Children use digital environments at an early age and should be supported from the start of school to a conscious and critical way of navigating the internet.Previous studies show that children have vague ideas about how the information has ended up on the internet, how it should be read and evaluated. In thisexploratory study, we investigated how children start an internet search, how they formulate their search query and what they pay attention to when the searchresult is obtained, as well as how they read the information from the screen. 15 eight-year-old children performed the searches in small groups, using one tabletin joint searches. The children's speech and screen activity were recorded. The data was analyzed with the help of Luke and Freebody's resource model to callin different dimensions of reading competence that are actualized when students initiate searches and navigate search results. The results show that thestudents can use speech and writing to quickly search for specific information. At the same time, they are disinclined to stop and reflect on the relevance,credibility, and sender of the search results. With interactional support, some students were able to identify the sender of the information and reason about which50type of sender might be credible. To reach a more developed thinking and awareness that digital information has a sender, teaching that promotes criticalinformation awareness and multimodal text competence is required. 

Given young children's frequent use of the internet and the expectations formulated in policy documents such as the Swedish national curriculum, teachers need to promote critical awareness about information found online, even in the earliest years of schooling. Responding to the need for more information about how first-graders understand the internet, we report on findings from focus group interviews concerning what students in Grade 1 think the internet is and what kind of experiences and linguistic resources they draw upon to express their understanding. Based on thematic and systemic-functional linguistic analysis, the results show that the children mostly express an understanding of the internet as something concrete, such as an app, as something encapsulated in apps or hardware and, more generally, as an enabler for the use of different apps. Students connections to using YouTube and games are prevalent, and their understanding of the internet is shaped by experiences of screen interactions when using these apps. On rare occasions, students hesitantly tried to formulate abstract perspectives concerning what the internet is or what it means. Possible directions for promoting and researching a more abstract understanding in pedagogical practice are discussed.

Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, teacher educators had to change the delivery mode of their teaching to online environments. In this article, we explore the changes and challenges to teacher educators' professional practices during emergency remote teaching. Since teacher educators act as both teachers, peers and role models to their students, their professional practices involve the teaching of how to be a professional body, i.e. a 'teacher body'. Central to professional practices are interactions consisting of both speech and bodily actions. In interviews, teacher educators express how their professional practices of teaching has been changed and challenged in relation to how they communicate with their students and how they can support them in their learning. Due to the restrictions in body language and gaze in emergency remote teaching, teacher educators do not recognise their professional body. Moreover, because of the destabilisation of their 'teacher body', the teacher educators find it difficult to sufficiently convey to their students what it is to be a teacher.

We investigated pre-service teachers’ conceptions of online learning during the transition from face-to-face to emergency distance education in Italy, Sweden and Iran. Conceptions of online learning were conceptualised based on how pre-service teachers defined online learning, the self-regulated learning (SRL) skills associated with it and how they compared it to face-to-face education. The participants were asked about the characteristics of their online courses, yielding information about the online learning conditions and experiences. Conceptions of online learning were found to be underdeveloped. Pre-service teachers should develop a flexible approach to SRL that takes into consideration the demands of the specific educational setting.

Allt mer av läs- och skrivundervisning i de lägre åldrarna sker via eller med hjälp av digitala enheter och verktyg. För att undersöka vilka digitala aktiviteter yngre barn möter i modersmålsundervisning och vilka möjligheter barnen har att via de digitala aktiviteterna utveckla sin literacy, bad vi cirka 160 lärarstudenter att under en modersmålslektion observera vilka digitala aktiviteter som förekom. Artikeln är ett exempel på hur lärarstudenter kan vara delaktiga i forskning då det är deras observationer som utgör dataunderlaget i den här artikeln.

Artikeln inleds med en kort genomgång av begreppet literacy och digital literacy, med fokus på yngre barns literacyutveckling. Sedan beskriver vi hur datainsamlingen genomförts och hur vi har bearbetat observationerna. Vi presenterar därefter fyra teman som identifierades i observationerna och diskuterar på vilket sätt de bidrar till att utveckla barns literacy. 

