Children who like to read and write tend to be better at it. This association is typically interpreted as enjoyment impacting engagement in literacy activities, which boosts literacy skills. We fitted direction-of-causation models to partial data of 3690 Finnish twins aged 12. Literacy skills were rated by the twins' teachers and literacy…

This article sheds light on adult engagement in a learning activity during and after online coaching on piano, guitar, or songwriting. Data was collected from the participants using thematic semi-structured interviews and experience sampling. To investigate the extent to which adult learners are involved in learning during and after online music…

Previous research has emphasized both the importance of giving and receiving peer feedback for the purpose of active learning, as well as of university students' engagement in reflection to improve learning outcomes. However, requiring students to explicitly reflect on peer reviewing is an understudied learning activity in higher education that…

Previous research suggests that peer support is an essential component of adolescents' sense of relatedness in peer relationships and correlates with study engagement and life satisfaction. However, what the underlying mechanisms of these relationships are, has remained unclear. This study examined 1) whether the sense of relatedness or study…

This study investigated the development of study engagement from the end of upper secondary school through the first and second years of higher education. The participants experienced the challenges related to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic while they were either university students or preparing for university entrance exams. The study…

In today's knowledge intensive and post-factual world, student teachers' relationship towards knowledge is a vital element in learning to teach. Student teachers must have a sense of epistemic agency to see themselves as productive participants in knowledge-laden activities. However, little attention has been paid to the role of agency in the…

This study seeks to identify profiles of depressive symptoms trajectories among a sample of 2,696 Finnish students (56.8% female), followed from 13-14 to 18-19 years old. Piecewise growth mixture analyses identified 5 trajectories: Low Stabilizing (6.20%), Mild Increasing (47.90%), Moderate Stabilizing (36.82%), Low Increasing (3.62%), and High…

The literature reports that while digital educational games are used in the elementary classroom, they are rarely, if ever, used in the upper secondary mathematics classroom. In order to investigate this situation, a survey was conducted to determine what upper secondary school mathematics teachers think about digital games and what obstacles and…

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has had its impact on research and researchers, potentially influencing the future of academia. Yet, to the best of the authors' knowledge, there are no empirical studies on the alignment between supervisors' and supervisees' estimates of the impact of COVID-19. This study aims to contribute to bridging this gap by…

This study examines the learning processes that take place when upper secondary students apply and generate theories while drawing on their preferred music and writing songs of their own. One music theory teacher and two researchers collaborated to design an emergent sequence of lessons focusing on students' interests, questions and creative work.…

Background: Transitioning into adolescence while simultaneously facing greater academic demands as the level of education increases often entails both academic challenges and general declines in students' school-related well-being. Still, however, relatively little is known about the causal relationship between students' academic well-being (i.e.,…

The importance of engaging students with complex societal challenges has led to the adoption of various interdisciplinary teaching and learning practices in both K-12 and higher education. However, interdisciplinary learning is one of the most complex domains of contemporary educational practice, and, despite its significance, remains…

The focus of this study is on the pedagogy of flipped learning (FL) in mathematics teaching. There has been extensive research into FL, but less research on teachers' pedagogical rationales when adopting this pedagogy. The present study addresses this research gap by examining interviews with mathematics teachers in Finland. These teachers…

This article examines how maltreatment experienced by adolescents is related to school engagement. Maltreatment includes physical, mental, and sexual violence along with sexual harassment, neglect, and witnessing domestic violence. School engagement refers to the students' relationship to all activities in the school. It describes students'…

Adult's self-direction and self-directed learning (SDL) have become topics in the discussion of work-related adult learning and an autonomous approach, emphasizing responsibility and independence, has received increasing attention in studies of learning. In the context of SDL, in contrast, the importance of the learning environment and community…