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Prior research about pupil welfare teams have identified problems at several levels: those of leadership, interprofessional cooperation, cooperation between the pupil welfare team and teachers, and type of work carried out. Perhaps most importantly, teams seem to work primarily with 'firefighting', i.e. acting reactively when problems already have occurred, rather than in a health promoting and preventive way. On the one hand, health promotion and prevention are endorsed as desired ways to work (e.g. SFS 2010, 800); on the other hand, reactive measures seem to dominate in practice. In order to try to bridge this gap, we carried out a study of a pupil welfare team in Sweden that we had reason to believe worked more in line with the health-promoting and preventive manner of working that is recommended. Since we could not know a priori whether the team studied worked in a qualitatively different way than other teams studied in prior research, we were led by two overarching research questions: (1) Is the studied team working in a heath promoting and preventive way? and (2) If so, how did their way of working emerge and how is it sustained? Our overriding purpose is to increase our knowledge concerning whether and how pupil welfare teams can become more health promoting and preventive in practice. More specifically, we are interested to find factors that contribute to the development and sustainability of health promoting and preventive work in pupil welfare teams.

This overview, or review of reviews, synthesises the contributions of influential research on education of autistic pupils to a) characterise this research and b) analyse the potential of this research to further inclusive education. The 80 most-cited reviews in Web of Science targeting research on education of autistic pupils were analysed. From the standpoint of inclusive education, several shortcomings in the research field were identified: First, the reviews very seldom explicitly address inclusion. Second, when they do, inclusion is narrowly understood. Third, only about half of the reviews concerned regular education. Finally, most reviews report positive effects but provide limited knowledge about what methods are most useful for specific sets of pupils and in which situations. The majority explores how to reduce symptoms of autism and how to foster socio-communicative skills. The Inclusive Education Model (IEM) was developed to analyse how different types of research, including research not specifically addressing inclusion, provide different forms of knowledge about how to increase inclusive schooling. The findings are discussed in relation to needs for future research on inclusion and it is argued that the field would benefit from more explicit orientations towards inclusive education. The benefits and shortcomings of IEM are discussed

This article presents a review of qualitative research on interprofessional cooperation between regular teachers and special educators published from 2005 to 2019. The aim of the review was to gain knowledge about how different forms of cooperation take shape and about factors at multiple levels that facilitate or constrain cooperation as a means of achieving inclusion. In total, 25 studies were selected. The results are discussed in relation to Thomas Skrtic's theory of bureaucracies within the school organisation in order to compare and analyse different forms of interprofessional cooperation and schools' organisations of special educational work. Cooperative teaching, special educational consultations and mixed forms of cooperation were found to entail different benefits and challenges related to communication and the cooperating actors' roles. Facilitating factors included personal chemistry, an equal distribution of power and responsibilities and support from the school management through provision of professional development and adequate planning time. In several studies, a flexible cooperation was argued to be hindered by curricular constraints and standardised testing. Education policy is therefore emphasised in this review as important for understanding the conditions under which school staff are responsible for inclusion.

Research on inclusive education often derives from a broader understanding of inclusion, namely as a radical change in schooling. Within this strand of research, several authors in the field have envisioned this change to be materialised in the image of schools and classrooms as communities with various characteristics where differences are seen as resources. Nevertheless, the word 'community' can carry a variety of meanings, especially when used in the field of education in which multiple theoretical traditions co-exist. The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of the meanings of the word 'community' throughout influential educational research and in relation to the different theoretical traditions that inform it. The meanings are analysed through a reading of the 50 most highly cited educational research papers in the database Web of Science that are concerned with communities in schools and classrooms. Through a thematic analysis of the definitions and descriptions of community in the sample, four metaphors were identified - community as Idealised-Home, Idealised-Academia, Idealised-Polis, and Power-Resisting Space. These meanings are discussed in relation to the theoretical traditions discerned and their implicit societal purposes. Moreover, implications of the review for research on inclusive education are discussed.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of intervention, combining instruction in cooperative learning and reading comprehension strategies on students’ reading comprehension in grade 5. The teachers in the experiment group implemented the intervention while the teachers in the control group received training in reading comprehension strategies and taught as usual. Students in the experiment group and control group participated in tests of reading comprehension before and after the intervention. The results showed that being a part of the experiment group did not lead to greater gains in reading comprehension above the control group. Students of teachers who did not fully implement the intervention attained higher scores on reading comprehension than students in the control group. Students of teachers who fully implemented the intervention, on the other hand, received lower scores. The results are discussed with regard to research on teachers’ integration of intervention into their instructional routines.

The purpose of this study is to discern and discuss issues with relevance to the tension between contextuality and generalisation, which recurrently are identified over time in research reviews of teaching methods. The 75 most cited reviews on teaching methods listed in the Web of Science from 1980 to 2017 were analysed. Since our interest is the claims made in each article about the teaching method under study, the analysis concerned the abstract, results, discussion, conclusion, and implication parts of each review. Three main issues, cutting across the reviews over time, were identified: 1) the abundance of moderating factors, 2) the need for highly qualified teachers, and 3) the research-practice gap. It is argued that the three issues reflect tensions in original research. The implications of these findings are discussed in the article. One main conclusion is that such issues ought to be more explicitly attended to and elaborated in both primary and secondary level research. The importance of viewing validity as a multidimensional concept, including internal, external, and ecological aspects, is underlined. Further, ideas from realistic reviewing are used to discuss a contextually bound approach to causality.

Many pupils with disabilities receive schooling in segregated contexts, such as special classes or special schools. Furthermore, the percentage of pupils educated in segregated settings has increased in many European countries. Studies suggest that there is high commitment to the general ideology of inclusive education among teachers in ‘regular’ education in many countries. This survey study investigates the views of teachers in segregated types of school about education. A questionnaire was sent out, in 2016, to all Swedish teachers (N = 2871, response rate 57.7%) working full time in special classes for pupils with intellectual disability (ID). On a general level results show that there is a strong commitment to preserving a segregated school setting for pupils with ID, a limited desire to cooperate with colleagues from ‘regular schools’ and a view that schooling and teaching are not quite compatible with the idea of inclusive education. The results highlight the importance of investigating processes of resistance within segregated schools to the development of inclusive schools and education systems. We argue that, while research and debate about inclusive education are important, both are insufficient without analyses of existing types of segregated schooling.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the importance of compilations of research being both systematic and reflective. The general point about the importance of reflection is illustrated by describing how a specific approach to compiling research, SMART (Systematic Mapping and Analysis of Research Topographies), has been used. SMART is based on a pragmatic perspective. This entails an openness to different scientific research traditions. The pragmatic starting point also means that compilations of research are linked to questions about how society and democracy can be developed. In this article, we describe how the approach has been used to compile research on 1) inclusion and 2) teaching, respectively. Finally, the article discusses 1) the importance of compilations of research being both systematic and reflective 2) the question of how we should understand the increasing number of research reviews in the field of education science and 3) implications of the reasoning in the article for policy and practice.