In Swedish schools, the so-called ‘Participation Model’ is used to observe and analyse participation, with the intention of supporting an inclusive learning environment. While this model is widely promoted by government agencies, its theoretical alignment to the concept(s) of inclusion is not established. This article therefore compares and maps the six aspects of participation within the Participation Model (i.e. belonging, accessibility, interaction, autonomy, involvement and acceptance) with a hierarchically ordered set of commonly occuring definitions of inclusive education (ranging from the lowest level, placement, to the highest, community). The Participation Model was found to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the lower levels of inclusion, as well as necessary conditions for the higher levels of inclusion. However, we show that the model suffers from construct underrepresentation and outline a few possible solutions intended to increase the theoretical alignment between the Participation Model and the higher levels of inclusive education. Finally, we suggest directions for further research.

The gifted education research area is rapidly expanding in Sweden. In the context of very limited research nationally, demands are increasing for steering documents and addressing of student and teacher needs in practice. However, Swedish research on students that are ‘twice exceptional’—students classified as being both gifted and disabled (for instance, through a neurodevelopmental disorder such as ADHD)—is nearly non-existent. In this study, we present an exploratory single case study of a female student in school year seven based on semi-structured individual interviews with the student and her two guardians regarding her educational situation. The data were first inductively coded and triangulated in collaboration between three of the authors. A fourth author later independently and deductively coded one-third of the data based on the previously inductively determined thematic structure and conducted a consensus interrater reliability check, exceeding 85% percent agreement. The three main themes are as follows: (1) multiplex perspectives on academic outcomes and expectations, (2) the intersection between twice exceptionality and academic work, and (3) information and perceptions about twice exceptionality. The results indicate several educational challenges and opportunities for twice exceptional students. Further research is needed regarding twice exceptional students in Sweden.

This article presents an intervention study on the effects of the combined methods of 1) the Socratic method, 2) chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, 3) simplified gamification, and 4) formative feedback on university students’ math learning driven by large language models (LLMs). We call our approach Mathematics Explanations through Games by AI LLMs (MEGA). Some students struggle with math, and as a result, avoid math-related disciplines or subjects despite the importance of math across many fields, including signal processing. Oftentimes, students’ math difficulties stem from suboptimal pedagogy. We compared the MEGA method to the traditional step-by-step (CoT) method to ascertain which is better by using a within-group design after randomly assigning questions for the participants, who are university students. Samples ${(}{n}{=}{60}{)}$ were randomly drawn from each of the two test sets of the Grade School Math 8 K (GSM8K) and Mathematics Aptitude Test of Heuristics (MATH) datasets, based on an error margin of 11%, a confidence level of 90%, and a manageable number of samples for the student evaluators. These samples were used to evaluate two capable LLMs at length [Generative Pretrained Transformer 4o (GPT4o) and Claude 3.5 Sonnet] out of the initial six that were tested for capability. The results showed that students agree in more instances that the MEGA method is experienced as better for learning for both datasets. It is even much better than the CoT (47.5% compared to 26.67%) in the more difficult MATH dataset, indicating that MEGA is better at explaining difficult math problems. We also calculated the accuracies of the two LLMs and showed that model accuracies differ for the methods. MEGA appears to expose the hallucination challenge that still exists with these LLMs better than CoT. We provide public access to the MEGA app, the preset instructions that we created, and the annotations by the students for transparency.

We present results from a single case study based on semi-structured interviews with a student (a boy in school year 3) diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and his school staff after participating in a short and small-scale intervention carried out in a socio-economically disadvantaged Swedish elementary school in 2019. The student participated in a seven week long long intervention with a total of 12 philosophical dialogues (ranging from 45 to 60 minutes). Two facilitators, both with years of facilitation experience and teacher degree and at least BA in philosophy, facilitated the majority of the dialogues, mainly followed a ”routine” procedure. The student was interviewed in direct connection to the end of the intervention about his experiences from the dialogues and his perceptions about wether and how the dialogues had influenced him. The student’s two teachers, who had participated in the dialogues as participants, were interviewed as a pair, also in direct connection to the end of the intervention, while the school principal was interviewed two years after the study. These staff interviews concerned the staff’s experiences of the influence of the dialogues on the students within the intervention as well as transfer effects to other contexts in school. The data from the study include detailed elaborations from a student perspective of different effects on the student’s communicative and cognitive development, which are in several respects supported also by staff reports. The results show that the student was able, interested, and willing to participate in philosophical dialogues, and our data point to several positive outcomes for the student in the communicative and cognitive domains.