Our Projects

Between Automation and Authorship: Generative AI and the Doing of Academic Writing

This project examines how Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), specifically Large Language Models, affects academic writing practices within higher education, particularly in the context of master´s thesis assignments. Instead of focusing solely on concerns regarding academic integrity, this research considers GAI as a significant epistemic technology that alters established practices of knowledge generation, authorship, and assessment. Utilizing an embedded multi-case study design, the project investigates institutional policy responses, students´ use of AI-supported writing tools, and transformations in supervision and evaluation practices across master’s programs in psychology, theology, and journalism. Methodologically, the project integrates collection and analysis of digital traces, interaction analysis, and critical policy analysis to systematically document interactions with AI tools during academic writing in context. Findings will aim to clarify the extent to which AI tools reshape epistemic labor and knowledge validation processes within academic institutions. Grounded in socio-cultural theories of learning and writing, the study seeks to contribute to educational sciences by theorizing how GAI reconfigures traditional academic writing practices and institutional responses, informing the responsible integration of AI technologies into educational contexts.

GRAITE: GRAduate school for AI and Teacher Education

Amid polarisation debates on digital technologies in education, the Graduate School for AI in Teacher Education (GRAITE) offers a nuanced research environment focused on AI´s role in teacher educators´ work and student teachers´ competence development. It addresses the critical need to understand how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies impact Swedish teacher education (TE). As digital and AI tools, including generative AI, rapidly transform society, GRAITE explores how TE programs respond to this shift through teaching, learning, and professional practice. Grounded in the TPACK framework, the program investigates how teacher educators build knowledge and strategies to integrate AI in pedagogically meaningful and ethically responsible ways. GRAITE brings together nine Swedish universities with interdisciplinary expertise across education, informatics, digital learning, media technology, and subject didactics. It offers doctoral students structured training through shared courses, seminars, and supervision, fostering both national collaboration and international exchange. Central research questions focus on how TE prepares student teachers to use AI, how educators develop their digital competence, and how AI-related challenges and opportunities are addressed in policy and practice. GRAITE aims to strengthen research, inform policy, and support democratic values in education in an AI-infused society.

Embodiment - Research on Extended and Experiential Learning in STEM (E-REELS network)

The E-REELS network highlights digital methods and tools which improve STEM education through embodied and multisensory  learning experiences. The network will study how digital tools enhance or limit sensorimotor engagement in STEM learning  through research collaboration between Swedish and American scholars. The research collaboration will create research-based educational approaches and  pedagogical models that merge embodied learning principles into digital STEM learning environments by applying the  4E-cognition framework (Embodied, Embedded, Extended, Enactive).The collaboration will be implemented through joint  workshops, seminars, research exchanges and collaborative publications. The network combines expertise in embodied cognition with educational leadership  and inclusive education and digital learning technologies to study movement-based learning and virtual laboratories and inclusive STEM practices through  empirical research. The researchers will submit joint funding applications while exchanging knowledge between their respective countries.The research  will support sustainable and inclusive STEM education through teacher training development and accessible learning environment creation for neurodiverse students and evidence-based policy recommendations. E-REELS aims to improve STEM learning through interdisciplinary collaboration by  developing digital tools that create deeper conceptual understanding and active engagement in various educational settings.

AI in Schools: Challenges, Opportunities, and Joint Strategies to Promote Democratic Education

This project investigates how AI can be integrated into schools to promote democratic education, focusing on challenges and opportunities for teachers and students.

Nordiskt nätverk för simulator-baserad träning och profesionellt lärande (SimPro)

For professional education, it is necessary to bridge theory and practice through active student involvement. The use of simulations in training are promising in this respect. Technological advancement in recent years have expanded the opportunities to train in a realistic and risk-free environment before entering a workplace where mistakes can be the difference between life and death. To successfully adopt such methods, we need an in-depth understanding of the relationships between professional contexts and simulation used in education. The research project PROSIM gathers researchers from universities in Sweden and Norway to study the use of simulations across different professional domains. Our aim is to develop knowledge and further understanding of the use of simulations for professional learning. In particular, our interest is to explore the relationship between simulations and the social, emotional and cognitive dimensions for professional practice through ethnographic research methods. The proposed Nordic network SimPro is led by University of Gothenburg and expands on the PROSIM project by inviting new partners to participate in forums for learning across domains, as well as between academia and the practice fields. Thus, the ambition of the network is to stimulate cross-disciplinary learning of best practices and a shared system of concepts in relation to the use of simulations in professional education.

