Finland: Success Through Equity—The Trajectories in PISA Performance

AbstractThe Finnish education system has gone through an exciting developmental path from a follower into a role model. Also on the two-decade history of PISA studies, Finland’s performance has provided years of glory as of the world’s top-performing nation, but also a substantial decline. This chapter examines Finland’s educational outcomes in recent PISA-study and the trends across previous cycles. Boys’ more unsatisfactory performance and the increasing effect of students’ socio-economic background are clear predictors of the declining trend, but they can explain it only partly. Some of the other possible factors are discussed.

Collaborative Problem Solving in Finnish Pre-service Teacher Education: A Case Study

This chapter provides results from a case study utilising the ATC21STM assessment portal in the context of pre-service teacher education in Finland. The results from the portal are combined with a questionnaire regarding teamwork and collaboration dispositions. Twenty-four pre-service teachers completed both these measures. The students of this study were following two divergent teacher education programs that had different profiles in terms of their study contents and methods of studying. The participants of both groups tended to be highly disposed to collaborate and work in teams, and their collaborative problem solving skills can be described as very good. The participants’ measured soci…

How Do Students Value the Importance of Twenty-first Century Skills?

Frameworks of twenty-first century skills have attained a central role in school development and curriculum changes all over the world. There is a common understanding of the need for meta-skills such as problem solving, reasoning, collaboration, and self-regulation. This article presents results from a Finnish study, in which 718 school pupils aged 11 to 15 years were asked to anticipate the skills they would need in the future. Accordingly, they were asked to value and rank the twenty-first century skills listed in existing frameworks and pick out those they regarded as the most important they had learned. Social skills and collaboration were ranked highest, both in the listed frameworks …

Tracking student teachers' technology-enhanced collaborative problem solving: Combining objective assessment data with subjective verbal reporting

In spite of increasing interest, technology-enhanced formative assessment practices reflecting 21st century skills are not yet much studied, particularly in teacher education context. Also, studies that combine both objective and subjective data around these practices are still rare. This study responds to these challenges in exploration of student teachers’ collaborative problem solving (CPS) processes. Relevant events in CPS tasks are tracked through process data acquired via ATC21S™ portal, and complemented with students’ interpretations of these processes as cued retrospective reports. The broader aim is to provide student teachers with hands-on experiences of using novel, technology-en…

Introducing Assessment Tools for 21st Century Skills in Finland

The Finnish national interest in the enhancement of 21st century skills has highlighted a need for and interest in developing tools and methods for teaching and assessing such skills. In this chapter, we present and analyze the development process of online assessment tools in the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills study (ATC21STM) from the Finnish perspective. (The acronym ATC21STM has been globally trademarked. For purposes of simplicity the acronym is presented throughout the chapter as ATC21S.) The development process was implemented according to the guidelines of the international project through four phases, namely concept checks, cognitive laboratories, pilot studies and …

Preparing teacher-students for twenty-first-century learning practices (PREP 21) : a framework for enhancing collaborative problem-solving and strategic learning skills

With regard to the growing interest in developing teacher education to match the twenty-first-century skills, while many assumptions have been made, there has been less theoretical elaboration and empirical research on this topic. The aim of this article is to present our pedagogical framework for the twenty-first-century learning practices in teacher education. We will first review the current status of policy frameworks for the twenty-first-century learning skills. Based on our previous work and current understanding in the field of learning sciences, we will next elaborate the processes and strategies for collaborative problem-solving skills and strategic learning skills to specify curre…

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Student teachers’ feelings of anxiety and exhaustion: can self-regulated learning skills function as an antidote?

ABSTRACTThis study examines first-year student teachers’ (N = 310) self-evaluated, study-related anxiety and exhaustion, and self-regulated learning (SRL) skills. Our presumption is that feelings o...

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Insights into Finnish first-year pre-service teachers’ twenty-first century skills

This study focuses on Finnish pre-service teachers’ perceptions of their twenty-first century skills, especially their learning strategies, collaboration and teamwork, as well as knowledge and attitudes related to ICT in education. The target group consist of 263 first-year pre-service teachers from three universities. The results outline how pre-service teachers perceive their twenty-first century skills, the relationships between different areas of these skills, and the differences among pre-service teachers in terms of perceived skills. The results indicate that the pre-service teachers perceive themselves as skilled learners in terms of learning strategies used as well as collaboration …

Assessing Online Collaborative Problem Solving Among School Children in Finland : A Case Study Using ATC21S TM in a National Context

Online collaborative problem-solving tasks were piloted in five Finnish schools participating in the Assessment and Teaching of Twenty-first Century Skills (ATC21STM) project. Process stream data from online tasks were captured from 480 Finnish students who explored dyad problem spaces. The log file data were explored to identify indicative behaviours of collaborative problem solving (CPS), which were coded into a series of dichotomous indicators. The Rasch simple logistic model was used to analyse student performance across the social and cognitive dimensions of CPS. Analysis of the Finnish data indicated that the construct can be interpreted using a two-dimensional model, matching the fin…