Sammendrag
There are several ways of implementing curricular elements, but fairly few procedures for determining the success of the implementation. This study presents a methodological framework for describing and assessing how educational ambitions in relevant policy documents are handled on programmeand course level. The central question is whether the student eventually has mastered the desired set of skills and the expertise that fulfil the ambitions of the original policy documents. This paper presents a procedure for analysing how high level educational ambitions are implemented in educational programmes, i.e., how political ambitions are cascaded down to the level that the student meets in the courses. The methodological framework is based on analyses of how these ambitions are handled in texts in relevant documents at different levelsand the relation between these. Documents that have been identified as relevant for an analysis of the chain ofimplementation in a Swedish higher education setting include the national degree ordinance, university policy documents, programme curricula, intended course learning outcomes, and learning assessment texts. While the specific example discussed in this paper is focused on the embedding of education for sustainable development in engineering education, the presented procedure should be general enough for application to any studied aspect of skills in a programme, in particular when this skill is developed in several different courses. The assessment procedure is based on the development and use of criteria for determining how a studied aspect of a programme is described and implemented. Emphasis is placed on how the aspectand different notions of it are visible in documents at different levels relevant for the particular curriculum. The method allows for an analysis not only of how policy ambitions at national level are orare not cascaded down to course level but also for a separate analysis on all levels in order to reveal where new notions of the aspect may appear, although not mentioned in binding policy documents. We discuss the limitations, generalizability and practicality of the proposed methodology. The described procedure can also be used to monitor changes over time.
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