No abstract

Previous research has highlighted how young people struggle to distinguish news from misinformation. In this study, we investigate how ca. 400 students determine the trustworthiness of false, biased and credible news. We find that students use different strategies depending on what they evaluate. For example, students who fail to debunk a manipulated image often rely on what they see in the image in contrast to students who determine credibility upon what is not in the image. Students finding junk news credible may have special problems separating different kinds of sources. We identify potentials and pitfalls among students important for further investigation, research and a focus on education.

In this paper, we aim to explore and exemplify what opportunities to develop disciplinary reading literacy students are given access to in particular types of classroom reading environments in social science subjects. The investigation focuses on how the teacher organizes activities around reading, on what content is approached in text-related discussions and on whose perspectives are allowed space in the classroom discourse. The empirical data consists of classroom observations from two classes in year five and two classes in the Swedish upper secondary school, using different approaches to teaching reading, one being Reading to Learn. With a theoretical base in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), dialogism and reception theory, the classroom discourse was analysed in terms of sequential reading stages, text movability and dialogicality. The findings reveal how differently organized reading environments provide different support structures for students' disciplinary reading. For example, the findings indicate that text activities that support the reading process in several stages bring about a larger potential for the development of reading literacy. However, the picture changes depending on to what extent students are given room to express their reception of the text, and thereby contribute to an active understanding of text in a dialogical classroom.

Research on early school writing has focused primarily on formal aspects of writing, such as spelling, punctuation and various aspects of text structure. Less attention has been given to what distinguishes the content of these early texts and how particular disciplinary content is developed and identified. This study endeavours to examine the subject specific content in early school writing of literary texts with the following research questions:(1) What content is construed in narrative texts written by students in early school years (grades 2-3)?(2) What linguistic resources are used to construe this content? This study offers a model for addressing content aspects of early school writing, giving empirical example of analysis of early narrative writing in primary school. The data consists of two groups of narrative texts written by the same children in school years 2 and 3, in relation to two comparable tasks. Our analytical framework is inspired by Systemic Functional Linguistics and in particular the analytical tool set provided by cohesion and transitivity analyses. We conclude that narrative writing in primary school can mean both to explore a diverse textual world and a more uniform one. We further claim that signs of emerging literary literacy may be detected throughout the analysed data sets by using the text analytic method suggested.

We present T-MASTER, a tool for assessing students' reading skills on a variety of dimensions. T-MASTER uses sophisticated measures for assessing a student's reading comprehension and vocabulary understanding. Texts are selected based on their difficulty using novel readability measures and tests are created based on the texts. The results are analyzed in T-MASTER, and the numerical results are mapped to textual descriptions that describe the student's reading abilities on the dimensions being analysed. These results are presented to the teacher in a form that is easily comprehensible, and lends itself to inspection of each individual student's results.