Search results for "koulu"
showing 10 items of 4546 documents
Language orientations in early childhood education policy in Finland and Norway
2021
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/),which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This article investigates the language orientations in education policy documents for early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Finland and Norway. Finland, an officially bilingual country, and Norway, a predominantly monolingual country, share similar views on ECEC. However, the ECEC field in both c…
Participation in job-related lifelong learning among well-educated employees in the Nordic countries
2016
The purpose of this study was to explore participation in job-related lifelong learning (LLL) among well-educated mature workers and compare it across four Nordic countries. Although this group generally is very active in LLL, the centrality of knowledge work in society, rapid pace of skills-renewal and rising learning demands for all qualifications levels, necessitates a better understanding of the patterns and factors affecting their skill development. The paper builds on theories of learning motivation, human capital and workplace learning. Data from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) by the OECD were used. In addition to high participation rates, systematic level differences in particip…
The creative class: do jobs follow people or do people follow jobs?
2017
Accepted manuscript version. Published version available in Regional Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2016.1254765 Regional adjustment models are applied to explore causal interaction between two types of people distinguished by educational attainment, and two types of jobs: creative class jobs and other jobs. Data used are for labour market regions in Finland, Norway and Sweden from the 2000s. Creative class jobs follow people with high educational attainment (one way causation), but creative class jobs also follow other jobs and vice versa (circular causation). The results suggest that stimulating creative class job growth could be accomplished through attracting people with higher educatio…
The effectiveness of rural versus urban nonprofit organisations in the Democratic Republic of Congo
2017
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a country with high natural resources, but it has suffered from decades of civil wars and social turmoil, being heavily aid-dependent. In the DRC, several Nonprofit Organisations (NPOs) are major players in fighting poverty and enhancing welfare. This research aims to analyse the effectiveness of small NPOs in improving poor peoples’ lives through health, education, and economic activities. Two NPOs working in the DRC, one in a rural and the other in an urban area, are compared by researching the aid sites and surveying 201 households (aid beneficiaries). Our case observations and the survey results facilitate analysing the mission accomplishment, e…
How do educational reforms change the share of students in special education? Trends in special education in Finland
2019
Recent European and global trends in education have been to promote inclusive education and expand education, resulting in the increased provision of special education. In promoting inclusive education, recent special education reforms have also aimed to curtail the rise in identification rates for students in special education, for example, by focusing more on early support and discontinuing fiscal incentives to identify students with special educational needs. Using official special education statistics, we studied how Finland’s special education system reforms changed the share of students in special education. In addition, we examined variations in special education provisions among mu…
Transnational turn and national models of higher education - The case of Finland
2014
The purpose of the article is to problematize the relationship between the Nordic democratic public higher education tradition and transnational market driven knowledge economy policies. The article illustrates this development with two cases -- quality assurance and internationalisation policies -- where external demands, based mostly on market ideologies, have been introduced with apparently transnational incentives but having national implementations. These transnational pressures are related to a kind of soft governance of higher education policy, characterized by networked decision making and use of expert consultants, which possibly promotes flexible decision-making and efficiency, bu…
The effect of polytechnic reform on migration
2011
This paper examines the effect of the polytechnic reform on geographical mobility. A polytechnic, higher education reform took place in Finland in the 1990s. It gradually transformed former vocational colleges into polytechnics and also brought higher education to regions that did not have a university before. This expansion of higher education provides exogenous variation in the regional supply of higher education. The reform raised the mobility of high school graduates across local labour markets in the years after they had completed their secondary studies, which indicated increased mobility between high school and post-secondary education. We estimate that the reform enhanced the annual…
Why Finnish polytechnics reject top applicants
2019
I use a panel of higher education clearinghouse data to study the centralized assignment of applicants to Finnish polytechnics. Many top applicants remain completely unassigned each year. The same applicants' future applications reveal that many of them should have been admitted to a different program immediately. The application system, however, discourages applicants from applying to multiple programs within the same year, while at the same time leaving them in the dark on the set of programs willing to admit them. Improvements to the application system have the potential to substantially reduce reapplications, thereby shortening long queues into Finnish higher education. peerReviewed
Transformative, interdisciplinary and intercultural learning for developing HEI students’ sustainability-oriented competences : a case study
2022
AbstractThe literature has produced relevant theoretical insights into pedagogical frameworks, tools and competences that would be best suited to teach sustainability at higher education (HE). This article contributes to such a discussion using a course on sustainability developed by us as a case study. Two research questions are tackled in this article: (1) How to empower students to address urban sustainability challenges through the inclusion of transformative, interdisciplinary and intercultural learning into the current HE system? (2) Which pedagogical tools can be used to develop students’ sustainability-oriented competences? To address the research questions, the case study consists …
More skilled, better paid : labour-market returns to postsecondary vocational education
2017
Outside the USA, relatively little is known about the labour-market returns to postsecondary vocational (or polytechnic) education. Yet, polytechnics in Europe are distinct from US community colleges. This paper focuses on the labour-market returns to polytechnic attendance in Finland, where polytechnics are representative of many European countries. Using matching methods and longitudinal administrative data, we find that, compared to individuals with no postsecondary education, students who attend polytechnics have higher annual earnings of €3,300 to €3,700 and employment gains of 2.5 to 6.6 percentage points 10 years after the entry decision. However, the returns vary by personal charact…