Parents’ own school recollections influence their perception of the functioning of their child’s school

This follow-up study set out to examine whether parents’ recollections of their own school would predict their degree of satisfaction with the functioning of their child’s school. A group of academically educated and vocationally educated parents with a child in preschool (N=391) were asked to think back to their primary school days and evaluate their school; these parents were then asked to indicate their satisfaction with the functioning of their child’s school once the child had reached the first, the third and the fifth grade. The parents’ recollections were found to influence their degree of satisfaction: among the academically educated respondents, the parents with relatively positive recollections showed higher levels of satisfaction than the parents with relatively negative recollections did; and among the vocationally educated respondents, the mothers with relatively positive recollections indicated higher levels of satisfaction than the mothers with relatively negative recollections did. It was suggested that parents’ recollections may be seen as an experience-based component of their general attitude towards education.     

The role of self-determination in informal and formal science learning contexts

Learning Environments Research - The goal of this research was to explore cognitive, self-determined learning and autonomous motivational effects in the context of a mobile science exhibition...     

Are parents’ academic gender stereotypes and changes in them related to their perceptions of their child’s mathematical competence?

In the course of their child’s school years, a group of parents were asked to assess their child’s mathematical competence and indicate whether they endorsed the gender stereotype pertaining to it. Once the child had entered upper primary school, the consistent stereotypic parents tended to rate their boys’ mathematical competence higher than the parents of girls did. Additionally, the parents whose attitude turned into an anti‐stereotypical one perceived their girls’ mathematical competencies as higher than those of the boys, which was related to their perception that the boys’ competencies were getting worse while the girls’ competencies were getting better.     

Increasing social interaction between an isolate first grader and cross-cultural peers

Positive social interactions between an isolate, white first grader and socially active, Indian first graders were experimentally increased. The procedure involved three five-minute observation periods, approximately one-third of which were followed by brief feedback statements, and one 30-second feedback period a day, which consisted of brief instructions plus delivery of a tangible reinforcer contingent upon positive social interaction. Results of a multiple baseline design across three supervised, unstructured settings showed that the child's rate of positive social interaction increased to above that of the Indian peer recommended as the highest-rate interactor by the teacher. The increase in behavior maintained across a period of six months.     

How teachers understand and strategize about emerging conflicts

This article concerns what have been variously called mild misbehaviours, minor distractions or emerging conflicts, i.e. situations of mild tension between the teacher and pupils in the classroom. The article responds to calls for further studies on the link between how teachers understand these emerging conflicts and the strategies they suggest to handle them. We carried out two studies on primary school teachers in Sweden, using a qualitatively driven mixed-method design, i.e. the studies were carried out sequentially using different qualitative methods. The first study, the main study, based on individual interviews with 20 teachers, used a phenomenographic approach, capturing these teachers’ different understandings of emerging conflict. The second study, the supplemental study, based on six group interviews with 18 teachers, built on the main study and used a hermeneutic approach, capturing how these teachers link a certain understanding of emerging conflicts to certain themes of suggested strategies. By utilizing this design, we were able to investigate the aforementioned link and build a model of nine different understandings, each linked to one to four strategy themes. Altogether, 22 different strategy themes, together encompassing a multitude of separate strategies, were recognized and linked to the nine different understandings. The results suggest that teachers have a more divergent and nuanced understanding of emerging conflicts, and how to handle them, than earlier studies of this link have reported. The results give valuable insights into developing more accurate quantitative surveys as well as more suitable teacher training programmes.     

Do parents' own school memories contribute to their satisfaction with their child's school?

In the present study a group of parents with a child in preschool were asked to give evaluative recollections of their own primary school and then to indicate the level of their satisfaction with the functioning of their child's school repeatedly in the course of the child's compulsory education. Across the follow‐up, the parents with positive recollections showed more satisfaction than those with negative recollections did. Over the years, the level of satisfaction decreased in all other groups but the fathers with positive recollections. Parents' recollections may be seen as an experience‐based component of their attitudes towards education.     

Responding to diversity and striving for excellence: The case of Finland

The implementation of inclusive education has become an internationally accepted goal. In this process a substantial challenge is to simultaneously increase both equality and quality in inclusive education. This article discusses ways of achieving this goal in light of recent research findings which indicate that it is possible to meet both goals at once. The findings of various studies on the Finnish comprehensive school reform, along with recent learning outcomes, support this conclusion. During the comprehensive school era, equality has increased, performance gaps have decreased, and student achievement has improved overall. Possible reasons for this are that Finnish educational policy development has not followed international mainstream trends and that flexible and extensive special education provisions have been built into our school system. Internationally acknowledged requirements for a good education are competent teachers and a school system’s commitment to take on the responsibility of educating children of all abilities.     

Parents’ perceptions of their child’s resilience and competencies

This study examined parental views of their child’s educability through the parents’ perceptions of their child’s resilience. The purposes of the study were: (1) to examine psychometric properties of the rating scale created to measure parental views of their child’s educational and psychological resilience, (2) to explore whether the parents’ views of the child’s resilience were related to their notions of the child’s competencies and (3) to examine how parents’ perceptions of their child’s resilience were related to the parent’s social position and the child’s gender. Data were collected by questionnaire from the parents of fifth-grade children (N=391). The parental rating scale consisted of three dimensions of resilience, all with satisfactory reliability. Parents’ views of their child’s resilience were related to their perceptions of child’s abilities and school success, suggesting that the parental rating scale had concurrent validity. The results also indicated that parents’ views of their child’s resilience were related to their gender and education and to the child’s gender. Furthermore, parents’ views of their child’s educational resilience, based on parents’ trust in their child’s internal capacities, were related to the parental definition of their child’s cognitive-verbal competencies, in particular.     

Risk‐taking abilities for everyone? Finnish entrepreneurship education and the enterprising selves imagined by pupils

This article examines the spread of the neo‐liberal educational policy in Finnish schools by considering entrepreneurship education. We examined the kinds of gendered and classed enterprising selves that were narrated in the Finnish writing competition Good Enterprise! written by pupils in the 9th grade of comprehensive school. In their narratives of enterprising selves, the pupils constructed the middle‐class version of the self, where the person was not contingent upon external effects but an autonomous self‐governing individual. Moreover, the possible selves of boys matched the culturally valued representations of the autonomous, risk‐taking entrepreneurial individual more closely than the self‐representations of girls did. However, it was especially the boys’ narratives of modest entrepreneurship with the traditional virtues of the respectable citizen that were successful in the competition. This finding is in conflict with the educational policies of the European Union, which call for risk‐taking abilities and competition as pre‐conditions for achieving progress.     

Assessing “The Regulars”—and Beyond

Commenting on online news articles must be considered an online staple—an established practice among news consumers that is currently being funnelled from the Web pages of news organizations to third-party platforms such as Facebook. The paper at hand adopts an exploratory approach and provides insights into the fervency and popularity of commentators and comments on the Facebook pages of two Swedish and two Norwegian newspapers. The results indicate that while immigration issues are a common topic in both countries, the Swedish context stands out by also featuring high degrees of commenting activity in relation to issues of gender equality. Identifying a series of differences in how these opportunities to comment on news are used in each country, the Swedish context appears to offer a wider range of opinions among the most fervent commentators in comparison with Norway. A similar tendency is found among the most “liked” comments.