Compulsory schooling in Denmark is currently confronted with sustained concerns about pupils’ student motivation, school satisfaction, and well‑being and engagement, alongside renewed attention to inequalities in achievement and engagement. Recent Danish and international research indicates that pupils’ school satisfaction and student motivation tend to decline across grade levels, with notable differences by gender and other background factors (Bang et al., 2020; Pless & Katznelson, 2019). Furthermore, levels of academic achievement remain critically low. Reflecting this trend, the share of students failing to pass Danish or Mathematics in their final examinations has risen to an unprecedented 11.9% (Jensen, 2025). In parallel, large-scale comparative assessments continue to document gendered patterns in achievement (OECD, 2023). Thus, in their latest analysis, Dansk Erhverv documents that Danish girls’ mean grade average across all subject fields is 0.8 (on a scale from -3 to 12) higher than that of boys. Against this backdrop, evaluations and policy analyses have questioned whether performance-oriented governance and reform initiatives have succeeded in improving learning outcomes, while also highlighting potential adverse implications for well‑being and engagement (Carlsson, 2022; Jacobsen, 2024).
 
Danish school policy has recently shifted toward greater local autonomy and an emphasis on freedom, immersion, and renewed attention to Bildung, learning, and well‑being and engagement. This reorientation is articulated in the governmental policy initiative “Prepared for the Future II: Freedom and Immersion” (Danish Government, 2023). Consistent with this agenda, a growing number of schools are revisiting student-centred and participant-directed pedagogies, including project- and problem-based learning (PBL). PBL is a learner-centred pedagogy that enables students to influence their own learning processes while designing solutions to authentic problems. It has a long-standing tradition in Denmark and is widely associated with the ‘Aalborg model’, in which learning is organized around collaborative, problem-oriented project work (Stegeager et al., 2024).
 
This paper reports findings from a municipality-wide school development project in Northern Denmark (2022–2026), in which all public schools worked to integrate PBL across subjects and year groups. The project was based on the following problem statement: What conditions and systemic factors shape the possibilities and potentials for implementing project‑based learning (PBL) across the primary school system of a Danish municipality when approached through a pragmatic whole‑systems framework?

Researchers from Aalborg University and VIA University College supported the implementation through teacher professional development and a mixed-methods evaluation design. Two survey waves (2024 and 2025) were administered to staff and pupils, yielding responses from 2,613 pupils on student motivation, sense of mastery, and attitudes toward group work and project work. Survey findings are complemented with qualitative process data (e.g., implementation logs and interviews with pupils, teachers, and school leaders) to contextualize variations in adoption and classroom enactment.
 
Preliminary results suggest that pupils of all genders report particularly high student motivation for group work and collaborative project work. While student motivation for schoolwork generally declines with age, the decline appears less pronounced for group work and project work than for conventional individual school tasks, aligning with research that frames student motivation as relational and context-dependent (Pless & Katznelson, 2019). Moreover, whereas overall school student motivation shows clear gender differences, with boys more likely to ‘completely disagree’ or ‘disagree’ with the statement “I work with engaging things at school”, these differences are attenuated in relation to group work and project work. These patterns indicate that project-based, collaborative pedagogies may function as an equity-promoting learning environment by broadening participation and strengthening pupils’ sense of competence and belonging. In the full paper, we will discuss the implications of the study for municipal capacity-building, teacher professionalism, and pedagogical design practices that safeguard well-being while pursuing academic improvement. 

The Danish municipality survey collected data in 2024 (N = 1,346) and 2025 (N = 1,273), yielding a total of 2,613 pupil responses. A final wave of data collection is scheduled for 2026. In total, eight schools from a single municipality participated in the study. Pupils from 4th through 9th grade completed a questionnaire assessing well-being, attitudes toward group- and project-based learning activities, as well as the frequency with which such activities occur in everyday classroom practice. The questionnaire comprised six demographic items and twenty-two items measuring pupils’ experiences and perceptions. All municipal schools, with the exception of special-needs schools, were included in the study. The survey was deliberately designed to support the application of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2018), with the purpose of examining newly developed variables related to group and project work, alongside key indicators concerning general schoolwork, academic engagement, and well-being. A standard EFA procedure (Hensen & Roberts, 2006) was employed using STATA, following a systematic step-by-step analytical approach (Watkins, 2022). Each item was evaluated for its potential suitability for inclusion in latent constructs, first at the level of item clustering and subsequently with regard to index formation. Following the Kaiser criterion (Eigenvalues > 1) (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2018) with a Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin measure of sampling adequacy of 0.744 (Kaiser, 1974), three factors were identified. These were conceptualized collectively as the Tri-Group-Activity Measure. The factors (hereafter abbreviated TGAm) serve as analytic constructs used to explain patterns and tendencies in pupils’ experiences with group work and related collaborative practices.

