This paper analyses the associations between computer use in schools and at home and test scores by using TIMSS data covering over 900,000 children in fourth grade. When controlling for school fixed effects, pupils who use computers at school, especially those who use them frequently are found to achieve less than students who never use computers.

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.

Two tendencies in research and policy on youth and education are firstly a general focus on urban contexts and their differences, and secondly a presentation of the non-urban as uniform. Based on a research project on rural young people and their education, we draw attention to these tendencies as problematic, before then discussing some similarities and differences between young people’s lives and education in different rural contexts.

To experiment with the meaning of the concept, this article is introducing the verb “läring” into Swedish, by discussing it in relation to the current National Curriculum for the Compulsory school.

Age-classes are a salient feature of modern schooling. Yet how did age-grouping come to prevail in entire school systems? And how was this form of grouping related to educational and pedagogic discussions at the time of its emergence? The article addresses these issues by looking at the historical context within which age classes came to a dominant position: the European nineteenth century.