UNESCO has indicated the need for more research to test the effectiveness of education for sustainable development (ESD). This study analyzes how ESD is included in the Finnish national core curriculum and examines four environmental indicators to determine if a correlation exists between ESD and a cleaner physical environment in Finland. The…

This descriptive case study examined how teaching practices were evidenced in Grade 1 classrooms in two different cultural and educational contexts, Finland and Japan. Teachers' teaching practices were video-recorded in 53 classrooms in Finland and six classrooms in Japan and rated with the Early Childhood Classroom Observation Measure by trained…

This study aims to reveal how primary school music education lessons are conducted during the pandemic process. For this purpose, answers to the following questions were sought in the study: How did music teachers adapt to the pandemic process? (Which practices did they plan and how did they manage the course process?); How has the pandemic…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between school leadership practices and teacher empowerment in the Finnish policy culture. Specifically, moral leadership and distributed leadership enacted by school principals are tested in a simultaneous design as predictor to two distinct yet related aspects of teachers' sense…

This study explores Finnish first-year primary teacher students' (N = 244) sense of professional agency in the classroom. In addition, the interrelation between student teachers' sense of professional agency and the perceptions of teacher education as a learning environment is explored. The sense of professional agency in the classroom…

This policy profile on education in Finland is part of the "Education Policy Outlook" series, which presents comparative analysis of education policies and reforms across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Building on the OECD's substantial comparative and sectoral knowledge base, the series…

Even if the results of international student assessment studies such as PISA or TIMSS show that girls have been catching up in mathematics and natural sciences, there are still remarkable gender differences in the number of males and females studying and working in the technological fields after basic education. Technology is still a…

This paper reviews research on small rural primary schools in Finland and analyses it under three thematic foci: the relationship between the local rural school and the surrounding community, the small rural primary school as a learning environment, and the teachers' profession in this context. Over 30% of Finnish primary schools are small rural…

We are delighted to welcome you to the International Conference on Education and New Developments 2013, taking place in Lisbon, Portugal, from 1 to 3 of June. Education, in a global sense, is a right since we are born. Every experience has a formative effect on the constitution of the human being, in the way one thinks, feels and acts. One of the…

In Finland, 22 fifth-graders completed activities using the Lego/Logo Control Lab learning system. Their work was largely self-directed; the teacher functioned as adviser; technological content was understood and transferred through social interaction; and math/science content was used naturally as a tool for problem solving. (SK)

Considers the problem of how to track a student's real progress in learning and evaluates the success of concept mapping in constructing a learning environment in a Finnish primary school. Highlights include the semiotic paradigm developed by Charles Sanders Peirce; and results of a longitudinal study. (Author/LRW)

This study showed how narratives permeate teacher knowledge and are essential to understand teachers work and learning. It focuses on the characteristics of the teaching profession that are both revealed and constructed in the activity of conversation. The main interest of the study was to reveal new layers of meaning and to uncover interactional…

In order to give a draft picture of the church- and school-based literacy campaigns in Sweden, some of the historical sources, problems, methods, and preliminary results from a broad research project on the two campaigns are discussed. (IAH)

Social problem solving, effectance motivation, and information processing were studied with 38 Finnish eight-year olds using the LOGO computer programming language learned through discovery learning. Results suggest that LOGO promotes the development of problem-solving skills if each student receives sufficient support from the teacher. (SLD)

The purpose of the study was to describe Finnish children's conceptions of aspects of the adult world and the development of the structure of children's thinking. Ninety boys and girls between the ages of 5 and 10 were interviewed individually. Each child was asked a minimum of 15 questions in each of the following subject areas: 1) war and peace;…