Assessment for Learning – Natural Science in a Social Context

survival words. The premise of this study is four Swedish municipalities, which in spite of similarities in terms of size, population structure, labour, etc. show significant differences in the described performances of their students. This resulted in a three-year research and development project where municipalities and universities collaborate. The overall aim of this project is to explore, change and develop educational activities with the intent to optimise the conditions for the teachers assessing student learning with subsequent improvements in student performance. The sub-study is focused on learning and assessment in science teaching in a social context. The project is based on the pedagogical theory of Basil Bernstein (Bernstein, 2000), where the conditions of students with non-academic backgrounds are taken into account. Important theoretical concepts are horizontal and vertical discourses, which on one hand represent knowledge as colloquial, and on the other, knowledge as qualifying, i.e. more specialised and meriting in the assessment context. The theory facilitates reasoning on how students can be given access to such knowledge, and also it challenges contemporary educational ideals that have been found to disfavour students with some sort of social background (Norlund, 2009)