Sirkku Kupiainen

Teacher Evaluation of Student Ability: What Roles Do Teacher Gender, Student Gender, and Their Interaction Play?.

Background: Recent decades have been marked by an extensive movement to analyze bias in people’s thinking, especially in gender-related issues. Studies have addressed the question of gender bias in classrooms on different levels—the use of gender in books, learning opportunities determined by students’ gender, or teachers’ gender preferences. Purpose: In this study, we aim to answer the question of whether and under which circumstances the interaction between teacher gender and student gender positively or negatively influences teachers’ evaluations of students’ performance, while controlling for objective measures of students’ performance. For instance, it could be possible that a teacher with the same gender as a student evaluates the student as better than opposite-gender students, independent of their objective performance. Sample: The sample consisted of n > 1,500 Finnish 6th grade students (Mage= 12.67) and their respective class teachers. Design and methods: Students completed several academic skills tests, including a mathematical thinking test, reading comprehension test, and scientific reasoning test. Furthermore, teachers provided their evaluation of each student, evaluating students’ performance in different school subjects and answering questions regarding their probability of academic success. To test whether the teacher-student gender interaction had an effect on the criterion variable, i.e. teachers’ evaluation of the students’ performance, multilevel analyses accounting for between- and within-class effects were applied. Thereby, the effect of students’ objective performance on teachers’ evaluation of the students and main effects of gender were controlled for as covariates. Results: The main results indicated that the interaction between student and teacher gender did not influence teachers’ evaluation of the students. However, regardless of their gender, teachers tended to evaluate girls as better than boys in first language performance (i.e. Finnish language) and potential for success in school. Teacher gender did not influence the evaluation. Conclusions: The results of the study suggest that the interaction between teacher and student gender is unlikely to be a source of possible bias in the evaluations of students in the Finnish educational system.

National survey of reading comprehension in Finland

As a part of an extensive project for the evaluation of the Finnish comprehensive school, a recently developed reading comprehension measure; a hierarchy-rating test, and a more conventional multiple-choice task were used to assess reading comprehension skills in population-based samples of 2,891 sixth-graders (12‐13 years old) and 1,953 (15‐16 years old) ninth-graders. The hierarchy-rating task was constructed within the theoretical framework proposed by W. Kintsch and van Dijk (1978). It was designed to examine the cognitively high-level text processing, or macroprocessing, of expository passages. The multiple-choice task and the hierarchy-rating task showed only a moderate intercorrelation. Girls outperformed boys regardless of the comprehension measure. Performance on both measures, but particularly on hierarchy-rating, correlated with school achievement (r=0.44 and 0.53 respectively, p50.001). In general, the results are in agreement with previous research. The paper also discusses the educational implications of the survey.

Assessment in Schools – Learning to Learn

L2 refers to the cognitive and affective-dispositional factors central to the application of existing skills to novel tasks at work. On the other hand, L2 refers to potential new educational practices in education, which would increase the appeal of education and learning to all pupils. L2 is to be seen to comprise and adhere to several theoretical traditions within educational sciences. Depending on the approach, there are also differing answers to the question of the criteria of L2. Study skills, strategies, and techniques may be the narrow(est) area of L2, but there are also attempts to broad(er) interpretations.

Development of learning to learn skills in primary school

In Finland, schools’ effectiveness in fostering the development of transversal skills is evaluated through large-scale learning to learn (LTL) assessments. This article presents how LTL skills—general cognitive competences and learning-related motivational beliefs—develop during primary school and how they predict pupils’ CPS skills at the end of sixth grade. The six-year follow-up of 608 pupils shows that cognitive competences demonstrated in the beginning of the first grade in a learning preparedness test predict both later cognitive LTL competences and CPS, but their development is not fully determined by earlier individual differences in learning preparedness in the first grade. Motivational beliefs begin to be related to cognitive LTL performance gradually from age 10 on, and they may have a slightly stronger effect on CPS than on cognitive LTL performance. It is concluded that the development of CPS is partly depending on pupils’ initial learning preparedness and the development of their LTL skills.

How Do Finns Know? Educational Monitoring without Inspection and Standard Setting

The Finnish educational system was decentralised in the 1980s and the 1990s. The school inspection system was dissolved and the municipalities as organisers of education were given responsibility for monitoring the effectiveness of education and securing that every child has equal possibilities in proceeding through the 9-year basic education consisting of primary education and lower secondary education. A national model for sample-based curricular and thematic assessments was created to ensure equity of education in different parts of the country. Unlike many other countries, Finland decided not to have a comprehensive standardised testing system, and the goals set in the national Core Curriculum were not considered as standards either. Thus, matriculation examination at the end of academic track of upper secondary education remained as the only high-stakes test, but due to extensive possibilities for subject selection and the normative approach still applied in grading the exams, it only produces a limited amount of information that can be used in monitoring the trends of pupil performance. This chapter gives an overview of educational quality monitoring during basic education in Finland, presenting first a short historical review of how the monitoring system has received its current form. Next, the national sample-based assessment system is described before introducing the local ways of monitoring the equity and functionality of basic education. These include the screening of support needs and the evaluation of the effectiveness of the provided support that has been claimed to be one of the explanations behind Finland’s success in international comparisons. Finally, we will discuss whether quality monitoring without standard setting can work and what standard setting could contribute to the Finnish education system.