättelser utifrån ett moraliskt dilemma. Berättelserna blir underlag för diskussioner och analyser under seminarier. Till sist sammanfattar studenterna sina tankar och iakttagelser i samband med övningen i en reflektionstext. Dessa texter utgör huvudmaterialet för studiens textanalytiska ansats.För att undersöka lärandet genom skrivande har aktivitetsteori, en organisationsteori på sociokulturell grund, använts som en textanalytisk modell. Analysresultaten visar att kritiskt tänkande blir olika i de närmare femtio texterna som undersökts, men att det följer vissa mönster som är beroende av vad skribenterna vill med sitt skrivande och vilka de blir när de skriver, alltså vilka skribentidentiteter som intresserar dem.
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- Skar, Gustaf, 1982-
(author)
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Skrivbedömning och validitet : Fallstudier av skrivbedömning i svenskundervisning på gymnasiet
- 2013
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This doctoral dissertation reports on results from three explorative case studies of teacher assessment practice within upper secondary school writing instruction. In Sweden, almost all responsibility for constructing, administering, and scoring assessments lies with the individual teacher. Unfortunately, little is known about classroom-based writing assessment and even less is known about the validity of such assessment. The aim of this dissertation is to build validity arguments based on classroom assessment practice concerning achievement tests in upper secondary school. Three research questions were formulated in relation to this aim: (1): To what extent can interpretation of scores be argued for? (2): To what extent can students be said to have had equal opportunities to learn what is later assessed? (3) To what extent can suggested and observed usage of scores be argued for, given the relationship between instruction and assessment? The data for the studies consists of audio recorded observations, student texts, teacher comments, and scoring rubrics, and was gathered within writing units in three upper secondary schools. Altogether the observations comprise 17 lessons (or 19.6 hours). Data was also collected in interviews with three teachers and their students.The data on instructed and assessed writing was analyzed by conceptual tools related to a theoretical model of writing, the so-called Writing Wheel. The validity argument was built using Bachman’s (2005) Assessment Use Argument (AUA) model.On an aggregated level, the results indicate threats to the validity of interpretation of scores, to the validity of usage of scores, and threats associated with inequitable assessment. The first types of threats stem, for example, from scoring rubrics that are not aligned to the assessment tasks at hand, and a low degree of standardization in the administration of the assessment tasks. The second type of threat is related to this; for example, low standardization led to incomparable student marks. While some students could benefit from contacts with able peers (and/or parents) others could not. The third type relates to possibilities to learn what is later assessed, which was not fully evident in some cases. Finally, the results also implicate that the building of an AUA can serve as a syllabus-design tool for practitioners as well as a design tool in intervention studies.The closing chapter of the dissertation presents a number of hypotheses based on the case study findings. Concluding remarks suggest how these could be tested.
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