Heidi Harju-Luukkainen

The Influence of Local Culture on Students’ Educational Outcomes

All adolescents are closely connected with their living environment, which influences their lives and learning in many ways. For example, individuals’ mental functions develop in interaction within different social, historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. In these environments, we can find different cultural features that have an impact on students’ educational outcomes.

Differences between students’ PISA reading literacy scores and grading for mother tongue and literature at school: A geostatistical analysis of the Finnish PISA 2009 data

In Finland, the national Core Curriculum for Basic Education defines the learning objectives along with the numerical grade to be given for good competence in each school subject in the final phase of basic education. While serving as a guideline for schools and teachers, it should also ensure an objective evaluation of all students in Finland. In this paper, we take a closer look at the equality of student assessment in Finland in the light of student performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009. This study investigates the relationship between the grades given to students in mother tongue and literature at different schools and the same students’ reading literacy performance in PISA 2009. The results are presented as a map produced using a method called kriging (McCoy and Johnston 2001). Kriging is a geostatistical interpolation method based on the statistical relationship among measured points’ spatial autocorrelation. In this case, the method produces contour maps illustrating areal differences for educational variables. The contour maps and related analysis indicate that teachers tend to adjust their grading practices to the general competence level of their class or school rather than strictly following the national curriculum guideline for student assessment. This may lead to local variations in terms of students’ school grades as indices of learning achievement and becomes evident when contrasted with an external, nation-wide reference point, such as their reading literacy performance in PISA 2009.

Immigrant Student Achievement and Education Policy in Finland

Finnish society has faced many changes during the past decade. One major change has been the increasing number of students speaking languages other than the national ones. This chapter provides an overview of the immigrant student population in Finland, including its change during the last decades. This chapter also takes a closer look at results of national and international assessments of students with an immigrant background, particularly the PISA 2012 results in which this student group was oversampled in Finland. This oversampling made the data considerably more representative of students having an immigrant background than in any other rounds, and also allowed more reliable statistical analyses. The findings of several analyses present an alarming picture regarding the learning achievement of students with an immigrant background in Finland. For instance, their performance in the PISA assessment in mathematics was clearly below that of the others and a greater portion of first-generation immigrant students did not reach the minimal level of mathematical proficiency. These findings are critically discussed in the increasingly multicultural, multilingual educational context of Finland.

Principals’ Perceptions for Finnish- and Swedish-Language Schools in Finland: An Analysis of School-Level Indices From Programme for International Student Assessment 2009

The Finnish educational system is known for its equality. However, in many key areas in national and international assessments, Swedish-language schools in Finland have lagged behind their Finnish-language counterparts. So far there is little research into the underlying reasons for this discrepancy. In this article, in order to illuminate the phenomenon, we take a closer look at a number of school-level indices based on the Finnish OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 data and compare school principals’ responses across these two school categories. Our findings reveal differences in school policies and practices, in school climate, and in school resources between the two parallel language-specific sectors of basic education in Finland.