Search results for "educational sciences"
showing 10 items of 198 documents
Recruitments in Finnish universities: practicing strategic or pathetic HRM?
2016
Recruitment is a core instrument in the academic labour market. This article takes the perspective of the organisation − here, the university − on recruitment. Universities’ personnel policies and practises are shifting from legally oriented personnel administration to more strategic human resource management (HRM). In Nordic countries, this shift is partly driven by the changing status of higher education institutions from state-governed bureaus to more autonomous institutions. This article provides insight into this transition, using Finland as a case example of higher education systems that have undergone drastic reform, moving from a civil servant model to autonomous personnel policy. D…
Collaboration for Inclusive Practices : Teaching Staff Perspectives from Finland
2021
accepted in publication Collaboration between educators is considered to be the key issue when implementing inclusive practices within schools. An open-ended questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were used to extend the current understanding of collaboration between teaching staff. The questionnaire was administrated to 167 classroom teachers, subject teachers, special education teachers and teaching assistants in primary, secondary and special education public schools in Finland. Also, semi-structured interviews with 20 participants were used to deepen the understanding of the elements included in the teaching activity in diverse classrooms. The results indicate coordination, cooper…
Finnish reform of the funding and provision of special education : the views of principals and municipal education administrators
2015
This study examines the current state of special education provision and resources in Finland after the extensive reform of the government transfer system and Basic Education Act implemented in 2010–2011. Data were collected from a survey of compulsory school principals and from interviews with the highest-ranking officials in municipal education administration. The results show that participants viewed the Basic Education Act as having a more significant impact on the provision of special education than the reform of the government transfer system. Partly due to the reforms, local authorities have targeted the resources of special education differently and used resources more effectively. …
Changing the heart and soul? Inequalities in Finland’s current pursuit of a narrow education policy
2018
The Finnish educational system is well known for its excellent learning results, highly trained teachers and egalitarian values. However, when the political leanings of the government change, its policies are usually altered as well. In this policy report we give an account of the recent changes and current trends in Finnish education policy. We analyse the characteristics of the Sipilä Government’s current education policy since 2015 and compare it to the Nordic welfare-state ideals of universalism, equality and social justice which have traditionally been the key building blocks of the Finnish education system. The Government’s policy appears to be narrow-minded and ignorant of issues rel…
Lessons learned on student engagement from the nature of pervasive socio‐digital interests and related network participation of adolescents
2021
The rise of modern socio-digital technologies has fundamentally changed the everyday environments in which young people communicate with each other and cultivate interests. To gain a more sophisticated understanding of this phenomenon, this study provides in-depth, qualitative insights into adolescents’ experiences of their socio-digital developmental ecologies. The 15 interview participants were recruited based on a previously conducted questionnaire. The semi-structured theme interview addressed the socio-digital aspects of the participants’ interest-driven behaviours and related networks with the aid of participant-generated egocentric maps. The data not only qualitatively enrich the pic…
Can noncomplementarity of agency lead to successful problem solving? A case study on students’ interpersonal behaviors in mathematical problem-solvin…
2022
In student collaboration, purposeful peer interaction crucial for success on the task. Such collaboration requires adequate and purposeful student agency. Theoretically, the between-individual complementarity of agency be-haviors enhances purposeful interaction. However, the level of agency of group members can disrupt the collaborative interactions. We conducted a case study of collaborative mathematical problem solving, where one student's behaviors of noncomplementary agency characterized the group interaction. We examined the video recording of the group by continuous quantitative coding of students' agency behaviors and segmented the interaction process into four phases. We analyzed qu…
The role of daily autonomous and controlled educational goals in students’ academic emotion states: An experience sampling method approach
2018
The present study examines antecedents of university students' academic emotions (Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry, 2002) in the context of self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985; 2000), using realtime assessment and intra-individual analyses. We investigated whether daily autonomous and controlled-motivated educational goals predicted students' academic emotions. University students (N = 55) completed smartphone diaries over 14 consecutive days. The two-week intensive longitudinal data were organized in a hierarchical three-level structure, with situations (Level 1) nested within days (Level 2) nested within students (Level 3). Students' goal motivation was assessed in morning quest…
Experiences of arbitrary management among Finnish academics in an era of academic capitalism
2020
For the last two decades, Finnish universities have faced the implementation of new systems of control and undergone dramatic changes that have worsened academic working conditions–such as corporatisation and budget cuts. This article explores Finnish academics’ experiences of university reforms with a special focus on the consequences it has had in terms of organisational socio-dynamics. We adapt Glynos and Howarth’s logics of critical explanation and apply this theoretical framework to analyse the interviews of academics who, against their own will, did not have their contracts renewed. This approach describes, explains, and criticises the logics–which are social, political and fantasmati…
Designing education democratically through deliberative crowdsourcing : the case of the Finnish curriculum for basic education
2020
In Finland, curriculum design is allegedly carried out through a deliberative process that involves various stakeholders, interest groups, experts and ordinary citizens. To facilitate participation in curriculum design, online crowdsourcing has been applied. The objective of this study is to explore to what extent the design process of the latest Finnish national curriculum for mathematics was open, democratic and deliberative. The theoretical framework of the study is the theory of democratic will-formation of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The comments given on the early version of the core curriculum of mathematics were analysed using directed content analysis, in which the abov…
Students' abilities to evaluate the credibility of online texts: The role of internet‐specific epistemic justifications
2021
Previous evaluation studies have rarely used authentic online texts and investigated upper secondary school students' use of evaluation criteria and deep reasoning. The associations between internet-specific epistemic justifications for knowing and credibility evaluation of online texts are not yet fully understood among adolescents. This study investigated upper secondary school students' (N = 372) abilities to evaluate self-selected authentic online texts and the role of internet-specific epistemic justifications in students' evaluation performance when solving a health-related information problem. Students selected three texts with Google Custom Search Engine and evaluated their credibil…