This paper examines how worldviews and national values are displayed in the national (Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) curricula of Sweden, Finland and Norway. The specific interest is to investigate what similarities and differences there are between these three ECEC curricula with regard to the position of religions and other…

This study explores head teachers' and cultural brokers' views of school-Muslim parent collaboration in Finland and Sweden. The data includes semi-structured interviews with school heads (n = 20) and Muslim cultural brokers (n = 16). The theoretical background leans on the theorizing of cultural capital originating from Bourdieu and on more recent…

Introduction: The prevalence rates of bullying vary significantly across countries and continents. Specifically, UNESCO estimates that the prevalence rates vary from 22.8% (CentralAmerica) to 48.2% (Sub-Saharan Africa). Recently these differences among countries andregions have been attributed to culture- and country-level variables. Thus, the…

This research seeks to better understand how older people living in sparsely populated areas learn and then use eHealth applications in their everyday lives. The study was conducted in northern Sweden and Lapland in northern Finland, the most sparsely populated areas in these countries. The study focused on the use of following eHealth services: a…

This article explores the link between the OECD TALIS 2013 survey's framework for defining the ideal teacher and national educational goals by focusing on the teacher self-efficacy items, using cross-country comparisons. Surprisingly, cross-country analysis of the TALIS 2013 data combined with World Value Survey data about Desired Child Qualities…

In the current paper, we present an analysis of a case study in which we have followed Swedish primary teachers who voluntarily began using translated Finnish curriculum materials, i.e. a textbook and teacher guide, in order to reform their mathematics teaching. The multifaceted data, consisting of questionnaires, interviews, protocols from…

This book identifies the cultural and moral foundations of country-specific educational governance and school leadership and presents the principles of justice and the diversity of common goods that guide leadership practices in schools. It contributes to an existing research field that studies diversity and ethical leadership in schools. The…

The aim of this study is to gain insights into students' language use on social media as part of the specific linguistic activities of second language (L2) learning, including development of sociopragmatic competence. Two Facebook groups were introduced in different English-as-L2 classes that were part of an international collaborative project…

Latin American students consistently score low on international tests of cognitive skills. In the PISA 2012 results, students in seven Latin American countries had an average score of 395 in mathematics, or about 100 points lower than the average score of 497 in four Scandinavian countries. We estimate the effect of socioeconomic characteristics…

A study of PhD dissertations in library and information science (LIS) was carried out to investigate which research topics have been of interest in Nordic LIS institutions. Seventy-nine doctoral dissertations from 2005 to 2014, published by 13 different research institutions, were retrieved from the institutions' archives and from library…

Purpose: Pupils' perspective should be better taken into account when developing nutrition education at school. The purpose of this paper is to explore Nordic children's perspectives on the healthiness of meals in the context of school lunches. Design/methodology/approach: In total, 78 focus group discussions were conducted with 10-11-year-old…

Educational policies and practices are influenced by cultural, political, and economic factors, and this is also true of specialized educational approaches such as gifted education. Factors such as a country's cultural tendency toward egalitarianism or meritocracy, whether the political system is centralized or decentralized, and the degree to…

This article builds from a multi-sited ethnographic study on immigrant students' musical agency, conducted in three lower secondary school classrooms in the capital cities of Finland, Sweden and Norway. The focus of the article is twofold, and concerns what kinds of meanings the participating students ascribed to the music from their own or their…

The lack of sex difference in left-handedness in Scandinavian countries reported by Papadatou-Pastou, Martin, Munafo, and Jones (2008) is questioned. We investigated the sex difference in left-handedness in two Finnish, one Norwegian, and one Swedish population-based sample not included in the Papadatou-Pastou et al. (2008) meta-analysis. The…

In this paper, the authors discuss the influence of democracy and law on music education in Sweden and Finland, and the potential for music education as training in democracy. The latter consideration can be instructive regardless of the nation, or its laws and paradigms of music education. The theoretical background is based on Jurgen Habermas'…