Didactics is the art and science of teaching and learning. It is a field within education that seeks to answer three central questions: What should be taught, how should it be taught, and why should it be taught?
Didactics encompasses questions about the selection of knowledge, teaching methods, and how learning takes place in different contexts. It can be seen as the planning, implementation, and analysis of teaching, with a particular focus on why certain goals, content, and methods are chosen. The well-known didactic triangle – what, how, why – is often used as a tool for analyzing and planning teaching and learning. Thus, didactics concerns the relationships between the teacher’s choice of content and methods, and what students actually learn.
At Stockholm University, didactic research is divided into general didactics and subject didactics, which concerns specific school subjects.