This study examined students’ engagement in sourcing throughout online inquiry, that is, when they specified the information need, formulated search queries, evaluated online texts, and composed a written product. Participants were 167 upper secondary school students. Students completed an online inquiry task in a restricted online environment that utilized authentic online texts. Students’ prior topic knowledge and reading fluency was measured and controlled for in the analysis. The results showed that students engaged in sourcing even in the earliest phases of online inquiry. A sequential regression analysis indicated that the more frequently students engaged in sourcing in specifying the information need and in search querying, the more frequently they engaged in sourcing when judging the credibility of online texts. Further, the more frequently students engaged in sourcing in their credibility judgments, the more frequently sourcing also was observed in their written products. The results suggest that students would benefit from instruction emphasizing that sourcing is a continuous process throughout online inquiry.

This study explores how newly arrived young students created meaning, communicated, and expressed themselves using digital technology in the subject of Swedish as a second language (SSL).  The qualitative case study presented in this article focuses on how the orchestration of teaching contributed to opportunities for digital meaning-making in the SSL subject in four classrooms at three schools in a city in Sweden. The notion of language as being fluid, which involves a critical approach to languages as separable entities, considers linguistic and embodied meaning-making, including digital technology, in social processes. This approach recognizes the roles of technology and digital meaning-making in young students’ second language acquisition. Moreover, technological innovations facilitate immediate and accessible communication.  In today’s language studies, ethnicity only is not considered an adequate focus of analysis. Furthermore, the meaning-making practices of newly arrived primary school-aged students remain under-investigated. In the present study, data collected in classroom observations and teacher interviews revealed three themes regarding the students’ utilization of digital technology to develop their multilingual skills. One insight was that the newly arrived students used digital technology strategically when they engaged in meaning-making activities with peers and teachers. When the students took the initiative in computer-assisted language learning, they displayed agency in meaning-making by being their own architects. The findings of this research provided insights into how the orchestration of teaching in Swedish as a second language to newly arrived students affects their opportunities to use multilingualism in meaning-making while employing digital technology.

We examine the conceptions of digital literacy of pre-service teachers in the United States (n = 188) and Sweden (n = 121). Pre-service teachers were asked to define digital literacy in an open-ended fashion and to select those skills that they considered to be essential for digital literacy from a list of 24 skills provided. Based on pre-service teachers' open-ended responses, four profiles of digital literacy conceptions, progressing in sophistication, were identified (i.e., technology focused, digital reading focused, goal directed, reflecting critical use). Moreover, pre-service teachers' selections of skills or competencies essential for digital literacy were used in cluster analysis. Profiles of digital literacy conceptions were consistent across open-ended and selected-response forms of assessment. Important similarities and differences in conceptions of digital literacy across the United States and Sweden are discussed, as are implications for improving teacher education.

This study examined upper secondary school students’ citations of self-selected online sources in their essays. Students (n = 140) conducted online inquiry about either effects of social media on people’s quality of life (SM) or allowance of genetic manipulation of organisms (GMO). Students, working either individually or in pairs, explored online sources with the help of a graphic organizer, after which they composed their essays. To capture the quality of citations identified in the essays, they were evaluated in terms of accuracy and richness of source features. Further, regression analysis was used to examine the effect of topic, grade level and work mode on the number and quality of citations. Results showed that students seldom cited sources in their essays, and when they did, citations were mostly accurate but less often rich in source features. When writing about SM, students most frequently cited media sources, while sources with ideological, political or religious motives were frequently cited in GMO essays. Students’ grades and work modes predicted the number of citations and number of accurate citations.

