Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyse the strategic planning of the Centre for Mechanical Engineering, which is a joint venture of educational institutions and companies in Southwest Finland. Design/methodology/approach: The paper presents the strategies of focus and cost efficiency and how the selected strategies can be adjusted…

The trends of globalisation have had unavoidable impacts in steering and guiding the decisions of national policy-makers and the direction of national education policies. In the obscuring processes of supranational homogenisation of education and educational policy, supranational regimes, such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and…

The present article reports a study of communicative behaviour among mothers and infants who were grouped according to the ratings of sensitivity and co-operation, respectively. The participants were 27 Finnish-speaking mothers and their 10-month-old first-born infants (13 boys and 14 girls). The study is descriptive by nature, and the data were…

Reports that the cooperation of the classroom teacher and the remedial reading teacher leads to more individualized instruction and better parent/teacher relationships in Finland. (FL)

This study was conducted during the academic year 2002-2003 in a municipality in Eastern Finland. It focuses on pre-school education assessing its quality factors from the parents', teachers' and children's points of view. Theoretically, the study focuses on analyses of the purposes of the national core curriculum and pedagogical issues that are…

Introduction: In this paper, we discuss the link between information sharing and organizational knowledge production in two very different organizations; a company that handles insurance claims and a small, entrepreneurial hi-tech company. We suggest that this link has not been adequately addressed by studies of information behaviour, though a…

Purpose: This paper seeks to look into Gabriel--the Worldwide web server for those European national libraries represented in the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), providing a single point of access on the internet for the retrieval of information about their functions, services and collections. Above all, it serves as a gateway…

The contribution of teaching assistants, learning support assistants or classroom assistants is becoming increasingly important in inclusive and specialist classrooms. In this article, Marjatta Takala, professor in special education at the University of Helsinki, describes her research into the work of 14 classroom assistants working in a mix of…

Strategic planning and quality management have been developed independently of each other, but they meet in practice in many kinds of organisations. Strategic planning and quality assurance integrate different aspects of higher education institutions (HEIs) to ensure high-quality educational outcomes. This paper investigates the role of these two…

Examines collaborative projects conducted in cooperation with teacher training and higher education institutions worldwide, offering a rationale for using electronic mail in internationally cooperative projects with schools. Electronic mail enhances teacher education by supporting constructivist approaches to learning and encouraging closer…

As different forms of short-cycle higher education have developed along with traditional university studies, they are often perceived as "different but equal". In Finland, with the introduction of the AMKs (polytechnics) in the early 1990s, this interpretation was clearly a part of the rhetoric of government presentation. "Equal but…

Patterns in college student mobility between Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden are examined, with attention given to challenges posed by having three of these countries within the European Union and two outside it. The role of several formal agreements is discussed, and implications for policy needs concerning interinstitutional and/or…

The developing role of the library as a center for cultural activity was the principal subject of discussion at the sixth Anglo-Scandinavian Library Conference. Aspects of this growing function which were treated in participants' papers included: the spectrum of activities which is encompassed by the word "cultural"; the library's role…

This article describes the basic elements of an intensive action research process. The process started from an educational programme offered to professional groups interested in the problems in developing the public sector as a forum that would transcend the boundaries separating different work organisations. The introduction of the programme…

Locus of control (LOC) is a personality variable shown to possess potential explanatory power in the study of ethical decision making. There have been, however, diverse results reported in the literature. Whenever differences on this variable are indicated by the research, individuals with an Internal LOC report the more ethical responses. This…