This mixed-method study examines students' expectations and concerns before transitioning from primary to lower secondary school and the role of students' school-related wellbeing and self-esteem in their concerns. Students reported their beliefs about the forthcoming school transition and filled in a questionnaire assessing school burnout and…

School bullying is associated with externalizing and internalizing problems, but little is known about whether reading difficulties also play a part. We asked how, in Grades 1 and 2, word reading skills and externalizing/internalizing problems predict the degree to which students are involved in bullying in Grade 3. Using a sample of 480 Finnish…

In the new national core curriculum for Finnish preschool and basic education, rationales for supporting pupil participation are framed by the goal of developing school communities by listening to pupils' perspectives, the social nature of teaching and learning and pupils' participatory role in planning, implementing and evaluating their own…

The language used around the digitalization of education tends to be inherently political, value-laden, and deterministic. This position paper scrutinizes this so-called 'Ed-Tech speak' via narrative methodology. The analytical focus is the paradoxes that exist between the normalizing master narratives of Ed-Tech speak and the complexity and…

The present study investigated the role of parenting stress in early adolescents' externalizing and internalizing behavior and, particularly, the moderating effect of maternal affection on these associations. The data of 992 early adolescents (x-bar[subscript age]=12.71; 454 girls) and their mothers during the transition from primary school to…

This study investigates the multimodal construction of blame attributions in peer interaction during digital tasks in English as a Foreign Language classrooms. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis (CA), we examine how the force of blamings is manifested in and through the variety of resources used, and the role of digital devices in the…

This longitudinal study covering two educational transitions examined 1,821 Finnish students' participation in and identification with school and their associations with students' academic achievement and truancy. The students were surveyed (a) at the end of primary school, (b) at the beginning of lower secondary school, (c) at the end of lower…

The present study examined the academic antecedents of declining peer social status. Participants included 545 (311 boys, 234 girls) Finnish students followed from the 1st through the 4th grade (ages 6-8 at outset). Each year, teachers completed assessments of academic task avoidance and students completed standardized measures of reading and math…

Children's agency accords with the principles emphasised by the Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations in Convention on the rights of the child. UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Geneva. Retrieved from, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx, 1989). This study focuses on children's…

The quantitative literature on parental reasons of school choice for their elementary school children was systematically reviewed using all major databases. The quality of the studies was assessed through a modified version of the Newcastle-Ottawa scale. Among 3982 references reviewed, 26 studies were included from 14 countries. Although large…

The present article discusses the possibilities of interdisciplinary integration for teaching art to primary-school students in after-school activities. Integrated teaching, as one of the ways for putting into practice the socioconstructivist approach to learning and the theory of the guided construction of knowledge, is used as a basis for…

Improvisation is an area of interest to both music education researchers and music educators alike. The purpose of this literature review was to examine extant studies related to improvisation at the elementary level. Selected research included the nature of improvisation, the amount of instructional time and activity type used, the development of…

This study examines the different ways in which fractions are dealt with in two elementary mathematics textbook series: Kang Hsuan (KH) in Taiwan and Laskutaito in Finland. The results showed that the total number of fraction questions in Laskutaito is higher than that in KH and that Laskutaito highlights the basic definition of fractions to help…

ISO Colegío in Paraiba, Brazil, implemented Finnish innovation pedagogy from Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS) as a pedagogical strategy in their new primary school in early 2020. The implementation started in class teaching but due to the pandemic, it was transferred online, still using the new pedagogical approaches. Experiences by…

Computerized game-based assessment (GBA) system for screening reading difficulties may provide substantial time and cost benefits over traditional paper-and-pencil assessment while providing means also to individually adapt learning content in educational games. To study the reliability and validity of a GBA system to identify struggling readers…