Employing Bernstein's (1990, 2000) concepts of recontextualisation and pedagogic discourse, this case study aims to identify types of discourse and forms of knowledge in primary history lessons, and to explain the observations through teachers' thinking. Two Finnish primary teachers were observed for nine or ten consecutive history lessons and…

This study examined how Finnish primary school students perceive teachers' roles and responsibilities, their own learning and participation, and the social climate during co-taught lessons. Data were collected through a web-based questionnaire among primary school students (N = 242) from grades four to six from Finnish schools where Swedish is the…

Schools represent a central meeting place where societal inequalities are reproduced and questions of social justice become important. This study focuses on categorisations related to race, nationality, and gender in interactions in Finnish teaching environments, as well as teacher reflections on these situations. We discuss the implications of…

A Word Problem Enrichment programme (WPE) has been found to increase student word problem solving performance when facing non-routine and application problems. However, it is unknown if the WPE has an impact on student beliefs about word problem solving and how the WPE works for students with different motivation in learning mathematics. This…

This study explores the level of congruency between students' ratings of their own emotional and behavioral strengths and difficulties, and their teachers' ratings of these factors, when compared amongst two neighboring countries, Estonia and Finland. Secondly, it investigates the level of agreement between sixth grade students' ratings and their…

This study investigated the effectiveness of a creative physical education (CPE) intervention on students' perceptions of motivational climate in physical education (PE), leisure-time physical activity (PA) motivation, and overall PA. A sample of 382 fourth to sixth grade students (M[subscript age] = 10.87[0.93]) from two elementary schools were…

Drawing on cross-cultural qualitative research in comprehensive (primary and middle) schools in Finland and Korea, this article explores students' peer relationships as well as tensions and negotiations that occur between student agency and school control. Based on school observations and interviews with students and teachers, this article…

This study examined the reliability and validity of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System-Secondary (CLASS-S) in Finnish classrooms. Trained observers coded classroom interactions based on video recordings of 46 Grade 6 classrooms (450 cycles). Concurrent associations were investigated with respect to teacher self-ratings (e.g., efficacy beliefs…

This study investigated the cross-informant agreement among student self-report, teacher report, and parent report on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire translated into Finnish (SDQ-Fin) and estimated mean convergent and divergent correlations with a sample of fifth-grade Finnish students (N = 588) and the cross-informant agreement among…

Background: Recent decades have been marked by an extensive movement to analyze bias in people's thinking, especially in gender-related issues. Studies have addressed the question of gender bias in classrooms on different levels--the use of gender in books, learning opportunities determined by students' gender, or teachers' gender preferences.…

The outcome interpretations, attributions for the outcome, expectancies of future test outcomes, and perceptions concerning instrumental actions of four Finnish elementary school teachers and their 84 sixth-grade students were compared after a math exam. Disagreements between teachers and students on these points reflect biases on the part of…