Formative assessment has been long emphasised as a powerful means for enhancing science learning. However, there is still a lack of research to investigate the impacts of formative assessment on both students' motivational beliefs and behaviours in science learning. This study examined such impacts using data from six Western and six East Asian…

The report provides a social and historical perspective on how Finland's education system was built and emerged as a high performer in Europe by 2000. In highlighting Finland's strengths, the authors focus on: (1) Finland's long-standing commitment to supporting all of its students as the driver of strong outcomes; (2 the systems's emphasis on…

This extended literature review explores four broad themes concerning mathematics education, the first of which is on how U.S. school-aged children have been performing in mathematics at the national and international levels. Findings demonstrated that at the national level, their performance has been stagnant for many decades for high school…

This study analyzes how students' reported teaching practices of their teachers and their attitudes towards science are related to the science achievements of four high-performing countries/economies in PISA 2015: Hong Kong, China, Canada, and Finland. A study of these regions can shed light on the commonalities of and differences between the…

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018 list top 1,000 universities in the world which represent only 5% of the 20,000 higher education institutions of the world. Out of these world countries, Finnish youth were the best young readers in the world according to results from the Programme for International Student Assessment…

This article describes an innovative teaching approach that can offer the changes needed for school improvement. When entering an Education: Basic and Interactive (EBI) classroom, one will see students focused on accomplishing self-guided tasks and eager to move on to the next challenge in their self-paced learning. The EBI Project described here…

Since students have lost their interest in school science, several student-centered approaches, such as using topics that are relevant for students, inquiry-based learning, and discussion-based learning have been implemented to attract pupils into science. However, the effect of these approaches was usually measured in small-scale research, and…

Since the publication of the 2000 PISA results highlighting Finland's school children ranking #1 in the world for reading, and #3 for mathematics and science, fascination with Finland's educational system has piqued the interest of educational researchers worldwide. Researchers have been captivated by the paradoxes of the Finnish education system:…

The aim of this paper is to discuss the role of coding and observation manuals in classroom studies. While observation manuals have been a part of the methodological toolkit for measuring various aspects of instruction for decades, the field has also been suffering from "paradigm wars," fragmentation and local production of instruments.…

Introduction: Evidence has remained scarce whether teaching practices might be linked to students' educational equality. This study investigated (i) whether student-oriented teaching practices are associated with students' learning outcomes in mathematics, and (ii) whether student-oriented teaching might increase equality in learning outcomes…

This article presents two independent studies of Finnish teachers' conceptions of giftedness and considers whether it is a malleable or fixed quality. The first qualitative study examined elementary school teachers' (N = 212) conceptions via inductive-oriented content analysis, whereas the second study measured teachers' (elementary n = 184,…

Educational quality is defined and shaped by the classroom practices implemented by teachers in our schools. The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)-PISA link presents a unique opportunity to explore what takes place in the classroom by listening to the voices of teachers and students. Teachers, with their professional training and…

The aims of this study were to determine low-achieving students' attitudes towards chemistry and how the attitudes differ within a low achieving group. The most preferred teaching methods were also defined. Empirical data (n = 2949) were collected by stratified sampling from fifteen-year-old Finnish lower-secondary school students as part of a…

This study analysed 10 top-performing regions in PISA 2015 on their science performances and instructional practices. The regions include Singapore, Japan, Estonia, Taipei, Finland, Macao, Canada, Hong Kong, China and Korea. The science performances of the 10 regions and their teaching practices are described and compared. The construct of…

Finnish students' success on all three content domains of each of the four cycles of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has created much international interest. It has also prompted Finnish academics to offer systemic explanations typically linked to the structural qualities of Finnish schooling and teacher education.…