SCIENTIFIC REPORT
Research is lacking when the Swedish preschool will be digitalized with the national digital strategy, that was implemented during 2018. The empirical material, such as video empirical data, recorded focus group discussions, field notes, children s representations, EEC data, math, language- and socio-emotional test results and log data has been worked on during the sabbatical. Some of the material from three research projects on about 30 preschools have been multimodally transcribed and analysed to understand how teachers designs for learning; how children learn with digital resources and how children’s attention, language, and maths ability is affected.

The sabbatical was spent entirety at AAA-lab, Stanford University. The established cooperation also includes the University of Lund and Oregon University. The sabbatical was devoted to publications with different purposes in different configurations, also in cooperation with AAA-lab researchers. The research collaboration will continue with guest researchers from Stanford at SU. My published results have already been used in the development of a digital national action plan (SkolDigiPlan) in ongoing collaboration with the National Agency for Education (Skolverket) and Swedish Municipalities and Counties (SKL) and in teacher training, at basic and advanced level, and in postgraduate studies at Sweden’s largest preschool teacher education.

Connected to AAA-Lab and my ongoing (Brainways in preschool) and my new (DigiTaktik) RCT project, a strong partnership with LU was established along with research collaboration with Brain Development Lab, Oregon University. This cooperation is now consolidated in the new research project where they are all members or advisors. Since I devoted myself to article writing in collaboration with international researchers, I contributed massively to a neglected research area. The national digital strategy is now being implemented with much support in the research result I presented during my sabbatical. My research aims to eliminate differences between children from homes with different SES and the concept of the "app gap" here becomes central: all children shall be invited to a digital world with quality.

Publications
The empirical material was collected before the sabbatical and parts of it was already categorized and analysed, thus I planned for 12 publications. I have published 5 peer reviewed articles and submitted 2 (1 is accepted). I have written two 2 books (1 monography and 1 anthology) and 6 chapters that have been/will be published in research books and I have presented my research in many chronicles and scientifical presentations. I also have 6 scientifical articles in progress.

Results in the seven peer reviewed articles
The results in the 1st article illustrate how Makerspaces and teacher education can be mutually transformed; how Makerspaces can be used in programming activities and what challenges and possibilities emerge in the meeting between the two. The results highlight a core aspect of the maker movement: authenticity. The hands-on learning environments are designed to foster collaboration, share ideas and innovation. In the interface between the formal and informal, a potential for inclusion and creation of spaces that reach individuals from different backgrounds is found. Mobile learning is a phenomenon that the making movement, together with teacher education, can make use of, at for example practice schools, university campuses or mobile Makerspaces. Collaboration between formal and informal education is complicated to establish, and the academy needs to find more creative and flexible ways of making connections.

The 2nd article discuss assessment in the digital divide in Scandinavian technologically advanced schools. Results show how assessment can be didactically designed to recognise students´ learning in digital learning environments. The subject design aims at an expert level, while formative assessment aims at a novice, level leaving students without adequate guidance. Despite this, summative assessment aims at an expert level and is at times contradictory. A concluding suggestion is that assessment in a digital learning environment can be designed exploratory to encompass students’ new knowledge and to embrace their multimodal signs of learning, or much of what is learned will be ignored.

The 3rd article presents results from a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary innovative intervention pilot study in Swedish preschools. It challenges and extends theoretical and methodological perspectives on what it means to undertake an individual digital learning intervention study. The results show that, unless children’s and preschool teachers’ meaning making of the unfolding actions in the digital interface make them engage in the activity and dynamically fits within the institutional preschool system, the intervention will not be functional. This pilot study provides detailed understandings of why, how and in what contexts interventions can be implemented with adherence and fidelity.

The results in the 4th article reports on the experiences of bidirectional collaboration between researchers in a multidisciplinary research team and between researchers and stakeholders, in an RCT in preschool. The results show that unanticipated disagreements and conflicts arose within the research team, as RCT methodology requires the measurement of effects pre and post the intervention. The findings illustrate strategies and negotiations that emerged in order to address ontological and epistemological controversies and disagreements. These include a) the negotiation of research ethics, b) making divergences visible and learning from each other, c) using a multiepistemological and methodological approach as a complement to the RCT design and d) the negotiation of research problems that are shared between educators and researchers.

