Especially in large courses, feedback is often given only on the final results; less attention is paid to the programming process. Today, however, some programming environments, e.g., Thonny, log activities during programming and have the functionality of replaying the programming process. This information can be used to provide feedback, and this…

This May sees the release of the results from the third PISA assessment of financial literacy. These results are largely consistent with previous findings, but also go beyond earlier assessments in probing students' behaviours and attitudes towards money matters (including digital money matters) and their exposure to financial education at school.…

The synergy, or lack thereof, between large-scale and classroom assessment has been fiercely debated in both academic and policy spheres for decades around the world. This paper seeks to explicate how different countries are utilizing large-scale testing and test results at the classroom level. Through country profiles, this paper analyzes…

Globalisation and policy transfer in education make it incumbent upon decision makers to prioritise among competing policy options, select policy initiatives that are appropriate for their national contexts, and understand how system-specific factors moderate the relationship between those policies and student outcomes. This study used qualitative…

PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) is the fourth assessment in the current trend series, following PIRLS 2001, 2006, and 2011. There were 61 participants in PIRLS 2016, including 50 countries and 11 benchmarking entities (e.g., regions of countries as well as additional grades or language groups from the participating…

The success of discipline-based teaching requires an interplay between substantive and procedural knowledge. In Finland, disciplinary thinking was included in the National Core Curriculum and in the final assessment criteria a decade ago, which meant a change in history teaching. The outcome of this change is examined in the article with the help…

Test-taking behaviors (i.e., task focus, maintenance of attention, and cooperation) affect children's cognitive test performance, and, thus, it is critical to take test-taking behavior into account when drawing conclusions and making recommendations. Prior studies have evaluated test-taking behaviors at the end of the assessment; the present study…

In this article the current empirical research on morality and giftedness is reviewed with an emphasis on moral sensitivity. The component of moral judgment has been the most studied aspect in morality. Although high-ability students have been shown to be superior in moral judgment when compared to average-ability students, morality includes other…

The research project presented in this article was designed to provide a better understanding of the stable and significant differences in the PISA results between two otherwise very similar Nordic welfare states, Denmark and Finland. In the PISA studies, Finnish students repeatedly achieve the highest Nordic (and partly worldwide) scores in e.g.…

Sponsored by the by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a set of tests administered every three years to 15-year-olds around the world. These tests measure students' practical ability in basic skills such as reading, mathematics, and science, but reporting…

In this article we attempt to analyse how OECD knowledge production is integrated with the process in which Finnish education policy takes shape. This is done by analysing the "uses" of the OECD PISA Study by Finnish central government officials. The main question posed is: How do these officials interpret the PISA results so as to…

This study explores undergraduate students' understanding and reasoning models of electric and magnetic fields. The results indicate that the tested students had various alternative concepts in applying their reasoning to certain CSEM test questions. The total number of physics students tested at the beginning of the first course on…

Purpose: This paper aims to understand the situational appropriateness of adopting e-learning for the in-house company qualification, and more specifically to compare the benefits of studying online to more traditional way of studying with print material. Design/methodology/approach: At the end of seven months study, final test results for company…

Studied the predictive value for success in medical school of three science tests, the secondary school matriculation examination, and learning-from-text (LFT) tasks taken by 109 Finnish medical students. Results show that the three science tests predicted medical course grades, and that the LFT tasks had predictive value for the pace of studying…

The seven articles of this special issue comment on the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Assessment Reading Literacy Study conducted from 1989 to 1991 in 31 countries. Project design and test instruments are reviewed, and results from the Nordic countries are presented and explored. (SLD)