The roles of teacher–student relationship quality and self-concept of ability in adolescents’ achievement emotions: temperament as a moderator

This study examined to what extent teacher–student conflict and closeness, on the one hand, and students’ self-concepts of ability in literacy and mathematics, on the other, are related to students’ achievement emotions (enjoyment, anxiety and boredom) in mathematics and literacy among Finnish early adolescents (N = 854). We also investigated the extent to which these associations are moderated by student temperament (surgency/extraversion, negative affectivity and effortful control). The results showed, after accounting for relevant covariates, that in both school subjects, teacher–student conflict was negatively related to enjoyment and positively to anxiety and boredom, whereas teacher–student closeness was positively related to enjoyment and negatively to boredom. Self-concepts of ability in both school subjects were positively related to enjoyment and negatively to anxiety, whereas the self-concept of ability was only negatively related to boredom in mathematics. Student temperament also moderated some of the associations in the literacy domain. Lower levels of conflict in the teacher–student relationship were related to higher levels of enjoyment in literacy, particularly among students who had lower levels of surgency/extraversion. Also, a closer relationship with the teacher or a lower self-concept of ability in literacy was related to higher levels of anxiety, particularly among students who had low effortful control. In the mathematics domain, the associations between the self-concept of ability and achievement emotions were somewhat stronger than in literacy, and the domain-specific associations were not dependent on student temperament.

     

‘New Ways of Working’ as a tool for improving the performance of a knowledge-intensive company

This paper explores ‘New Ways of Working’ (NewWoW) – that is, non-traditional mobile and flexible work practices, settings and locations using sufficient ICT tools – as a novel approach to improve the performance of a knowledge-intensive organization. This paper makes a contribution by illustrating how the measurement of the impacts of NewWoW can be done and by producing empirical evidence of the benefits of NewWoW. The conceptual background of the study is anchored in the literature on knowledge work productivity and performance as well as on NewWoW. The empirical section reports a longitudinal case study of a change process during which the case company, Rapal, went through a NewWoW project. The impacts of the change are evaluated based on the results of both objective and subjective performance measures. The project was successful and resulted in significant cost savings as well as improvements in environmental performance (CO₂ emissions).     

Elementary school pupils' evaluations of the malleability of their academic abilities

Purpose:?This study set out to investigate pupils' evaluations of their academic abilities in different school subjects and their ratings of their potential for improving their performance in those school subjects.

Sample:?Twenty-eight pupils from the third grade (approximately age nine) and 30 pupils from the sixth grade (approximately age 12) in a primary school in Finland were interviewed.

Design and method:?The interview included tasks where the pupils were asked to rate and explain their potential for improvement in mathematics, the foreign language and the mother tongue. The explanations given were content-analysed and coding categories were formulated on that basis.

Results:?In all the three school subjects, the third-graders had a more positive view of their ability and its potential for improvement than the sixth-graders, and they based their view on a perspective of development and learning new things. The sixth-graders were more moderate and more uncertain in assessing their future performance.

Conclusions:?This study provided support to the earlier findings to the effect that pupils' faith in their abilities decreases in the course of their school years. We seek to explain this phenomenon in terms of the early stabilisation of the pupils' school performance, which is conveyed and constructed in the school's evaluative practices, especially in normative assessment. These practices clearly convey a differential conception of ability, which the pupils adopt as part of their self-assessments as shown e.g. by their use of school-like explanations in assessing their performance.     

Thinking multicultural education ‘otherwise’ – from a secularist construction towards a plurality of epistemologies and worldviews

This article examines educational, political and philosophical perspectives on the concepts of worldview and religion in the context of multicultural education. Using a postcolonial and post-structural approach combined with theories that analyse the politics of secularism, we attempt to pinpoint key perspectives in the recognition of worldviews in the current discourse on liberal multiculturalism. We suggest that the liberal-secular foundation of multicultural education is blind to practices, which, while supposedly based on political neutrality, are discriminating and ‘Othering’ towards religions and non-Western worldviews. Through theoretical and contextual analysis, we aim to deconstruct the ‘Otherness’ of religious worldviews at the epistemic level.     

Students negotiating the borders between general and special education classes: an ethnographic and participatory research study

ABSTRACT

Although Finnish basic education is based on inclusion, 37% of students receiving special support still study in either separate schools or separate classes in comprehensive schools. In this study we explore how policies of inclusion are implemented in a school with separated special educational needs (SEN) and general education (GE) classes. More specifically we conducted a two-year ethnographic study focusing particularly on exclusion and the sense of belonging in a lower secondary school (students aged 13–16) in the capital region of Finland. During the fieldwork, several students attending the SEN-class expressed an interest in changing from the SEN-class to a GE-class, or in breaking the borders between SEN and GE classes in other ways. As part of the negotiations with the school, students who criticised the GE- and SEN-class division were offered an opportunity to transfer to GE-classes but in the end, all of them wanted to stay in the SEN-class. In this investigation, we focus on the students’ reasoning and the teachers’ reactions when students negotiate the borders between SEN and GE-classes. In this study we found a clash between integration and inclusive thinking.