Integrating Adaptive Learning in Maritime Simulator-Based Education and Training with Intelligent Learning System (I-MASTER)

An EU-funded project that aims to develop and integrate adaptive learning technologies into maritime simulator-based education to personalize the training experience.

WASP-ED Work Area 6: AI Teaching Competence Development

Focuses on the pedagogical development of AI education and the use of learning analytics to support teaching and learning in AI-related programs.

PROSIM – Professional education and simulation-based training

Investigates technology-supported simulation-based training in maritime, health, and biomedical laboratory science to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical applications.

The Missing Teacher in AI: Involving Teachers in Metadesign of AI to Ensure FAIRness

Aims to involve teachers in the metadesign of AI systems to ensure fairness and increase teacher agency in the design and use of AI in education.

Reconfigurations of Educational In/Equality in a Digital World

Investigates how digital technologies reconfigure educational inequalities, focusing on the interplay between digital tools, pedagogical practices, and social structures.

Teaching, training and assessment of surgical skills, using human cadavers

Explores the use of human cadavers for teaching, training, and assessing surgical skills, focusing on the educational and practical benefits of this method.

LIKED - Doctoral program for Learning, Interacting and Knowing in a Digitalized World

The doctoral program LIKED – Learning, interacting, and knowing in a digitalised world, is a joint national venture involving nine Swedish universities. This doctoral program rests on the assumption that the digitalization of society results in challenges and opportunities for learning and education that call for transformations – from current to future practices. Digital technologies cannot merely be understood as providing access to new resources for learning, interacting, and knowing, it provides new dimensions. The ongoing digitalization processes in society creates a situation in which not only students but citizens at large need of competences for handling everyday life that differs from those in pre-digital times. LIKED will address issues in relation to how will the digitalization of society changes the conditions for teaching and learning in education at large, as activities intended to provide competences for handling everyday life in a digitalized society, how these competences can be described, analysed, and understood in terms of learning, interaction, and knowing in a digitalized world.LIKED will have the role of being a research environment of high scientific quality. The participating universities will collaborate to provide courses based on their expertise in the field, such as various research methods, different theoretical perspectives, analysis tools and design issues in research.

The physiology of eye contact in children with autism

Appropriate eye contact is an important aspect of our social behavior. Individuals with autism have shown deficiencies in making and maintaining eye contact with others, which contribute to the social difficulties that define the disorder. A common assumption has been that individuals with autism are indifferent to others, which has also been a motivating factor in reinforcement-based therapies. However, a growing number of research projects have shown that the behavioral lack of eye contact is often accompanied by a physiologically aroused autonomic nervous system (ANS), which points to an oversensitivity, rather than disinterest, in eye contact. Guided by the hypothesis of an excitatory/inhibitory imbalance in the socio-affective processing in autism (Lasalle et al., 2017), two objectives motivate present research. The first is to explore pupil mimicry (Fawcett et al., 2018; Kret, Fischer & De Dreu, 2015) as an index of autonomic function through physiological responses such as skin conductance and heart rate. Pupil mimicry has been found to be the mechanism by which an observer matches the arousal level with the observed individual. The second objective is to examine how pupil mimicry effect correlates with autistic traits, an individual's sensory profile, and degree of anxiety. The present project holds theoretical, clinical and social implications for individuals who have difficulty with eye contact and for whom traditional therapies have proven to be inconsequential.

UPGRADE - Teacher education and the digitalization in schools

The doctoral program UPGRADE - Teacher education and the digitalization in schools, is a national graduate school at nine Swedish universities. In Sweden, teacher education has been noted in relation to the school´s digitalization since the early 1990s. However, the results of a recent study among Swedish teacher students show that one of three teacher students experienced that the use of digital tools in their teacher education was low and almost half of the teacher students felt that the preparations for teaching with digital resources were inadequate. In the recently launched Swedish action plan for the digitalization of the school, teacher education is emphasized as crucial for preparing teachers to be able to use digital technology in meaningful ways in their professional activities.UPGRADE will address issues in relation to preparing student teachers for the digitalized school, how to develop methods that better incorporate digital technologies in teaching and learning including the role of education policy, national differences and the digital transformation of the surrounding society, and how to develop digital competence for teacher educators.UPGRADE will have the role of being a research environment of high scientific quality. The participating universities will collaborate to provide courses based on their expertise in the field, such as various research methods, different theoretical perspectives, analysis tools and design issues in research.

