Abilities, knowledge requirements and national tests in RE – The Swedish case as an example in the outcome-focused school and society of today

1. Introduction

In recent years, public educational discourse worldwide has been rather focused on achievements, measurements and international comparisons (Smith, 2016). In relation to this, a debate within educational research about what such a trend means, in general and particularly in the field of religious and ethics education, is important.

One aspect of this public debate on achievements has been the effort to govern and direct education. Both in EU policy and in national curricula, the tendency to describe educational expectations in terms of competences has become common. In Sweden, the concept competence [kompetens] is not present in the current national curriculum, which was enacted in 2011. Instead, ‘knowledge requirements’ [kunskapskrav] are central here. These requirements are rather detailed and in this respect, they differ quite a lot from the “goals” and “goals to strive for”, the expressions used in the previous curriculum (Lpo 94). Along with the latest curriculum reform, the government introduced national tests in many more subjects and for more age groups than previously. Religious education (RE) was one of the subjects in which roughly 25 000 pupils per year in grade six and 25 000 students per year in grade nine were to be evaluated as having or not having an approved level of knowledge. Such a situation highlights the question of which knowledge is emphasised in a field. In 2014, the Swedish Research Council granted funding to a project on varieties of conceptions of ethical competence (EthiCo) which stresses that what is seen to constitute knowledge within ethics education is somewhat disputed and is potentially limited in the Swedish curriculum. This text draws on findings from the project.^[1]

The aim of the article is to present the system that governs Swedish RE in terms of curricular requirements, national tests and their outcomes, and discuss this in light of the current critical debate on an outcome-focused school as well as the debate on the need for ‘powerful knowledge’.

2. Desirable school knowledge as competences

3. The Swedish model

4. EthiCo – beyond knowledge requirements and national tests

The EthiCo project was developed from the starting point that there are reasons to believe that the knowledge requirements and national tests limit central knowledge in a field. The EthiCo project focuses on the sub-area Ethics within the subject of RE in Sweden and has the purpose of identifying and elucidating varieties of conceptions of ethical competence as well as critically analysing and discussing them in relation to each other and in relation to ethical theory as potential content in ethics education in compulsory school. The interest is in varieties of conceptions of ethical competence beyond the analytical and argumentative competences emphasised in the knowledge requirements and national tests. In the EthiCo project, ethical competence was used heuristically as a broad and open concept with the intention of bridging different forms of knowledge, skills and abilities, as well as different labels for such resources (Osbeck et al., 2018; Osbeck, 2018). The purpose of the project is fulfilled through empirical analyses of 1) the tests as a. operationalisations of the requirements, b. findings and information about the ethical competences required of students, and c. findings and information about additional ethical competences shown by students, 2) international curricula, 3) Swedish teachers’ view on central ethical competences and 4) students’ view on central ethical competences. In the presentation below, some of the main findings are summarised and references are given to full presentations of the different studies.

As expected, and as can be seen below, findings from the project show additional ethical competences to those tested in the national tests. Analyses of the test constructions show how the knowledge requirements have directed the tests, as well the assessment instructions for the tests. The focus on testing reasoning in ethics is shown to be unfavourable to ethics education, as other dimensions of ethics education are neglected (Sporre, 2018a).

The findings from a systematically drawn sample from the 47 266 grade 6 and 9 tests – i. e. 3102 student tests – show that students’ grades were in general lower on the tasks related to the sub-area of Ethics than the tasks referring to the two sub-areas related to religions (Tykesson, 2017). However, this does not mean that it is possible to claim that the ethics part of the subject is generally the more difficult one since there was a larger proportion of multiple choice items for the sub-areas related to religions than for the sub-area of Ethics. In addition, whether a task is solved to a higher or lower degree than average varies between the ethics tasks. Another circumstance that makes it hard to draw conclusions about groups of tasks (Ethics-Religions) in a test aiming at high inner consistency, is that results on different tasks correlate highly with each other. However, it is clear that girls generally perform better than boys on the RE national test and that native speaking students perform better than non-native speaking students (Tykesson, 2017).^[4]

A subsequent reanalysis and close reading of a systematic sample of students’ answers to the ethics tasks – in sum 200 test texts – has indicated that wider ethical competences are shown than the ones that students are supposed to receive credit for according to the assessment instructions (Osbeck, 2017; Sporre, 2018b). In particular, abilities to weigh values in relation to each other and argue for collective and societal values, in line with the introductory part of the Swedish curriculum, are shown – although not given credit.

