The aim of this longitudinal study was to examine how adolescents' school burnout profiles relate to perceived learning difficulties and delayed graduation in upper secondary education. Adolescents (N = 485, mean age 15.7 years) living in a mid-sized city in Finland completed questionnaires during their upper secondary education in either the…

Principals (policy makers) have debated the progress in U.S. student performance for a half century or more. Informing these conversations, survey agents have administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math and reading in 160 waves to national probability samples of selected cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. This study is the…

Can science teaching contribute to developing skills for managing uncertainty towards the future and projecting imagination forwards? If so, how? In this paper, we outline an approach to 'teach the future' through science education. In the first part, we describe a framework that has been constructed to orient the design of teaching modules…

Lay conceptions of energy often conflict with scientific knowledge, hinder science learning and scientific literacy, and provide a basis for ungrounded beliefs. In a sample of Finnish upper secondary school students, energy was attributed with features of living and animate beings and thought of as a mental property. These ontologically confused…

As the 21st century unfolds, the United States faces historic challenges, including a struggling economy, an aging infrastructure and global terrorism. Solutions will have to come from educated, skilled citizens who understand and believe in our democratic system and are civically engaged. This incisive new report examines these fault lines and…

Data on 2,546 Finish adolescents were analyzed to determine the role of gender in the subjects' occupational and educational plans. Focus was on sex-atypical aspirations of students in Grades 9 and 12. Gender played a significant role in aspirations. Other influential factors included school performance, family background, and personality. (TJH)