En majoritet av sjuåringar i Sverige använder internet varje dag. Sjuåringars läsförmåga är dock begränsad, vilket försvårar för dem att hitta information, att avgöra varifrån information härstammar eller med vilken intention den är publicerad. Det innebär också att det är svårt är att avgöra trovärdigheten i den funna informationen. I det centrala innehållet för svenskämnet för årskurs 1-3 framgår att elever ska förstå hur texters avsändare påverka innehållet. Det finns med andra ord ett behov av att stödja barn i att förstå hur information når internet så att barnen kan utvärdera trovärdigheten i den information de finner. Utifrån forskningsfrågorna hur gör barn med begränsad läsförmåga när de söker information och hur tror de att information når internet? har vi genomfört en pilotstudie med 23 barn i årskurs 1 (pojkar = 8, flickor = 15). Intervjuerna genomfördes i grupper om tre under skoldagen. Resultaten från innehållsanalys visar att elevernas tankar om och erfarenhet information på internet präglas starkt av användning av Youtube. De visar hur de kan söka fram fritidsrelaterade bilder och videor genom Siri och Youtube och beskriver hur det ser ut när exempelvis videoklipp laddas upp till Youtube. Angående informationens trovärdighet uttrycker de att allt som visas på Youtube inte är sant eller fungerar att genomföra. De gör också skillnad mellan fakta och fiktion, och vet om att vissa saker kostar pengar. En mer abstrakt och kritisk förståelse för hur information landar på internet och har specifika avsändare med en viss intention saknas.

We explored potential profiles of interest, attitudes, and source evaluation by performing cluster analysis in a sample of Norwegian upper-secondary students. Differences among the profile groups with regard to multiple-document use were examined. The profile groups were partly consistent with the default stances described by the cognitive-affective engagement model of multiple-source use (List & Alexander, 2017), resulting in critical analytic, evaluative, and disengaged profiles. However, the model’s assumption that interest and attitude constitute one affective engagement dimension was not confirmed. There were no statistically significant differences between the profile groups in the processing of a set of multiple documents; yet there was a tendency for students who adopted a critical analytic stance to engage in a more thorough text selection process. Those students also included more information units from the selected texts in their written products and integrated information units across the texts more frequently compared to the other profile groups.

Students need to apply evaluation strategies to find relevant and trustworthy information when completing open-inquiry tasks on the Internet. One such strategy, sourcing, implies attention to information about the sources of documents. This multiple-case study investigates how three small groups of secondary school students solved an open-inquiry task. The task took place after extensive instruction on how to benefit from the use of source information when selecting, reading, and integrating information. The multiple-case study aimed to ascertain how the taught sourcing skills were reflected in the different groups’ sourcing activities. Data consisted of observations, interviews, and documents. Results show that groups performed more sourcing activities than they displayed in their oral presentation. Though the integration of information from multiple documents was less prominent, teachers valued it highly. The findings suggest that instructions in school should not focus on the performance of sourcing activities but on discussions where students compare their selections and integration of information.

I det här kapitlet beskriver vi ett utvecklingsprojekt kring frågor om lärares digitala kompetens. Bakgrunden till projektet är de förändrade läroplansskrivningarna gällande digital kompetens (Skolverket, 2018). Vår studie visar att lärarstudenterna erbjuds att utveckla sin digitala kompetens på ett avgränsat, snarare än ett systematiskt sätt. Lärarstudenterna möter ett blandat kursinnehåll kring digitalisering i samhället och utbildning genom enstaka inslag i kurser snarare än en precis idé om lärares professionella digitala kompetens. Det lärarstudenterna främst efterfrågar är mer innehåll kring praktiskt och didaktiskt användande av digital teknik i skolpraktik. Studien pekar vidare på vikten av att fånga upp samt nyansera nyantagna studenters föreställningar om elevens digitala kompetens. På så vis skulle digitaliseringen kunna figurera som en naturlig del i lärarutbildningen snarare än något nytt och främmande.

