This study examines young people's (ages 13-18) perceptions of their own opportunities to influence the development of their own environment through an experiment aimed at developing civic democracy in Finland in 2020-2021. The purpose of the experiment was to try out new ways of participating and influencing meaningfully for young people at…

The present study examines the educational speech that appears in the upper secondary school curriculum. Teaching and the organisation of teaching is guided by the written reality of the curriculum.The Foucaultian approach is applied to study the discursive events, i.e. expressions presented as true. The study is based on the interest in the role…

This article explores the positioning of dual qualifications (DQs) in the Finnish education policy and the education system since the late 1980s. The analysis is carried out in the context of academic-vocational divide. At the end of the 1980s, Finland questioned the functionality of the strict academic-vocational divide in post-compulsory…

Finnish education has received worldwide attention due to the country's performances in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Research investigating Finland's positive outcomes in the assessment has highlighted not only the strength of teachers, but also the rigour of Finnish teacher education. Finnish student teachers must…

The purpose of this research was to study how teachers do differentiated teaching in practice. The main research question was: How do Finnish teachers do differentiated teaching? It was specified with sub-questions: (1) How are the various elements of the model of differentiated teaching emphasized by teachers?; (2) Which methods do teachers use…

This study describes how students initiate and manage transitions between activities during group-work. Audio and video recordings were collected in secondary school mathematics lessons (6 x 75 min) based on student-centred learning and the idea of minimal teacher instruction. In these lessons, the students were given the responsibility to…

This May sees the release of the results from the third PISA assessment of financial literacy. These results are largely consistent with previous findings, but also go beyond earlier assessments in probing students' behaviours and attitudes towards money matters (including digital money matters) and their exposure to financial education at school.…

Forty-six interviews of French and Finnish Junior High School teachers clearly show a strong will to link professional commitment to common progressive values. However, the interviewees have to adjust these political or philosophical views when confronted with the reality of their professional everyday life and to the development of widely…

In this study, we explore teachers' professional space as an alternative to, and/or expansion of earlier conceptualizations of teacher autonomy. Professional space is here understood both as an objective space with e.g., physical, juridical, economic features, and as the teachers' subjective negotiation of this objective space, where teachers are…

This article reports the findings from a phenomenographic investigation into guidance counselors' conceptions of career management skills (CMS). The results show that CMS was conceived as (a) information-based knowledge, (b) personal skills development, (c) interpersonal skills development, and (d) autonomous application of skills. The differences…

The present study was aimed to investigate whether Finnish and Danish students' math achievement differed and which student-level factors, if any, explained the achievement gaps and whether teacher participation in decision making and teacher morale, among the school-level factors, explained the achievement gaps in Finland and Denmark. To this…

This article presents the results from a survey investigating 708 Swedish and 1583 Finnish teachers' perceived autonomy with a focus on the teachers' perceptions of who makes the most important decisions in school. Teacher autonomy is seen as exercised at different levels; by teachers individually in the classroom or by teachers as a collective in…

Investigating whether the effects of extrinsic and intrinsic factors on teachers' dissatisfaction with the teaching profession show variation between countries is crucial, especially given the significant impact on quality of instruction, which is also associated with student performance. In this respect, the main aim of this study is to reveal…

Background: Despite the increasing need for STEM skills, to date, the connection between STEM subject choices and their impact on students' educational pathways has not been widely studied. Focusing on the mathematics choice (basic/advanced/no mathematics), a large register dataset that covered students admitted to Finnish universities during…

Transitions from one level of education system to another and from education to work are structured by socio-economic and institutional structure factors, while at the same time they are appropriated by individuals in their biographical constructions. Patterns to career trajectories are also dependent on social class, immigrant origin and level of…