Didactic Perspectives on Socio-academic Interventions: Teaching, Learning and Participation in Primary and Lower Secondary Education

In recent years, the need to enhance both students’ academic learning and their social skills in primary education has become increasingly apparent. All too many students face challenges to participating in their learning communities, a circumstance that can negatively impact not only their academic development but also their well-being (Brewer et al., 2017; Saggers et al., 2023). At the same time, schools are expected to prepare students for collaborative work and social engagement as part of future educational and societal demands (OECD, 2018; Weidmann & Deming, 2020). Despite this, little research has systematically mapped how interventions that integrate social and academic elements are designed, implemented and evaluated across subjects in primary and lower secondary school.
Reviews have spotlighted academic interventions, but without examining how social factors influence students’ academic outcomes. Mulcahy et al. (2014) highlighted that many interventions have targeted students with emotional and behavioural difficulties, but few have systematically linked social and academic goals. Bowman-Perrott et al. (2016) observed that research often prioritises content-related or cognitive aspects of teaching over the social dimensions of learning. They further point out the lack of methodological rigor in most studies, which frequently overlook social factors that may either support or impede students’ learning.
This paper aims to address these knowledge gaps by examining existing types of socio-academic interventions, how they are defined, implemented and evaluated, and how they measure students’ academic and social development. We map current interventions and analyse how they integrate social and academic elements, while also identifying whether and how their interlinkages are conceptualised and empirically examined in the literature. By incorporating a deeper analysis of these interventions’ social elements, we aim to shed further light on how best to support students’ social and academic growth at school.
Socio-academic Interventions
Schmidt’s (2015) concept of socio-academic learning provides the theoretical foundation for this paper. It builds on social practice theory (Lave & Wenger, 2012), Bourdieu’s notion of social capital (1998) and the concept of socio-mathematical norms (Yackel & Cobb, 1996). Together, these perspectives highlight the mutual and inseparable connection between academic and social participation in learning communities. Socio-academic learning challenges the traditional separation between academic and social inclusion by demonstrating how students’ social positioning and relationships shape their access to learning opportunities.
Socio-mathematical norms refer to the implicit and explicit norms that define what counts as meaningful academic contributions in classroom interactions. Socio-academic learning extends this idea beyond mathematics, suggesting that valuing precise subject-specific language or metacognitive reflection establishes participation norms that structure both social and academic dynamics in the classroom.
In practice theory, learning is situated within social communities where participation is a dynamic process. Bourdieu’s concept of social capital highlights how relational resources support or constrain academic development. Socio-academic norms illustrate how shared understandings of what constitutes meaningful academic participation can directly impact students’ opportunities to engage in learning. Consequently, instructional design should consider social mechanisms that influence their learning opportunities and recognise that academic progress depends on an inclusive, supportive social structure.
In this context, socio-academic interventions refer to instructional approaches that intentionally integrate social and academic goals to promote students’ learning and participation. Such interventions range from collaborative learning activities, where students interact and learn together, to more structured programmes explicitly designed to develop both social competencies and academic skills.
By conducting a scoping review of the existing literature, this paper addresses the following overarching research question: How are the social and academic dimensions of socio-academic interventions in mathematics, literacy and science in primary and lower secondary school (ages 5-15) described, operationalised and evaluated, and in what ways do these dimensions influence one another?
Method
We initially included all peer reviewed articles reporting empirical findings on socio academic interventions, defined as interventions aiming to enhance students’ academic and social outcomes simultaneously. Additional inclusion criteria were:
• The intervention should be aimed at a subject in public school and have both an academic and a social emphasis.
• The target group should be public school students aged 5–15 years and comprise entire classes.
• The intervention should be aimed at general and inclusive education
• The peer-reviewed articles must be written in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, or English and published between 2014-2024.

Studies that targeted segregated special education were excluded. Review articles were also excluded, as they provided neither sufficient insight into the socio-academic aspects of the individual interventions nor adequate insight into the studies’ scientific quality.
We conducted our literature searches in March 2024, using the following six databases, including three Nordic databases: ERIC, Education Research Complete, PsycInfo, Oria, SwePub and Research Portal Denmark.
Screening and data selection took place from March to June 2024 using the review software Covidence. The initial database search and final collation were conducted in collaboration with an information specialist. Two authors (ST/MS) independently screened 557 references at title‑and‑abstract level. Subsequently, two authors (ST/KH) reviewed 36 full text studies, of which 25 were excluded for the following reasons: no social intervention (n=8), no evaluation (n=1), wrong target group (n=5), wrong setting (n=1), review study (n=2) and not peer reviewed (n=8). Conflicts were resolved through consensus. All three authors jointly operationalised the inclusion criteria and reviewed the full text versions of the 11 studies included in the final analysis.
We used a data charting form modified according to the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) guidelines to extract data from the 11 included studies, including reference, intervention name, country, population, sample size, study design, outcome measures, intervention content, subject and results.
Given the heterogeneity of study designs, methods and outcome measures, meta analysis was not suitable. Instead, we conducted a thematic synthesis (Thomas & Harden, 2008), involving: 1) line by line coding, 2) development of descriptive themes and 3) generation of analytical themes that extend beyond the primary data to address the research questions. All three authors coded independently and resolved discrepancies through discussion to ensure analytical rigour. This approach enabled us to identify patterns across studies and gain deeper insight into how socio academic interventions target and interlink social and academic competencies.

Results
Out of 557 identified articles, only 11 studies explicitly addressed both academic learning and students’ social participation as intended and evaluated outcomes in whole-class, inclusive educational settings. Across mathematics, literacy and science in primary and lower secondary education (ages 5–15), the interventions shared a common didactic ambition: to organise teaching in ways that position social interaction and participation as constitutive conditions for subject-specific learning rather than as merely parallel or supportive elements.
The thematic synthesis identified three recurring didactic patterns. First, social dimensions were primarily operationalised through structured collaboration, dialogic interaction and collective problem solving, thereby shaping participation norms and students’ access to subject-specific practices. Second, academic learning was framed through disciplinary forms of reasoning and language use, while social participation shaped students’ opportunities to take part in subject-specific learning activities. Third, only a minority of studies made the relationship between social participation and academic learning analytically explicit; most treated social interaction as a pedagogical means rather than as a didactic object of inquiry with implications for inclusion and equity.
Across studies, positive effects were reported for both academic outcomes and students’ social participation, suggesting that socio-academic interventions can support learning and inclusion simultaneously within general education classrooms. However, the review also reveals a significant didactic blind spot: the lack of conceptual and empirical analyses of how specific instructional designs shape participation, reduce or reproduce barriers to engagement, and contribute to students’ opportunities to learn across subjects.
From a didactic perspective, the findings point to a need for more fine-grained analytical frameworks that can capture the interplay between subject content, participation norms and instructional design, including their implications for inclusive teaching. The review thus contributes to European discussions on didactics by identifying both shared features of socio-academic interventions and critical gaps in current research on teaching, learning and participation.

Intent of publication
Some of the results presented in this paper have been published in Thygesen, S., Schmidt, M. C. S., & Hansen, K. R. (2026). This conference paper places particular emphasis on the didactic analysis of the findings and their implications for teaching, learning and participation.