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Educational content recommendation is a cornerstone of AI-enhanced learning. In particular, to facilitate navigating the diverse learning resources available on learning platforms, methods are needed for automatically linking learning materials, e.g., in order to recommend textbook content based on exercises. Such methods are typically based on semantic textual similarity (STS) and the use of embeddings for text representation. However, it remains unclear what types of embeddings should be used for this task. In this study, we carry out an extensive empirical evaluation of embeddings derived from three different types of models: (i) static embeddings trained using a concept-based knowledge graph, (ii) contextual embeddings from a pre-trained language model, and (iii) contextual embeddings from a large language model (LLM). In addition to evaluating the models individually, various ensembles are explored based on different strategies for combining two models in an early vs. late fusion fashion. The evaluation is carried out using digital textbooks in Swedish for three different subjects and two types of exercises. The results show that using contextual embeddings from an LLM leads to superior performance compared to the other models, and that there is no significant improvement when combining these with static embeddings trained using a knowledge graph. When using embeddings derived from a smaller language model, however, it helps to combine them with knowledge graph embeddings. The performance of the best-performing model is high for both types of exercises, resulting in a mean Recall@3 of 0.96 and 0.95 and a mean MRR of 0.87 and 0.86 for quizzes and study questions, respectively, demonstrating the feasibility of using STS based on text embeddings for educational content recommendation. The ability to link digital learning materials in an unsupervised manner—relying only on readily available pre-trained models—facilitates the development of AI-enhanced learning.

Eelco Runia’s view of historical time is that the now and the past exert an alternating influence on each other. The most prominent expression of this is a dialogue between the historian and the historical actors in which the historian creates metonyms, replacement terms, for how historical actors are defined, which affects the description of the past. In this paper, Runia’s conception of historical time has been tested through an empirical investigation into the changing descriptions of the process of rejecting the aether hypothesis, 1858-2022. After the process of phasing the aether out of physics had previously been explained as being caused by the gradual acceptance of the theory of relativity, the cause was suddenly superseded in the 1990s by the Michelson-Morley experiment conducted in the 1880s. During the 21st century, however, the aether once again returned as a concept. The reason for the changes, is the conclusion, could possibly be due to the ambition to give a rational picture of the development of natural science at every point in time

This paper presents results from a large-scale study of history teachers in Swedish secondary schools. The study examines perceptions of history, content being taught, teaching methods and use of digital technology. The study uses the Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework to analyse the results together with narrative theory. The main results indicate that knowledge of the past and contemporary perspectives from a canonical tradition are prioritised, together with a content-based lecture-style pedagogy. The use of digital technology does not seem to challenge methods or bring new perspectives to history teaching. However, to fully understand history teaching with technology, a framework that emphasises all parts of history education is needed. This calls for further development of the TPACK model, which is further discussed in this article.

El objetivo principal de este estudio es el de analizar de forma comparativa la presencia o ausencia de las competencias de pensamiento histórico en el currículo educativo de Historia en los niveles de Gymnasieskolan (Suecia) y Bachillerato (España). Para ello, se diseñó y validó un instrumento mixto, cualitativo y cuantitativo, para analizar los documentos oficiales. Los resultados expresan la gran presencia de variables como “conciencia histórica” en el caso sueco y el mayor peso que tiene el trabajo con fuentes históricas y evidencias en el caso español. The main target of this study is to make a comparative analysis between the presence or absence of historical thinking competencies in the official curricula of Gymnasieskola (Sweden) and Bachillerato (Spain). To reach this goal, a mixed instrument was designed, both qualitative and quantitative, to analyze the offical documents. The results show a great presence of “historical consciousness” in the case of Sweden and the use of historical sources and evidences in the case of Spain. literacy

This article investigates the media lives of a particular class taxonomy in the Swedish press from 1945 to 1976. Invented by the Central Bureau of Statistics in 1911, the ‘social group division’ system was abandoned in the early post-war period. Around the same time, however, it gained popularity in Swedish culture and political debate. While earlier research has noted that such bureaucratic class taxonomies – as in several other Western countries – conditioned how actors understood and created new knowledge about the population, this process of wider circulation remains understudied. Using insights from literature on ‘the social life of methods’ and the history of knowledge, which underline that knowledge is transformed by and transforms the contexts it circulates in, I show that print media was an arena for circulating and producing new meaning around class taxonomies. Although editorials shunned the social group division for incorrectly representing Swedish society and creating artificial class boundaries, journalists used the taxonomy to explain social structures. Furthermore, by interviewing ‘typical’ members of the different social groups, journalists made the system relatable and personal for their readers. In this context, the social groups were imagined as cultural communities, sharing cultural behaviours and preferences. Lastly, I analyse usages of the social group division in letters to the editor, which reveal that people felt they were being classified and wanted to offer their views of society, using the taxonomy in ways the experts had not intended. This study thereby contributes to the history of social taxonomies and class languages in the post-war period.

This article takes a comparative approach to settler colonial violence in the American Southwest and German Southwest Africa. The Anglo invasion of central Arizona in 1864 and the German conflict against the Herero in 1904 highlights the nature of frontier violence and identifies similarities and differences across two points in space and time that have seldom been compared by historians. Those writing of the US-Apache conflicts have failed to look to colonial theaters around the world, their transnational attention focusing instead on the borderlands of United States, Mexico, and independent Indians. Similarly, research on the violence in GSWA has not engaged systematically with international parallels and has instead focused on identifying possible links between GSWA and the Nazis and the Holocaust. This article seeks to address these shortcomings by analysing the comparative strands of settler colonial violence.

School as an Experimental Workshop: Dissemination of Knowledge and Experience from Experimental Teaching in Swedish Pedagogical Journals, 1920–1960. The purpose of the article is to look at how knowledge about experimental teaching was disseminated through educational journals 1920–1960. Throughout the period, there was an interest from teachers and schools to experiment with new ways of teaching. Educational journals had an important role here to spread knowledge from these experiences. During the interwar period, it was mainly teachers who acted as brokers and shared knowledge of their experiences from experimental teaching. The knowledge shared was often a mix of teachers’ experiences and pedagogical perspectives. During the 1950s, other brokers took up more space, such as researchers and school mangers. Although the journals shared pedagogical perspectives from different countries, rarely individual countries came into focus. Often here too it was a combination of perspectives that are presented via the articles on experimental teaching.

Abstract Building performance simulation (BPS) based on physical models is a popular method for estimating the expected energy savings from energy-efficient building retrofitting. However, for many buildings, especially older buildings, built several decades ago, an operator do not have full access to the complete information for the BPS method. Incomplete information comes from the lack of detailed building physics, such as the thermal transmittance of some building components due to the deterioration of components over time. To address this challenge, this paper proposed a data-driven approach to support the decision-making of building retrofitting selections under incomplete information conditions. The data-driven approach integrates the backpropagation neural networks (BRBNN), fuzzy C-means clustering (FCM), and generative design (GD). It generates the required big database of building performance through generative design, which can overcome the problem of incomplete information during building performance simulation and energy-efficient retrofitting. The case study is based on old residential buildings in severe cold regions of China, using the proposed approach to predict energy-efficient retrofitting performance. The results indicated that the proposed approach can model the performance of residential buildings with more than 90% confidence, and show the variation of results. The core contribution of the proposed approach is to provide a way of performance prediction of individual buildings resulting from different retrofitting measures under the incomplete physics condition.