The sensitive nature of feedback as an interactional phenomenon

Social actions such as advice and feedback are sensitive actions, often triggering emotional and defensive reactions. Moreover, just how to understand and describe such actions – for instance, as “constructive advice”, “complaints”, or even “insults” – is a potential point of contention and dispute for participants in interaction. Based on a unique corpus of video data from higher education (500h, from 12 different settings), the project aims to develop a conceptual and empirically grounded understanding of the social organization of feedback. We focus on how participants orient to the sensitive nature of feedback, and deal with situations where emotional reactions, resistance and defensiveness become focal. The diversity of the corpus also allows distinguishing generic from setting-specific phenomena and specify the relevance of contextual and situational characteristics, strengthening the potential for theoretical development. The project is a timely contribution not only empirically and theoretically, but also in its ambition to conduct analyses of a large corpus of existing video data. Encouraging secondary use of data is currently priority nationally and internationally. An important methodological contribution of the project is to develop workflows for secondary use of video data, potentially serving as a model for similar future initiatives.

Social Dimensions of Expertise Development in Networked Communities

Investigates the social dimensions of expertise development in networked communities, using open digital badges in the humanities as a case study.

Teachers' digital work - (in)balance between demands and support?

Examines the digital work of teachers, focusing on how technologies are used in practice and the challenges they face in their daily professional lives.

Rethinking and Reinventing Learning, Education, and Collaboration in the Digital Age

Assessment of professional performance: Maritime technologies, knowledge and educational practices in transformation

Maritime education serves as an illustrative example of a domain that during recent decades have gone through significant transformations: from a system of apprenticeship to an academic education where the time spent learning the work practice at sea is partly replaced by training in simulator environments. Today, maritime education is regulated by international standards for competencies and different types of certificates. This in turn poses challenges for educators to train competent master mariners and to use simulators in training and assessing professional performance. The thesis “Training to become a master mariner in a simulator-based environment: The instructors’ contributions to professional learning” contributes with knowledge on the practical accomplishment of training through ethnographic fieldwork and detailed video analyses of the instructors’ work in simulator environments. The planned post doc project shifts focus from the practical accomplishment of training towards the challenges of assessing and certifying professional performance identified in and through the thesis project. A problem is that neither such scoring systems nor high-end technologies in themselves are able provide valid assessments of professional conduct. Hence, a prevailing pedagogical question is the instructors’ ability to bridge between feedback from assessment tools and the contingent character of skilled performance. Through interviews and analyses of video recorded assessments in simulator environment the project explores a) how do new tools and criteria enter into existing assessment practices in the simulator environment? b) which pedagogical challenges can be identified when new tools and criteria for assessment is implemented? The project is expected to provide new knowledge about how the adaption of new technologies restructure how intelligent actions are being perceived and assessed.

International Conference on Analyzing and advancing simulations for professional learning

Reading faces and reading words in school-age children with and without develomental dyslexia

Dyslexia is defined by difficulties in acquiring fluent and accurate word reading, and is commonly associated with phonological difficulties. Recently it has been suggested that not only written words but also faces might be processed differently in dyslexia. However, there is currently no precise description of face processing in dyslexia, nor of its relationship with reading-related skills. In this project, we will first explore face processing atypicalities in school-children with dyslexia by means of standardized tests of face perception and face memory. Second, we will use eyetracking to examine how children with dyslexia and control children spontaneously view videos of people´s faces during speech processing. We will measure indexes of laterality/maturation of the face processing system in the brain (the so-called left visual field bias) and the distribution of gaze to the eye versus mouth region of faces. Finally, using an experimental training study, we will explore whether children with and without dyslexia learn to read phonologically complex written words better (faster and more accurately) if the words are presented and trained together with a dynamic visual representation of a mouth, that articulates the phonological structure of each word. Together these data will provide theoretically and practically important information regarding the severity and specificity of face perception difficulties in dyslexia, and will help to develop educational support programs.

Graduate school - Digital technologies in education - GRADE

This application is for a doctoral program grant to establish a national “GRAduate school for Digital technologies in Education” - GRADE - planned to admit 12 doctoral students. One fundamental pillar of GRADE is the interdisciplinary approach. Applied IT, Curriculum studies, Education, Informatics, and Media technology are subject areas represented. GRADE will be conducted in cooperation between six Swedish universities; Umeå University ; University of Gothenburg; KTH Royal Institute of Technology; Mid Sweden University; University of Gävle; and University West Sweden.The role of GRADE is to provide a high quality research environment. Participating universities will cooperate in providing courses based on their expertise. This will imply that central issues with a bearing on the digitalization of education, namely school policy, teaching, learning, assessment and professional development will be researched from different perspectives and with different methodological approaches.The doctoral students will be admitted to third-cycle subject areas (disciplines) at the partnering universities and GRADE will provide a frame for courses, seminars, conferences, and supervision. It will be conducted both at campus and through different forms of communication-technologies.The long-term ambition of GRADE is a national center for research on digital technologies in education, with a bi-annual admission of doctoral students and a postdoctoral program.

