The increasing prominence of neoliberal agendas in international higher education has led to greater weight being ascribed to student satisfaction, and the national surveys through which students evaluate courses of study. In this article, we focus on the evaluation of feedback processes. Rather than the transmission of information from teacher to…

Success in complex and holistic engineering practices requires more than problem-solving abilities and technical competencies. Engineering education must offer proficient technical competences and also train engineers to think and act ethically. A technical "engineering-like" focus and demand have made educators and students overlook the…

Private supplementary tutoring in the form of preparatory courses to university entrance examinations is present in Finland alongside public higher education (HE). We explore the participation in preparatory courses. Our data derive from the university undergraduate subsample (n = 2969) of a larger cross-sectional national survey targeting…

Sexual abuse is a public health issue with long-term consequences for children's lives and education. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is a key reference point in safeguarding, increasingly incorporated into domestic law. This article aims to strengthen safeguarding theory and practice by reviewing human rights education (HRE) theory and…

Collaboration with parents is widely regarded as important in the education of children and young people, yet teachers rarely feel sufficiently prepared for this task. Several studies indicate that initial teacher education (ITE) programmes struggle to address issues of family-school partnerships (FSP). Our purpose in this study was to assess…

Teaching excellence is at the centre of national and international higher education policy. The Higher Education Academy (HEA) is a part of the debate to develop a shared understanding of what constitutes teaching excellence and has published research including "Considering Teaching Excellence in Higher Education: 2007-2013" by Dr Vicky…

Monitoring bullying behaviours is the key aspect of a successful anti-bullying intervention. Questionnaires among pupils and principals of the same schools were utilised to measure the agreement between pupil-reported frequency and principals' estimations of the prevalence of frequent bullying in the same schools and to identify monitoring methods…

The article examines organisational challenges in the Finnish vocational education and training (VET) to support students' lifelong learning pathways. Investigation of organizational challenges is done through the students' transitions either within one school level or from one school level to another or to working life. For supporting the…

This article examines how, through uncovering collaborative leadership, the whole school staff is able to understand its common endeavours to support heterogeneous students' fluent learning paths. For this, a notion of distributed pedagogical leadership (DPL) is drawn upon. DPL concerns everyone in the school community, not only leaders and…

Finland is probably the only country where sex education has been studied in two consecutive national surveys, in 1996 and 2006 directed at biology and health education teachers, and in 2000 and 2006 by measuring adolescents' sexual knowledge. In 2006, responses from teachers and students could be combined for 339 schools. The most important…

The decline in physical activity among young people has been discussed in the media during recent decades, although the scientific evidence for this has been scarce. The aim of this study was to investigate trends over 30 years in leisure time physical activity of Finnish boys and girls aged 12, 14, 16 and 18 years from 1977 to 2007. The data were…

Despite the breadth of coverage and collaboration, few empirical studies have concerned educational background and its implementation in order for scrutinising the reasons for students' high scientific literacy in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003 at international level. Rather, many report the data as evidence of successful…

The objective of language studies in Finnish polytechnics is to provide the student with language and communication skills which meet the needs of working life and the student's professional development in future. To ensure high quality and to provide uniformity in foreign language education in Rectors' Conference of Finnish Polytechnics has given…

In the European context Active Citizenship has been promoted within the education and training Lisbon Strategy as a tool to support the continuation of democracy, human rights and greater social inclusion. In this article the authors analyse the impact of education on Active Citizenship and contribute to the existing debates relating to education…

A survey collating information on educational research in member states was carried out by questionnaire; this volume contains the replies from Austria, Finland, the Federal Republic of Germany, Ireland, Malta, the Netherlands, and Turkey. The report from each country is divided into two parts: (1) Governmental Activities, and (2) Activities of…