Terhi Skaniakos

Peer Group Mentoring Programmes in Finnish Higher Education––Mentors’ Perspectives

Peer mentoring is one of the most important guidance practices for first-year students entering higher education and academic life. We are interested in mentors’ roles and apply the ideas of group counseling in order to increase the understanding of peer mentoring. Other aspects of guidance––content, methods, and collaboration––are approached on the basis of the holistic career guidance model. The data were gathered via an online questionnaire (n = 784) from 20 Finnish HE institutions. The results show that peer mentoring is a positive experience. The main emphasis is on the personal, psychosocial aspects of the student’s life. We identified four mentor types based on used activities. The experience of mentoring can vary according to the mentor type.

Supporting Students' Pedagogical Working Life Horizon in Higher Education.

In this article, we introduce a model of a pedagogical working life horizon. It encompasses questions posed by individual students concerning their future and incorporates the idea of a working life orientation to the pedagogical possibilities within education. Working life orientation consists of three elements: individual relationship, knowledge and skills and employability. In the model, we aim to outline how an orientation to working life might be included in higher education, providing a broad perspective on the various pedagogical possibilities. There are two key pedagogical elements supporting the implementation of the pedagogical working life horizons model: reflection and an inquiring attitude. Our inquiry is a synthesis of socio-constructionist theories of career guidance, a review of international writing on career guidance and working life skills in higher education, adult learning theories and of our practical experiences as educators and scholars in the fields of guidance and adult education.

Study guidance experiences, study progress, and perceived learning outcomes of Finnish university students

ABSTRACT In recent decades, the massification and diversification of higher education have generated new challenges for the guidance of university students. The present study focuses on students’ experiences of guidance in relation to their study progress and perceptions of their learning outcomes. The data (n = 4916) were collected from 2010–2013 through yearly Internet surveys whose targeted respondents were the students of a Finnish University. According to the results, general study guidance was a very strong predictor of students’ self-assessed development of their academic and generic skills as well as working life orientation. It also decreased the probability of slow progress in studies. Significant differences between disciplines were found: the Faculty of Education outperformed other faculties in regard to students’ satisfaction with the guidance and the students’ evaluations of their own learning outcomes. The main result of the study is that guidance can play a significant role in students’ academic success.