MyCode - digital tools for emotional support during and after cancer treatment on young adults’ terms

Explores how children's programming and mathematics are integrated into Swedish preschools, focusing on the roles of teachers and digital tools.

Emerging communities of professional development for IT in schools: Teachers´ engagement in the flipped-classroom movement

Recent findings from research on IT in education have highlighted the pedagogical shortcomings of IT-use in schools. These results confirm earlier research concluding that teachers have had little opportunity for influence and that technological access is not sufficient for school development to take place. In this proposed project we are interested in a number of large-scale movements organised around internet-based communities that have developed significant influence and numbers of participants both within Sweden and internationally. Our aim is to examine one example of a newly emerging teacher-driven initiative where teachers are engaging in professional IT development outside common structures and school organizations; the rapidly evolving flipped-classroom movement which is currently developing both internationally and nationally. In particular, the research will draw on the perspective of situated learning within communities of practices by conducting: a) a social network analysis of the online community b) a document analysis of key documents produced by teachers and institutional stakeholders, c) a survey of Swedish flipped-classroom community members, d) interviews with teachers, and e) interviews with institutional stakeholders. Our overall purpose is to contribute to the research on IT and school development by taking an innovative research focus and methodology for analysing emerging Internet supported opportunities for teacher-driven professional development.

Developing together: Unpacking the mutual transformation of technology and educational practices in diverse learning settings

As examples of user-generated content on the Internet powerfully illustrate, users cannot be simply understood as consumers of technology. Instead, their role as producers must also be considered. Similarly, the shaping of educational practices through technology use is only one side of a more complex process that also involves shaping of that technology by educational practices. To help understand the complex mutual transformation of technologies and educational practices in diverse learning situations, this research programme draws on two on-going research projects in two different learning settings. One project, VIDEOMAT, is an international comparative study of early algebra teaching and learning in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and California. The other, MobSci, investigates learning with mobile technologies in science centres. Drawing on empirical data collected as part of these projects through video-recorded observation, interviews, and material evidence, network analysis of the relationships among humans and materials in the settings will be performed along with detailed analysis of individual interactions. The aim is to uncover key features of the mutual transformation of technologies and educational practices and to probe the socio-cultural similarities and differences between diverse learning situations.

The Role of Open Models in Mutual Development in Non-Formal Education

We are witnessing the growing influence of open models such as Open Source Software (OSS) and Open Educational Resources (OER) on emerging educational practices that support non-formal and self-organized educational communities. The openness of OSS and OER as models for digital resources provides learners with the opportunity to use, adapt and improve the tools and contents they learn with, and to find new forms of collaborative design even when they are not part of a specific local development team. The purpose of this postdoctoral research program is to examine how course organizers and self-directed learners participating in voluntary non-formal courses engage in mutual development, and to investigate how OSS and OER models for educational resources make this mutual development possible. By conducting two virtual ethnographic studies informed by the theory of innovation communities, the study will examine how course organizers and self-directed learners contribute ideas to the design of open courses and how this contribution is mediated by OSS and OER. This program should lead to a more informed understanding of the way mutual development works in an educational setting and the way we can engage more people in educational processes, by empowering them to use, adapt and improve the tools and contents they learn with. Hence, the results of this program can be used to enrich continuing education and professional development.

Illumination, magnification and verbalisation: Technologies and techniques in the learning of endodontics

The project is grounded in the theoretical traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis ? and, especially, previous work within these traditions that has examined video recorded interaction between novices and experts. The focus is the teaching and learning of endodontics, a speciality within dentistry concerned with the pulp of the tooth. The endodontic treatment and its procedures have historically been hard to make comprehensible for students. Recently, video recordings of the endodontic procedures through the microscope have been broadcasted live in seminars, thereby creating a new form of learning situation. These sessions are used in conjunction with lab work, in which students use ´mock ups´ to train their own skills. By recording and analysing the educational activities, the aim of the project is to reveal some foundational conditions for teaching and learning of professional skills ? not only in endodontics, but also in other domains where the relation between theory and practice is critical, and where competencies are intertwined with technology and the production and interpretation of visual representations. By being firmly grounded the empirical material, the project also aims to expand some central discussions on central concepts in educational research, such as ´knowing-in-action´, ´authenticity´ and ´situated learning´ ? discussions that primarily have been based on purely theoretical arguments, speculation or anecdotal evidence.