Stepping into other people’s shoes proves to be a difficult task for high school students: assessing historical empathy through simulation exercise

In 2011, the Finnish National Board of Education assessed the learning outcomes of history with a study whose results raised doubts about the fulfilment of the goals of history education. This article seeks to expand awareness about Finnish adolescents’ understanding of historical empathy. The study assessed twenty-two 16–17-year-old high school students’ ability to understand predecessors’ actions in particular historical situations. The study also examined how well a simulation exercise works as a tool of empathy teaching and evaluation. Students participated in the simulation and afterwards the students were interviewed. They also participated in a survey that measured their attitudes before and after the exercise, and wrote an essay at the end of the course. The results of the study show that most of the high school students did not reach the goals set for history teaching. The weak performance of students is explained by the strong tradition of history teaching which has been continuing in Finnish schools despite the curriculum reform. Teaching still concentrates on passing a meta-narrative on to students who have not yet enough experience of explaining historical events from a multiperspective point of view.     

Assessing historical literacy among 12-year-old Finns

The new national core curriculum has been put into operation in Finland. Teaching and learning is intended to focus on historical literacy. In this paper, we study how it can be assessed with a pen-and-paper test, and what that reveals in regards to the mastering of historical literacy among elementary pupils. To study this, we designed a test where pupils analysed sources, answered open-ended questions, and filled out weighted multiple-choice questions. Furthermore, we implemented the test with the think-aloud method. The results from this indicate the way 12-year-olds read historical documents and formulate their own interpretations. The results demonstrate that most of the pupils succeeded in acquiring historical information from different sources, as well as understanding the interpretative nature of historical knowledge. The test also revealed that pupils can identify some intentions of the sources’ producers, as well as reasoning through their own interpretations using a single source. Some pupils, however, could not process the cognitive noise inherent to the test (i.e. conflicting sources). Some of them also considered an authoritative source to be principally more reliable than other sources. Our study sheds light on which kind of task can be used at the elementary level to assess historical literacy.     

Specificity of Reading Self-Efficacy Among Primary School Children

We investigated the specificity of reading self-efficacy among second- to fifth-grade children in Finland (N?=?1,327). Bandura (1997 Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York, NY: Freeman. [Google Scholar]) theorized that efficacy beliefs can be assessed at different levels of specificity; however, empirical support for this view is scarce among young children. Efficacy beliefs targeting reading-related activities were assessed at three specificity levels (general, intermediate, and specific). Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that these specificity levels are separable, but correlated, and the structure was invariant across gender and grade level. Self-efficacy factors were positively associated with reading fluency, but the strength of these associations varied according to specificity level. Findings suggest that reading self-efficacy in primary grades can and should be assessed at different specificity levels according to research aims.     

Learning the routines: "professionalization" of newcomers in secondary school

Education systems are expected to enhance both social regulation and emancipation of school students. The contradictions between these aims are visible in the everyday life at school in tensions between control and agency. These tensions are explored in this article by analysing the first two weeks in secondary school, on the basis of ethnographic data collected in the project "Citizenship, Difference and Marginalization in Schools: with Special Reference to Gender." Multilayered processes and practices are involved in the induction of new students. Banal instructions in the "official school," the construction of differences and continuities in the "informal" school, and the ways in which bodies of students are placed in the time-space paths in the "physical" school are explored. The authors ask how school students are taught to become "professional pupils" routinized in the everyday life of their new schools, and how students themselves construct competences through negotiation, withdrawal, or resistance.     

Humour as a resource and strategy for boys to gain status in the field of informal school

Through a feminist approach this paper illustrates how humour is used as a resource and strategy for status among Finnish school boys and in constructing culturally accepted masculinity in the field of informal school. Based on interview and observation material collected in three schools, the results suggest that although humour is often affiliative and positive in nature, exclusive, violent humour is also used as a resource and strategy, which might have serious consequences on targeted students’ lives. The effect of humour as a symbolic resource of status depends not only on context and power relations between the agents, but also on a credible, strategic usage of the resources available to a boy. Humour has an important influence on constructing masculinities and the social status of boys. Furthermore, the status of a boy defines the value of his humour among his peer group.     