The limitations of the ethical competences assessed in the Swedish national tests can also be seen from comparisons and analyses of international curricula. Text analyses of Nordic curricula show, for instance, an absence of action competence in the Swedish one (Lilja et al., 2018). Analysis of the curricula from Namibia, South Africa, California State and the Province of Québec indicate an individualistic nature of the Swedish curriculum, which to a large extent fails to place ethical competences in a societal context by addressing current issues such as multi-cultural and citizen-oriented topics (Sporre, 2017).

In the group interviews, teachers from eight different schools and municipalities (14 groups) stress as important ethical competences, beyond those in the Swedish knowledge requirements, an understanding of ethical dilemmas, often everyday life events. Such an understanding may be of an empathic kind but may also be a reflexive understanding, drawing on, for instance, critical thinking. How ethical competence may be related to a perseverance competence is also shown through the interviews as well as the centrality of action competence.

From the perspective of the interviewed students – in total 16 groups from the same schools as the interviewed teachers – ethical competence is a rather contextual, holistic, procedural and everyday-life-related competence. This perspective clearly includes a weighing of values in relation to each other. The needs expressed by the students regarding ethical competence are related to certain situations of which some are mentioned more frequently than others. Values, situations and needs for ethical competences are intertwined in the interviews with the students. Here an identifying competence concerning ethical issues is stressed as well as a carrying out competence and a reconsidering competence, i. e. taking responsibility for previous decisions.

Previous research stresses, in addition to the argumentative ethical competences in the Swedish curriculum, the importance of an identifying competence, a competence to be informed and knowledgeable about ethical issues, but also an action competence, as well as a perseverance competence (Osbeck et al., 2018).

5. Concluding remarks

This article has stressed how the language of competences is a part of an outcome-focused language frequently used in curricula nowadays. Even if a focus on learning outcomes can be criticised for having an instrumentalising view of knowledge, this article has also pointed to the importance of school in contributing to powerful knowledge, in relation to which an interest in learning outcome might be understandable. Although the language of competences in the curriculum may be limiting in some respects, in the Swedish context it is more the national testing that has contributed to such limitations. There are central aspects of an ethical competence that have been identified in research, for example in the EthiCo project, that are not taken into account in the knowledge requirements and therefore not tested. This means that there are serious reasons to believe that the testing and its teaching-to-the-test effects may restrict students’ development of ethical competences in Sweden.

While this article was being written, the Swedish Minister of Education and the National Agency for Education announced a rewriting of the knowledge requirements of the curriculum. To what extent this will also have consequences for the national tests is a question that remains to be answered. Since the Agency has invited curriculum researchers in general to engage in this work, one might expect that research such as that developed in the EthiCo project will be taken more into account and that the new curriculum will therefore be more varied.

One possible contribution of the EthiCo project, even while still in progress, to such a discussion about changes in the curriculum would be to point out the need to change the one-dimensional understanding of ethical competence – the argumentative competence – into a multi-dimensional understanding of ethical competence. What has been briefly presented in this article is how the empirical analyses of the different materials in the EthiCo project have identified an understanding of ethical competence that goes beyond the curricular requirements and national tests. A summary of such identified competences, beyond the argumentative competence stressed in the Swedish syllabus, are: an identifying competence concerning e. g. ethical dilemmas in everyday life; a weighing competence in relation to collective and societal values; a competence of being well-informed about the issues at stake, an action competence, a perseverance competence, a reconsidering competence, but also a competence to contextualise ethical issues in the multi-cultural and global society of today. A frequently cited scholar who conceptualises morality broadly, in four components, is James Rest (e. g. 1986). Without discussing the psychological foundations of his theory, the four components – moral sensitivity, moral judgement, moral motivation and moral implementation – seem fundamental in their way of capturing most of the dimensions that the EthiCo project has empirically identified, and also many of the perspectives on ethical competence that can be identified in empirical research (Osbeck et al 2018). Rest’s concepts, in addition to the EthiCo empirical findings, seem helpful in order to conceptualise and visualise a multi-dimensional understanding of ethical competence that could possibly replace the dominant one-dimensional understanding of ethical competence of the Swedish syllabus and national tests.

In order to develop educational quality, factors other than goals and curriculum content need to be focused on, however, as stressed previously. How teaching processes and classroom communication develop is one such factor, as well as the abilities of teachers and students (Schweitzer, 2006). One of the most important issues hindering school quality from improving in Sweden today is the segregation of schools. The possibility of choosing schools freely and the different requirements of these schools regarding student achievements is one part of the segregation. The increasing segregation in living areas of Swedish society is another. A high-quality school system must be able to realise social mobility. That means that a high-quality RE needs to provide students with powerful knowledge concerning both a better understanding of religion and society, and an ethicalexistential competence that also includes the very courage to be – however difficult it may be to measure such a competence.