Mid Sweden University

In Sweden, likewise in many other countries, there is an enhanced focus on assessment for learning as well as assessment of learning, on individual pupils’ results, grades, and national testing. In the last Swedish curricula (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2011, 2022) it is stated that pupils are to take a personal responsibility for their academic success, and to develop an eagerness for lifelong learning. Moreover, they are to learn to e.g. compose texts on their own in writing assignments given by the teachers. Simultaneously, the aims of public education are according to the curricula that pupils are to develop democratic values and solidarity. When it comes to writing assignments, the curricula as well as in the comment material to the Course Plan (e.g. Swedish National Agency for Education, 2017) stresses that pupils should be given opportunities to co-write texts together with peers, give feedback to peers on their texts as well as to receive feedback from peers on their own texts. However, it is not stated in the curricula how these co-composed texts are to be assessed and/or graded. 

The background for this presentation is a more comprehensive study from a Swedish municipal lower secondary school of which some parts have been published (Rönn, 2022; Rönn and Pettersson, 2023). Within the frames of an ethnographic study with an outspoken pupils’ perspective, the researcher conducted observations in one class during several months in Year 8 (14-year-olds) with a focus on how they collaborated informally with classmates during lessons in several school subjects. The aim was to explore how they assisted peers in low-voiced conversations out of the teachers’ supervision. One year later, when the pupils were in 9th grade (the last year of compulsory school in Sweden) the researcher interviewed pupils in the same class, in total 18 interviews on their view of schoolwork, grades, assisting peers, and future plans. At this stage, no interviews with the teachers were conducted, but at the school Urkund (now Ouriginal) was used for plagiarism control of the pupils’ writing assignments. The aim of the study was to explore and provide an account of what informal social strategies pupils apply in dealing with formal individual assignments as well as to try to understand how these strategies could be understood in a formal school context heavily relying on formative assessments of writing assignments and summative assessing of the individual pupil, such as e.g. tests and the National Tests. The results showed that pupils, out of the teachers’ supervision, since Year 6 (12 year-olds) had applied various informal social strategies. Some examples of this were that: a) high achieving pupils in the class, on requests from peers, forwarded pictures of their completed writing assignments to classmates to be reformulated in the classmates’ “own words”, b) pupils could swap computers behind the teachers’ back and write original texts for peers, and to c) pupils logged into classmates’ Google Classroom-accounts and wrote original texts for peers or make comprehensive proofreading of the peers’ texts. The aim with these informal social strategies was, according to the pupils, to achieve better grades with little efforts for some of the 11 pupils. When the pupils started forwarding pictures of completed assignments in Year 6, they did not understand that they were not meant to do this (Year 6 is the first year in Sweden that pupils are graded). It is important to keep in mind that this is a generation who are accustomed to share pictures of everything in their everyday life. It was not until Year 8 that they started to understand that the exercises were not meant to be completed this way, but then it was difficult for them to stop using these informal social strategies. One finding was that the pupils considered sharing pictures and reformulating peers’ writing assignments rather unproblematic. The pupils were loyal to their (close) friends, and few pupils regarded their strategies in a bigger context of solidarity, of equity of grades locally and nationally. Since the findings of the study have been reported back to the teachers and headmaster of the school, they have changed their way of working. For example, only texts which are written during lessons at school are now graded; the pupils can prepare for the writing at home but the writing has to take place at school. The teachers at the school have inspired other schools to follow their example. This has led to that the parents to pupils at one school in another part of the municipality, where most parents are well- educated high-income earners, complain loudly when they are no longer alowed to help their children with writing assignments for assessments. 

With a starting point in the findings from the more comprehensive study, this presentation will focus on dilemmas in the curricula; how the aim of solidarity and the fostering of democratic citizens are to coexist with an enhanced focus on individualization, competing and grading. It also problematises what future citizens are to become of pupils who, without the teachers’ awareness, apply the above mentioned informal social strategies; thus pupils who rely on informal contacts to compose formal assignments, recycle peers’ arguments within a text instead of making their own opinions/voices heard rely on the willingness/time of peers to fulfill the tasks given by the teachers, do not consider it problematic that they are graded individually for the achievement of 

someone else miss out years of exercises in composing their own texts • 

According to the curricula, public education should foster future citizens. In practice, there seem to be a dilemma in the tension between pupils’ collaboration (and in particular pupils’ informal social strategies in composing texts together with peers without the teachers’ awareness) and individual achievements for assessment in the competition for elevated grades which will be highlighted in the presentation. Moreover, how can teachers help pupils to an awareness about some of the problematic aspects of the pupils’ informal social strategies on both an individual as well as societal level – as in becoming future citizens. 12 Bibliography 

Rönn, C. (2022). Pupil’s informal social strategies in a Swedish compulsory school – What pupils do and say, out of sight of the teachers, while managing written individual assignments. Educational Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2022.2054955 

Rönn, C. & Pettersson, D. (2023). Swedish students’ everyday school life and teachers’ assessment dilemmas: peer strategies for ameliorating schoolwork for assessment. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11092-022-09400-3 

Swedish National Agency for Education (2017). Kommentarmaterial till kursplanen i svenska 2011: reviderad 2017. [Comment Material to the Course Plan in Swedish 2011: revised 2017]. Skolverket. 

Swedish National Agency for Education. (2011). Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet [Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and School-age Educare]. Skolverket. 

Swedish National Agency for Education (2022). Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet [Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and School-age Educare]. Skolverket.