Evaluation Through Follow-up
The Evaluation Through Follow-up (UGU) is a large cohort-sequential research study which is used for evaluation and research about schools and education in Sweden.
UGU stands for Utvärdering Genom Uppföljning ("Evaluation Through Follow-up" in english) and is one of the largest study in Sweden in the field of education, the country's largest survey of schools. As part of the national evaluation of the school system, our study contributes with nationally representative data that can be linked to other databases. The study contains nationally representative samples of students from eleven cohorts, born between 1948 and 2010. The special thing about UGU is the longitudinal design where individuals from these cohorts are followed through the education system. The design makes it possible to both follow students through the education system and to compare cohorts from different times.
| Hofverberg et al. have investigated the importance of different motivational factors for students' well-being. The questions that have been used to measure the social goals are listed below. The students had to place their answers along a 5-point scale (Always-Never): | For psychosomatic problems, a number of sub-questions have been selected. These, as well as the questions concerning the social objectives, were answered on a Likert scale. The sub-questions that have been used to measure the students' perceived psychosomatic problems are the following: |
How often do you try to do the following at school?
| Think about how it has been both inside and outside of school! Have you in the last six months... ...Feeling that you have trouble sleeping? ...Bothered by headaches? ...Bothered by stomach pain? ...Feeling tense? ...Had a bad appetite? ...Feeling dizzy in your head? ...Feeling sad? ...Feeling down? ...Feeling irritable or in a bad mood? |
| The study found no statistically significant results for the relationship between psychosomatic disorders and school performance between grades 9 and 12. The survey for year 12 does not contain questions about social goals and therefore the development in those between year 9 and 12 has not been analyzed. | The study also found no links in psychosomatic disorders in relation to performance goals in terms of parents' educational background. This confirms previous studies' theory that students can experience performance-related stress regardless of their level of education at home, as higher performance is of interest to both groups with highly educated parents and those from a lower educational background. |
Boys: Year 9: The correlation between the boys' psychosomatic problems and school performance was not significant. Year 12: The boys who had strong social goals in year 9 had more psychosomatic problems in year 12 than the group of boys with weaker social goals. Girls: Year 9: The girls experienced more psychosomatic problems as their social goals decreased. However, their focus on social goals had a positive correlation with their school performance in grade 9. Year 12: Higher school performance and/or psychosomatic problems in year 9 also predicted the level in year 12 for the girls, so-called autoregressive outcomes. | Results: In year 9, the psychosomatic problems in both girls and boys had a negative relationship to their social goals. The study found no causal effects between school performance and psychosomatic disorders, but was able to show that the new environment in upper secondary school can be decisive for how motivated students are to perform, regardless of their performance goals in secondary school.
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The wednesday began with a warm welcome from our scientific leader Alli Klapp, followed by Jan-Eric Gustafsson's insightful look-back on UGU's history. From Karolinska Institutet, our guests Patrik Magnusson presented to the audience about the Swedish Twin Registry and its structure, and Peter Allebeck who talked about his research with UGU data and how our data has contributed to a better understanding of the link between cognitive ability and suicide and schizophrenia among teenagers.
Erica Lindahl from the Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU) talked about how UGU data has been able to lay the foundation for several research projects, where the importance of, for example, age-integrated classes has been investigated. From Stockholm University, Hugo Westerlund talked about the REWHARD infrastructure with as many as nine nodes! And Anne Boschini, who investigates the connection between cognitive ability and fatherhood, invited to a very interesting lecture, which characterized an innovative way of using UGU data.
The last speaker of the first day, Mikael Hjerm, talked about the European Social Survey (ESS) and how this large-scale database has contributed to increased knowledge about gender differences in the labour market. At the mingle afterwards, new collaborations and exchanges of ideas were created among doctoral students and researchers.
From Umeå University, we had speakers Hanna Eklöf and Björn Högberg, who began the second and final day of the conference with presentations on students' increased stress and psychosomatic problems - topics that the researchers with the help of our longitudinal data have been able to investigate more closely.