The data portrays a clear picture of students’ perceptions of group work and project work. There is an overwhelmingly positive response to group work, where 76% agree or strongly agree with the question “I like to work in groups”. Boys are even more positive than girls with almost 80% strongly agreeing with the above statement. This trend may relate to another item: “When I work in groups, I find it easier to understand the school content we are working on”, where 60% agree/strongly agree with this statement. Thus, according to the pupils in the municipality, group work should not be seen solely as a social event but very much as a pedagogical, learning promoting activity. Student perception of project work is also highly regarded, though slightly less so than group work. Thus, when answering the question “to what degree do you appreciate project work” only 12% answers to a very/low degree while 41% reports to a very high/high degree. Notably, no gender differences emerged in evaluations of project work, a pattern consistent across age groups. These findings suggest that group work and project work may help mitigate the documented decline in school student motivation from grades 4 to 9. Furthermore, given the lack of gender differences in appreciation of these pedagogies, implementing them more systematically (especially among older students) may help narrow the widening gender gap in academic achievement. Statistical findings and their possible implications for the future of K12 education will be further unfolded and discussed at the ECER 2026 Conference.

Bang, L., Lorentsen, A., Andersen, M. B., Christiansen, N. L. S., & Hansen, I. S. (2020). Udfordringer og succes i skoleudvikling - når tallene taler. Aalborg University. Carlsson, M. S. (2022). Reimagining wellbeing in neoliberal times: School wellbeing as an adjunct to academic performance? In R. McLellan, C. Faucher, & V. Simovska (Eds.), Wellbeing and Schooling: Cross Cultural and Cross Disciplinary Perspectives (pp. 35-48). Springer. Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2018). Research Methods in Education. New York: Routledge. Danish Government. (2023, October 11). Forberedt på fremtiden II: Frihed og fordybelse – et kvalitetsprogram for folkeskolen [Prepared for the Future II: Freedom and Immersion]. Regeringen.dk. https://uvm.dk/media/g1pdj2zn/231011-forberedt-pa-fremtiden-2-web.pdf Henson, R. K., & Roberts, J. K. (2006). Use of exploratory factor analysis in published research: Common errors and some comment on improved practice. Educational and Psychological measurement, 66(3), 393-416. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013164405282485 Jacobsen, B. S. (2024). Educational performance pressure and mental ill-being: the case of Danish primary and lower secondary schools, 1975-2024. Educational Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2024.2383897 Jensen, T. L. (2025). Flere elever dumper i dansk eller matematik: Det højeste niveau siden 2012. Arbejderbevægelsens Erhvervsråd. https://www.ae.dk/node/3755/pdf-export Kaiser, H. F. (1974). An index of factorial simplicity. psychometrika, 39(1), 31–36. OECD. (2023). Education GPS: Denmark—Student performance (PISA 2022). Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Pless, M., & Katznelson, N. (2019). New Insights into Young Peoples' Motivation in Lower Secondary Education in Denmark. Qualitative Research in Education, 8(1), 60-88. https://doi.org/10.17583/qre.2019.3946 Stegeager, N., Traulsen, S. J., Guerra, A. O. P. D. C., Telléus, P. K., & Du, X. (2024). Do good intentions lead to expected outcomes? Professional Learning Amongst Early Career University Academics in a PBL-Based Program. Education Sciences, 14(2), https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020205 Watkins, M. W. (2022). A Step-By-Step Guide to Exploratory Factor Analysis with STATA. New York: Routledge.