About us
The purpose of the graduate school Assessment of Knowledge in Educational Systems - an national doctoral school for teacher educators (ASSESS) is to strengthen research competence in a neglected and central area of knowledge for teacher education and educational science research.
ASSESS' purpose is broken down into four sub-goals:
1. To develop new research frontiers on knowledge measurements by analysing the many high-quality individual knowledge measurement-data available in Sweden based on a multidisciplinary basis.
2. To build a national research capacity through the development of supervisor skills among teacher educators, postgraduate courses, workshops, networks and conferences.
3. To disseminate new research results and expertise on knowledge measurement to other research environments and to strategic actors in teacher education and school administration.
4. To establish Sweden as an international node for the study and analysis of knowledge measurements by taking advantage of the extensive high-quality datasets available for research.
The overarching theme is knowledge measurement in a national and international perspective. This includes national tests in, for example, mathematics and Swedish, grades in school subjects and the large, internationally organised knowledge measurements PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, ICCS and others. Research on measures of knowledge and studies of school results is a broad field that includes different areas. One is about measurements and includes the construction of samples, classical and modern measurement theory, questions of reliability and validity. Another is about secondary analysis of knowledge results, which in turn focuses on differences between students, schools, municipalities and countries. A third is about more comprehensive analyses of the wider effects of knowledge measurements at the individual and aggregate level. These are the areas that are explored in the graduate school. The three research environments contribute with different and complementary competencies to the graduate school's multidimensional profile.
The graduate school comprises nine doctoral students who are linked in various ways to the teacher education programmes at the collaborating universities. The graduate school is coordinated by researchers at the University of Gothenburg and is carried out in collaboration with researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University. These three educational university environments together form a powerful network for research in the field of assessment linked to data from national and international knowledge measurements. In addition, international experts in the field will be hired as lecturers and, if necessary, as expert supervisors. Researchers from the three universities will teach the courses that are compulsory for the graduate school and supervise the doctoral students' thesis projects.
The doctoral students have been admitted to doctoral studies at one of the three participating universities and thus have different disciplinary grounds. At the same time, a common knowledge base is built up via a compulsory course package of five third-cycle courses 7.5 credits in the assessment area. In addition to this, an annual workshop is added, where the doctoral students are given the opportunity to present their research and discuss with each other, with the researchers of the graduate school and with representatives of the international expert panel that has been linked to the graduate school.
The graduate school is well integrated into teacher education. All research environments included in ASSESS are located at departments that conduct teacher education, and the environments are responsible for essential elements of teacher education where knowledge measurements are processed. All doctoral students are offered the opportunity to teach up to 20 percent within the framework of these courses. The ambition is for the graduate school to contribute to further strengthening teaching about knowledge measurement in teacher education through the addition of new competence, more competence and course development. Not least, the quantitative methodological competence that is built up within ASSESS will be a welcome contribution to the teacher educators' competence profile and supervisory ability in accordance with the degree objectives of teacher education. UKÄ's audits of teacher education programmes have shown that virtually no degree projects in the audited teacher education programmes use quantitative methodological approaches, and a likely reason for this is deficiencies in supervisory competence among teacher educators.