In this quasi‐experimental study, the authors examined the effects of an intervention designed to teach upper secondary school students to take source information, such as author expertise, into consideration when selecting, processing, and using textual resources to complete particular multiple‐document literacy tasks. The intervention centered on a contrasting cases approach framed by authentic curriculum‐based classroom activities and was implemented over six weeks by teachers who had participated in professional development seminars. The findings demonstrated that students who had participated in the sourcing intervention placed more value on source information when selecting texts, invested more time and effort in processing the texts they selected, and more frequently attributed textual ideas to their respective sources compared with students who had participated in typical classroom activities instead. These effects were observed on far transfer tasks in which students worked with multiple documents on different topics in different situational contexts for different purposes, and were sustained over a period of 5.5 weeks. The discussion highlights the uniqueness of the current intervention work and centers on the aspects of the sourcing intervention that likely promoted these broad, sustainable, and transferable sourcing skills in students. Attention is also directed to several possible lines of future research in this area.

The purpose of this study was to test a hypothesized model that specified direct and indirect effects of textual and individual factors on readers’ ability to integrate information about sources and content when reading multiple conflicting texts on a controversial socio-scientific issue. Using a path analytic approach with a sample of 140 Norwegian upper secondary school students, it was found that the textual factor of presentation format, specifically whether they read about the conflicting issue in multiple texts or in a single text, affected source-content integration directly as well as indirectly through memory for textual conflicts. Thus, compared to interacting with a single text, interacting with multiple texts improved students’ sourcing performance directly as well as indirectly. Further, the individual factors of prior knowledge and gender affected source-content integration directly, with prior knowledge also having an indirect effect that was mediated by memory for textual conflicts. Specifically, students with higher prior knowledge and girls were likely to display better sourcing performance than were students with lower prior knowledge and boys, and prior knowledge also had an indirect positive effect on sourcing via memory for textual conflicts. Theoretical as well as educational implications of the findings are discussed. 

Pictures are often integrated in digital learning materials with the purpose of enhancing learning. This mixed methods study uses quantitative eye-tracking data and qualitative data such as oral answers to discover whether characteristics of pictures influence patterns of text–picture transition in readers with (n=10) and without (n=14) dyslexia, and how reading comprehension is affected. Most participants attended to the picture with a “noncongruent with reality” motif early in the inspection process. Qualitative analysis of oral answers showed that retaining the gist of that specific picture led to more developed answers, even for the dyslexic group. Early attention to the picture thus gives readers a fair chance of starting with a holistic impression of the material to be processed.

This study analyses the effect of pictures in reading materials on the viewing patterns of dyslexic adults. By analysing viewing patterns using eye-tracking, we captured differences in eye movements between young adults with dyslexia and controls based on the influence of reading skill as a continuous variable of the total sample. Both types of participants were assigned randomly to view either text-only or a text + picture stimuli. The results show that the controls made an early global overview of the material and (when a picture was present) rapid transitions between text and picture. Having text illustrated with a picture decreased scores on questions about the learning material among participants with dyslexia. Controls spent 1.7% and dyslexic participants 1% of their time on the picture. Controls had 24% fewer total fixations; however, 29% more of the control group's fixations than the dyslexic group's fixations were on the picture. We also looked for effects of different types of pictures. Dyslexic subjects exhibited a comparable viewing pattern to controls when scenes were complex, but fewer fixations when scenes were neutral/simple. Individual scan paths are presented as examples of atypical viewing patterns for individuals with dyslexia as compared with controls. © 2016 The Authors. Dyslexia published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Central coherence is the ability to gather information from the environment to shape a coherent meaningful whole. Having a weak central coherence, like individuals with ASD usually have, means they tend to divide the whole in parts, while individuals without ASD rather try to shape a whole gestalt of the parts. How school-tasks are designed is of importance for all students, and McMaster, van den Broek, Espin, Pinto, Janda, Lam, Hsu, Jung, Leinen and van Boekel (2015) have studied how task design to establish coherence have to make the students identify how different events or facts lead to or depend on each other can be developed. However, if the students do have impairments in central coherence this issue becomes even more important.