The 5th article take departure in a discussion about how children, during the preschool years, develop abilities and skills in areas crucial for later success in life. These abilities include language, executive functions, attention, and socioemotional skills. The pedagogical methods used in preschools hold the potential to enhance these abilities, but our knowledge of which pedagogical practices aid which abilities, and for which children, is limited. This article describes an intervention study designed to evaluate and compare two pedagogical methodologies in terms of their effect on the above-mentioned skills in Swedish preschool children.

The 6th article presents an RCT where two pedagogical methodologies were tested to evaluate how they enhanced children’s language, executive functions and attention, socioemotional skills, and early math skills during an intensive intervention of either a socioemotional and material learning paradigm (SEMLA) or an individual, digitally implemented attention and math training paradigm, including a set of self-regulation practices (DIL). The results present a potential for different pedagogical methodologies to have different impacts on children of different ages and with different backgrounds.

The results in the 7th article suggests a didactic design in between the individual/collaborative and the digital/physical, to prevent mathematical inequalities among children. There are potentials for adaptive games in preschools and the results illustrate how children are engaging with math toward pro-social ends. Games can be used (or designed) to encourage collaboration/pro-social behaviors in a way that reinforces early math concepts. There is a great variety in how digital math is brought from the app to the physical room. A wide variety of adjacent, distant, synchronous and diachronic extensions were identified. Teachers found it easier to initiate math activities after the intervention. A digital math intervention need not come at the expense of early math activities in physical space.

Other results
Many results found during this sabbatical have been produced but not yet published, while others have been published in books and chapters written for school, teachers and teacher education. There are results illustrating how teachers and preschool teachers didactically design for students learning in different subjects with digital tools: the tools are used in all subjects but adequate digital competence also means that one shall know when not to use digital tools. Results highlight how translanguaging can be a tool for equity, multiculturalism and bilingualism in the digitalized preschool. Results discuss the potentials for ecology and sustainability teaching in the digital environment. Chains of transduction with physical nature objects as well as digital representations illustrate how children learn. Part of the results illustrate how the headmaster can use leadership of change in the digitalized preschool. A great part of the results concerns digital competence, i.e. how children play, learn, interact ethically, communicate and explore in the digital interface and how teachers can design and understand children’s knowledge.

The results drawn from this sabbatical have served as a reference for Sweden’s implementation of the national strategy for digitalization. Corresponding research is lacking and the municipalities/authorities across Sweden still use my research reports as Teacher’s Guides. With my new book this will change. The results present discussions on how programming and computational thinking play a role in “coding” which from now on is mandatory in the Swedish curriculum. The results indicate how these new phenomena can be understood, implemented and taught. To mention an example the results indicate that this could be done by making use of both digital and analogue tools. This area of research is current, important and unexplored.

My research results are now being implemented at different levels of the new Swedish curriculums. They are also being used in the construction of SU’s research environment, as well as by the programme in ECE at SU: primarily in the language semester. The long-term international cooperation with Stanford University and Oregon University can generate exchange places for researchers, teachers and students. A graduate school/graduate course in collaboration between SU/Stanford and LU is being discussed, alongside discussions on an AAA-lab researcher split visiting professorship/lectureship between LU/SU. The first step is an international symposium on learning the 14-15th of March 2019 where researchers from Oregon will attend and where Dean Schwartz and Dr Pilner-Blair will be key notes and where other AAA-lab-researchers will attend.

New research questions
The sabbatical has generated many new research questions that are being worked on in the 6 articles in progress. The following questions are from my two new research projects:

Can digital tools be a possible resource to better plan, orchestrate, follow, challenge, document and formatively support children's exploration and learning?
How can assessment instruments be developed to assess students ' programming skills in order to support and develop teaching in programming at the Swedish elementary school?