This short paper describes the first prototyping of a self-evaluation process of Curriculum Agility at a Faculty of Technology in Sweden. The process comprises guided, semi-structured, individual interviews at different organisational levels within the faculty, a joint narrative based on those interviews, prioritizing development strategies per level, and jointly mapping them on importance and implementation time. The self-evaluation is part of and based on the research on the principles of Curriculum Agility. The results show the interplay in timely curriculum change for futureproof engineering education between the teaching staff, the systems and the people who control the systems. The self-evaluation brings together the different perspectives and perceptions within the faculty and gives insight in how those affect he willingness towards and occurrence of curriculum development. This work in progress indicates how doing such a qualitative self-evaluation paves the road for transparent strategic dialogues on a holistic level about what to give attention and organize differently.
Among other things, learning to write entails learning how to use complex sentences effectively in discourse. Some research has therefore focused on relating measures of syntactic complexity to text quality. Apart from the fact that the existing research on this topic appears inconclusive, most of it has been conducted in English L1 contexts. This is potentially problematic, since relevant syntactic indices may not be the same across languages. The current study is the first to explore which syntactic features predict text quality in Dutch secondary school students’ argumentative writing. In order to do so, the quality of 125 argumentative essays written by students was rated and the syntactic features of the texts were analyzed. A multilevel regression analysis was then used to investigate which features contribute to text quality. The resulting model (explaining 14.5% of the variance in text quality) shows that the relative number of finite clauses and the ratio between the number of relative clauses and the number of finite clauses positively predict text quality. Discrepancies between our findings and those of previous studies indicate that the relations between syntactic features and text quality may vary based on factors such as language and genre. Additional (cross-linguistic) research is needed to gain a more complete understanding of the relationships between syntactic constructions and text quality and the potential moderating role of language and genre.
Explicit language objectives are included in the Swedish national curriculum for mathematics. The curriculum states that students should be given opportunities to develop the ability to formulate problems, use and analyse mathematical concepts and relationships between concepts, show and follow mathematical reasoning, and use mathematical expressions in discussions. Teachers’ competence forms a crucial link to bring an intended curriculum to a curriculum in action. This article investigates a professional development program, ‘Language in Mathematics’, within a national program for mathematics teachers in Sweden that aims at implementing the national curriculum into practice. Two specific aspects are examined: the selection of theoretical notions on language and mathematics and the choice of activities to relate selected theory to practice. From this examination, research on teacher learning in connection to professional development is proposed, which can contribute to a better understanding of teachers’ interpretation of integrated approaches to language and mathematics across national contexts.
