Many studies have been conducted about academics' approaches to teaching, professional development and perceived departmental culture, but their interconnectedness has been considered to a lesser extent. The research presented here examined these patterns comparatively by disciplinary fields and years of teaching experience. Three inventories were…

The paper presents a Sino-Finnish teaching initiative, including the design and experiences of a series of pedagogical workshops implemented at the Aalto-Tongji Design Factory (DF), Shanghai, China, and the experimentation plans collected from the 54 attending professors and teachers. The workshops aimed to encourage trying out interdisciplinary…

Despite much public discussion about the importance of creativity and innovation-friendly teaching in Finnish higher education, the impact of the general opinion on actual teaching practices has been limited. In the Finnish computer science education the teaching mostly follows a pattern of lectures, fixed exercise sets, and exams. With this…

Since half of Finland is sparsely populated, the Finland National Board of Education has initiated a preschool project for sparsely populated areas. Project goals are defined as the acquisition through research, experiment, and planning of information relative to sparsely populated areas and special problems of distance, small population base,…

Main traits of the mastery learning theory and its relations to other innovatory approaches are sketched. A Finnish school experiment, with the experimental group (160 first graders) following mastery learning principals, is presented and positive results discussed. Advantages of learning strategy and practical difficulties restricting its…