Reconstructing Imagined Finnishness: The Case of Art Education through the Concept of Place

This multidisciplinary article presents a methodology, a research project and selected outcomes from an environmental art education course for teacher students. The course is part of an art education minor at the University of Helsinki, Department of Teacher Education. The students were asked to construct their place through an intertextual art method that provided them the means to study their place open‐endedly as a space of plural cultural meanings. Applying the results from their intertextual process, they reconstructed their place artistically. The end product was a personal work of art that included traces of their chosen places, and created a new meaning for it. The outcome is a visual space of compacted meanings from different places. Places contain history and memories important to identity construction. The results show that the intertextual reading extends the students’ concept of place as a space for relational and plural cultural meanings. Foucault's concept of heterotopia, as it applies to otherness of places and spaces, was used alongside the intertextual art method.     

Associations of subjective social status with accelerometer-based physical activity and sedentary time among adolescents

This study examined the associations of subjective social status (SSS) with physical activity (PA) and sedentary time (ST) among adolescents. The study population consisted of 420 Finnish adolescents aged 13 to 14 years. The adolescents reported their own SSS within their school (school SSS) and their family’s social position within society (society SSS) based on the youth version of the Subjective Social Status Scale. Adolescents’ moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity (MVPA) and ST were measured objectively by accelerometers and analyzed separately for the whole day and the school day. The associations between SSS and MVPA and ST outcomes were analyzed using multilevel modeling. School SSS was positively associated with whole-day MVPA and negatively associated with school-time ST. Society SSS was not significantly associated with objectively measured MVPA or ST. Both MVPA and ST are important behavioral determinants of health. As an important correlate of MVPA and ST, school SSS should be addressed by providers when discussing obesity risk and healthy behaviors with adolescents.     

Openness in developing inter-organizational innovation

The paper describes empirical findings on how openness is realized in practical innovation projects involving different organizations. The purpose of the study is to increase the understanding of how openness should be managed in the various forms of inter-organizational innovation development. The main research interest is in how openness is manifested in developing innovations with different organizations involved in inter-organizational innovation projects. Subsidiary research questions are: ‘What is open?’, ‘To whom is it open?’ and ‘How open is it?’. The study applied qualitative case study methodology, and empirical data were collected by semi-structured interviews with management personnel in 40 organizations in Finland and the Netherlands. The findings reveal that openness in innovation is a multifaceted issue that can have very different meanings in different contexts. In the context of the study, the answer to the first sub-question (‘What is open?’) is obvious. It is the innovation project; its input, process and outcome. As for ‘To whom is it open?’, interviewees made a clear distinction between projects with known actors and projects that may include unknown actors. Answering ‘How open is the project?’, one can distinguish between different projects according to which attribute best describes the openness of the project – readable, usable, or modifiable. Answers to the three sub-questions conceptualize the issue of openness in inter-organizational innovation development and can be considered theoretical conclusions of the study. By combining the answers, five characteristic levels of openness in inter-organizational innovation were derived as practical implications of the study for R&;D and innovation management.     

Does Childhood Reading Disability or Its Continuance Into Adulthood Underlie Problems in Adult-Age Psychosocial Well-Being? A Follow-Up Study

ABSTRACT

This follow-up study aimed at a better understanding of the associations of reading disability (RD) with adult-age psychosocial well-being. We compared adult-age psychosocial well-being in 48 individuals (20–39 years) with documented childhood RD but without comorbid disabilities to 37 matched controls. The associations of psychosocial well-being with childhood and adult-age reading fluency were studied in the RD group, controlling for IQ, gender and unemployment. Psychosocial well-being was assessed with commonly used self-report questionnaires. No group differences were found in psychosocial well-being. In the RD group, lower adult-age reading fluency was associated with symptoms of depression, lower self-esteem, and social functioning. Severity of childhood RD was not associated with psychosocial well-being. Thus, reading fluency problems continuing into adulthood appear to be related to adult-age psychosocial well-being. A more holistic approach to studying how RD impacts adult-age well-being is needed, including both the individual’s developmental history and current functioning in various domains.