Time,things, teacher,pupil: engaging with what matters

This article presents an empirical study of everyday life in school and a methodological attempt to emphasise children’s views and to find ways other than representation to analyse them. The empirical portion took place in a Finnish elementary school in which the author was the class teacher. The ten-year-olds in the class engaged in an unstructured classroom diary activity in which they freely wrote their observations, thoughts and stories. The study takes a relational materialist approach to the children’s writings focusing on various moments and gatherings in the classroom as assemblages and illustrates how time, things, teacher and pupils are co-produced in them. Temporality and materiality are also considered in relation to research methodologies. Research with children is reconceptualised based on the focus on mattering. The analysis is enacted as a non-linear and nomadic process through retelling and responding to the children’s texts. It highlights particular situations, unstabilities, ‘tiny’ things and the complexities of children’s lives in educational environments.     

Operational,interpersonal, discussional and ideational dimensions of classroom norms for dialogic practice in school mathematics

While research suggests that interactive pedagogy drawing on students’ ideas can improve learning outcomes, it has been found difficult to change mathematics classroom practice in this direction. The reasons for this difficulty remain poorly understood, hindering change at scale. This article focuses on the under‐researched normative aspect of such practice which shapes participants’ actions and expectations. Drawing on theories of social practice and interaction, we define norms as recurrent and socially obligating patterns of, and rationales for, behaviour in a particular social practice. We then examine empirically what and how (new) norms associated with this type of pedagogy are manifest in classroom discursive activity by examining talk across 21 school mathematics lessons by 12 teachers implementing a dialogic intervention. While there is a clear distinction between surface norms and underlying rationales, and a consistent set of surface norms relating to classroom talk can be identified, deeper analysis finds norms to be multi‐dimensional. We illustrate how a surface norm, such as ‘Respect others’ ideas’, can be enunciated in terms of multiple underlying rationales which we term operational, interpersonal, discussional and ideational. Our findings shed new light on why the dialogic intentions of such interventions are often realised in a superficial way. We further examine the ways in which teachers hold students and themselves accountable to the ideational dimension—the dimension that relates to taking students’ ideas seriously in classroom dialogue.     

The role of achievement strategies on literacy acquisition across languages

We examined the importance of children’s achievement strategies in different literacy outcomes in three languages varying in orthographic consistency: Chinese, English, and Greek. Eighty Chinese-speaking Taiwanese children, 51 English-speaking Canadian children and 70 Greek children were assessed on measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, reading fluency, and spelling. The children’s use of a task-focused versus task-avoidant achievement strategy in the classroom context was rated by their teachers. The results indicated that the teacher-rated task-focused behavior was a significant predictor of spelling and to a lesser extent of reading fluency and that its effects were comparable across languages.     

Cognitive Correlates of the Covariance in Reading and Arithmetic Fluency: Importance of Serial Retrieval Fluency

This study examines the core predictors of the covariance in reading and arithmetic fluency and the domain-general cognitive skills that explain the core predictors and covariance. Seven-year-old Finnish children (N = 200) were assessed on rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological awareness, letter knowledge, verbal counting, number writing, number comparison, memory skills, and processing and articulation speed in the spring of Grade 1 and on reading and arithmetic fluency in the fall of Grade 2. RAN and verbal counting were strongly associated, and a constructed latent factor, serial retrieval fluency (SRF), was the strongest unique predictor of the shared variance. Other unique predictors were phonological awareness, number comparison, and processing speed. Findings highlight the importance of SRF in clarifying the relation between reading and arithmetic fluency.     

The effects of educational computer game on low-performing children’s early numeracy skills – an intervention study in a preschool setting

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of an educational computer game, Lola’s World, on low-performing children’s early numeracy skills. Four preschools with 33 children from families of low socio-economic status (M _age = 5.5 years) took part in this study. Of the 33 children, 23 were split randomly into two groups: an intervention group playing a numeracy game (Lola’s World) and an active control group playing an early reading skills game (Lola’s ABC party). The remaining 10 children served as a passive control group. The intervention phase lasted three weeks, during which time the children played the games daily for about 15 min. The children’s numeracy skills were measured using the Early Numeracy Test. Those children (n = 22) who exhibited low numeracy (i.e. at risk for learning difficulties in mathematics) were included in the analyses. The three groups did not differ in terms of parental educational levels or home languages. They were comparable in terms of nonverbal reasoning and the amount of time spent playing. The Lola’s World group improved its early numeracy performance from pretest to post-test. No between-group differences were found. The results are discussed in relation to providing game-based support for low-performing preschoolers.     

Does Training in Syllable Recognition Improve Reading Speed? A Computer-Based Trial With Poor Readers From Second and Third Grade

Repeated reading of infrequent syllables has been shown to increase reading speed at the word level in a transparent orthography. This study confirms these results with a computer-based training method and extends them by comparing the training effects of short syllables and long frequent and infrequent syllables, controlling for rapid automatized naming. Our results, based on a sample of 150 poor readers of Finnish, showed clear gains in reading speed regarding all trained syllables, but a transfer effect to the word level was evident only in the case of long infrequent syllables. Rapid automatized naming was associated with initial reading speed, but not with the training effect.     

A marshall in love. Remembering and forgetting queer pasts in the Finnish archives

This article analyses the formation of the queer archives in Finland. In Finland, the close links between the civil society and the state affect the archiving of social movements’ history. One of the publicly funded private central archives, the Labour Archives (Työväen Arkisto), has taken responsibility of preserving the documents of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) past. This includes documents of activism and associations as well as personal archives and narratives. The article presents the position of the Finnish LGBT collection within the Finnish archival sector and evaluates it in the light of archival theory. The Finnish model of queer archives offers an example of preserving queer pasts in a social history archive that is neither strictly a mainstream archival institution nor an independent activist archive. The article describes the development of queer history and the need to find sources telling about queer lives and discusses the role of the archival institutions and archival science in remembering and forgetting queer pasts. The article reflects also how the archival policies and archival practices affect which pasts are officially remembered and which are forgotten.     

Patterns of symbolic numerical magnitude processing and working memory as predictors of early mathematics performance

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Although the roles of symbolic numerical magnitude processing (SNMP) and working memory (WM) in mathematics performance are well acknowledged, studies...