According to the Bologna Directives teaching at Swedish Colleges and Universities should be outcomes-based rather than content-based. Inspired by the assessment principles involved in setting grades for art education portfolios, professor Peter Gill at the University of Gävle has developed a model of educational assessment matrices, the purpose of which is to clarify the procedures involved in assessing educational tasks by focussing on learning outcomes. However, the implementation of this initiative has been met with certain difficulties. Intended users have lacked a common conceptual framework and have expressed a reluctance to embrace a scoring system that requires congruence between aggregated subjective judgements and Bologna grades. One reason may be that the underlying epistemological assumptions are difficult to clarify. A further reason is also postulated on the basis of epistemological collisions between different ideological positions. The following text takes as its starting point observed misunderstandings concerning the nature of intuitive authentic assessment as well as practical experience of making use of such assessment procedures. The article argues for the use of clarifying and systematizing the assessment principles in order to increase methodological transparency for students and colleagues. It is also argued that implementing such assessment strategies provides improved possibilities for pedagogical and didactical development.

Within the scientific community, methodological concepts occupy a central position. Many students devote much effort trying to learn "correct" meanings for the concepts with which they come in contact. Another way to approach what might be termed ‘ontology of conceptualization’ is to study how concepts are used. The subject of this investigation is an exploration of the use of some methodological concepts as they arise in academic dissertations. In the theses that were studied it was found that concepts are not used coherently in a lexical sense. While use may be consistent with knowledge claims as they are elucidated in the texts, there is a need to distinguish what is being described in terms of the use of concepts from other possible meaning-options. A didactic conclusion from this analysis is that the teaching of research methodology will be more successful when it focuses on differences between concepts and how they are presented and used in given research contexts, rather than attempting to providing general all-encompassing definitions.

The basic assumption underlying this study is that in completing any pedagogical task there is always an aesthetic dimension involved. Three archetypal pedagogical approaches are enacted and examined by focusing on pedagogical activity as a form of Art. The examples are constructed in order to explicate pedagogically “problematic” approaches. The purpose is to understand and enlighten the pedagogical impact of certain behaviors by the using of aesthetic analysis. One suggested result of the study will be to show how hard, or impossible, it is to distinguish between aspects of content and form in any pedagogical process. Another suggested conclusion will be to show how enhanced awareness of, and reflection on, aesthetic considerations in pedagogical contexts usually deemed "non-aesthetic" might serve a useful tool in professional pedagogical development as a teacher.