Hans Grönqvist from Linnaeus University introduced us to yet another unique area of use for UGU. His ongoing study examines the media's portrayal of vulnerable areas and how students who live there experience their everyday lives, as a result. Thea Klapp, a PhD student at IPS, talked about one of her published papers that examined the relationship between high-achieving students' self-assessment and mediocre math teaching (the Big Fish Little Pond effect). Kajsa Yang Hansen, professor at IPS, presented an article where the effect of interest levels for different subjects was measured among resilient students. Before our panel discussion, Björn Halleröd from the University of Gothenburg talked about the challenges faced by large-scale research databases, and our scientific leader Alli Klapp summed up the days and emphasized the importance of this milestone - an inspiring conference that marked 63 years of Evaluation Through Follow-up (UGU).
The increased school-related stress among young people is a current topic that researchers from different disciplines have investigated. Researcher Björn Högberg from Umeå University examines, among other things, pupils' well-being in school.
In this study, Högberg examines the increased school-related stress based on four hypotheses: What is the relationship between the following factors and the increased school-related stress? The following survey questions have been used to answer the research question;
The survey questions
- "Tests" - "How often [do you have tests] in your class?"
- "Ambition for further education" - "Are you planning to start studying at university or college?"
- "Academic difficulties" - Three variants of the sub-question "... I have a hard time keeping up with lessons." in combination with questions about self-assessment in Swedish, English and math.
- "Isolation" - The sub-question "... I feel bullied by other students."
Result
- "Tests" - The amount of hours spent on homework was less in 2020 compared to 2003.
- "Ambition for further education" - A larger proportion of students wanted to continue studying after upper secondary school in 2020, compared to the proportion of students in 2003.
- "Academic difficulties" - Self-reported homework difficulty has increased since 2003, while academic self-assessment has remained stable overtime.
- "Isolation" - More students have felt excluded or bullied in 2020, compared to 2003.
Högberg also takes into account the school reforms that were implemented in the first half of the 2010s. The reforms included higher assessment requirements, but also less personal support, which affected students in need of it.
The reforms can partly explain the increased stress among students in relation to the number of tests. In terms of the ambition for further education, the proportion of positively disposed students was higher in the spring of 2020, compared with the spring of 2003. This may be due to the increased demand for further education in the labour market. This development may also have contributed to a dilemma, where both low- and high-achieving students experience increased stress linked to their performance in school.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected students' experience of the academic difficulty and whether they feel isolated. While the school reforms may explain the increased academic difficulty between the years 2003 and 2020, the restrictions of the pandemic combined with the reforms may have reduced students' social interactions, and thus increased their isolation.
The upper secondary school survey follows up on the cohort with students born 2004 and who has previously received surveys in year 6 and 9 in primary school and in their first year of upper secondary school concerning the covid19-pandemic. About 1900 students choose to fill in the survey. The survey has been answered by the student-sample during the spring of 2023. More info regarding for example how the data looks or what questions were asked can be found here and in our codebook for cohort 2004.
More information for those who are included in the selection can be found under the following link:
Principals with classes in the sample
Teachers with students in the sample
Parents with children in the sample
Information clips for students
Thank you for contributing to the research on Swedish schools!
In educational research, one is often content to collect information about students and their education at a single point in time, such as year 6 or year 9. The longitudinal design is especially useful for those who wonder why different students take different paths through the education system or whether it matters which path you take for how it goes later in life. UGU is unique in an international perspective as these longitudinal studies follow so many individuals for such a long time. Even fewer studies follow more than one cohort. For each cohort, administrative data, questionnaires and various measures of students' study conditions and educational results are collected. Since similar data has been collected in each cohort, it is possible to compare students who grew up and went to school during different time periods. It is useful information in discussions about how school reforms or societal changes affect students' educational careers. UGU thus enables both longitudinal and cross-sectional surveys of large and nationally representative student samples.