This presentation reports from the large-scale research and development project Improving the Quality of Danish and Mathematics in Danish lower Secondary education, a multiple intervention research program focusing on inquiry-based teaching of Danish and Mathematics. ‘KiDM’ (the project acronym in Danish) involved 27 researchers and professional developers working in collaboration with 175 Danish schools on interventions in both subjects. Interventions are based on an initial ‘program theory’ (Pawson & Tilley, 1997) for improving the quality of subject-specific teaching revised iteratively as the project progresses through pre-studies, pilot studies and RCT studies complemented with qualitative studies. In the KiDM project’s focus on Danish Language arts, the purpose is to improve the quality of literature teaching. This reflects requirements in the initial call from the Danish Ministry of Education (Ministeriet for Børn, 2015), which emphasized 1) that interventions should attempt to change the balance between teacher and student centering and 2) that interventions should produce an effect size that showed improvement for, ideally, all students. In response, a multiple intervention research program was designed, which established an initial program theory for improving the quality of literature education based on a phenomenological framework (Elf & Hansen, 2017). The program theory argues partly critically and partly constructively (Hansen et al., in revision). The critical part problematizes that literature teaching is prototypically too analytical and intellectualizing. The assertion is that students' ability to experience aesthetic texts is limited in classrooms, guided by predominantly instructional goals and analytical tasks. The constructive part, informing the intervention, emphasizes that a task-based teaching approach, which scaffolds a rhythmic transaction and a balance between the aesthetically experiential and the analytically reflective dimensions leads to a deeper understanding of aesthetics texts and students’ development of literary interpretative competencies. In the presentation, we emphasize methodological framings related to the quantitative competence test and complementary qualitative studies. We argue that it is possible in some respects to test and document students’ development of literary competence; but that contextual and individual aspects of quality literary education could only be grasped through complementary qualitative research, and that micro analyses of video observation are a particularly useful approach to highlight such qualities,

Elf, N., & Hansen, T. I. (Eds.). (2017). Hvad vi véd om undersøgelsesorienteret undervisning i dansk. Og hvordan vi kan bruge denne viden til at skabe bedre kvalitet i danskfagets litteraturundervisning i grundskolen. [What we know about inquiry-based teaching in Danish. And how we can use this knowledge to improve quality in the Danish subject’s literature education in mandatory schooling]. Odense: Læremiddel.dk - Nationalt videncenter for læremidler. Available online: www.emu.dk/modul/kvalitet-i-dansk-og-matematik-kidm-forundersøgelse Hansen, T. I., Elf, N., Gissel, S. T., & Steffensen, T. (in revision). A Phenomenological Approach to Inquiry-Based Teaching of Literature. Ministeriet for Børn, U. o. L. (2015). Bilag til opgavebeskrivelse. [Appendix for project description]. København: Ministeriet for Børn, Undervisning og Ligestilling. Pawson, R., & Tilley, N. (1997). Realistic Evaluation. London: SAGE.