Swedish students’ everyday school life and teachers’ assessment dilemmas: peer strategies for ameliorating schoolwork for assessment

In contemporary ways of thinking about education there is an enhanced focus on individual students’ results and less on students’ collaborative processes for attaining good results. This may appear peculiar, given that the Swedish curriculum for the nine-year compulsory school states that students should be given opportunities to compose texts together with others and give and receive feedback on them. This is also in line with societal desires to motivate students to take responsibility for their lifelong learning. The evolving ethnographic research design, comprising observations, audio-visual recordings and follow-up interviews with students at a Swedish lower secondary school (Years 8 and 9), investigated the informal social strategies that students enacted when doing formal schoolwork and how they reflected on them. Goffman’s (1959/1990) dramaturgical metaphors of the back region, front region and impression management were applied as theoretical points of departure. The findings showed that some students worked hard at their schoolwork in ways that corresponded with societal desires and ideal learning curves. Other students aimed at more effortless achievements and relied heavily on peers and digital devices when taking shortcuts to produce formal assignments. These students’ potential learning curves showed a broken arrow of knowledge development, resulting in assessment dilemmas for teachers and possible mismatches in their grading