How to make the neighbourhood school a school for all?

A new special education strategy was launched in Finland by the Ministry of Education in 2007. The new Basic Act was enacted in 2010 and the new national core curriculum concerning three‐tiered support for pupils in 2011. Since the 1990s, teachers across Finland have participated in developing Finnish basic education towards greater inclusion. The goal of this study was to enhance understanding of the implementation of the Finnish educational reforms. In this study, teachers' perceptions of good inclusive teaching arrangements were analysed and compared with the theories of inclusive education. There is still a lack of information available on the implementation of inclusive education practices, and especially about teachers' experiences of teaching in inclusive classrooms. In 2010, basic education teachers (N = 327) in Lapland, Finland, were asked to describe their experiences and perceptions of inclusive teaching arrangements. The results indicated that teaching practices have become more diverse, flexible and differentiated, enabling teaching of diverse groups. More and more teachers preferred teaching in teams and planning their work together, showing that changes in schools change the teacher's profession too. In this study, a framework for inclusive schools was constructed through implementing the indexes of inclusion created by Booth and Ainscow.     

Learning inter-professional teamwork during university studies: a case study of student-teachers’ and social work students’ shared professional experiences

This paper explores ways of enhancing inter-professional skills as part of professional development during university studies. From a socio-psychological viewpoint, inter-professional teamwork can be regarded as an interface between the group and individual levels, where collective commitment, efficiency, shared processes and outcomes, as well as tensions and dilemmas, are brought together. Inter-professional skills, which are already practised in university, may enable professionals to work in inter-professional contexts during their careers. In this case study, the participants (three student-teachers, two social work students and four supervisors) reflected on their shared experience of participating in a shared practicum at a primary school. The data-set comprises two group interviews conducted separately with the students and supervisors following the practicum. The results indicate that it is possible to develop inter-professional competencies during one’s university studies and that this has the potential to promote students’ reflective skills as they reframe their expertise and the expertise in other professions.     

The internationalization of higher education with Chinese characteristics: Appadurai's ideas explored

The aim of this paper is to explore Appadurai's ideas of global cultural flows in the context of the internationalization of higher education in China. Studies on the internationalization of higher education have increased with the expansion of international activities on university campuses; however, more theoretical analysis in the field is necessary, especially in less studied and rapidly developing countries such as China. Appadurai's theorization may provide new insights into the field because of its background in the changes transforming international student flows: intensified migration and mass mediation. The research data of the paper consist of previous literature and statistical data. The paper focuses first on analysing the general ideas of Appadurai's model and second on one of the scapes of the model, the ideoscape. The paper suggests that Appadurai's ideas of global cultural flows, when expanded through further research and theorization, provide a heuristic framework for analysing the internationalization of higher education in China. The continuing significance of the nation state and the locality of international actions characterize the internationalization of higher education. Furthermore, the ideoscape of the internationalization of higher education has widened because the volume and the range of activities at universities have expanded.     

Knowledge Building Expertise: Nanomodellers’ Education as an Example

The content of the expertise which young natural scientists try to gain by doing science in research groups is a relatively little-explored subject. What makes learning in such settings challenging is that a central part of the expertise is tacit. This study employs empirical methods together with a contextualized approach and interdisciplinary cooperation in order to reveal practicing nanomodellers’ (N = 10) perspectives on their knowledge-building expertise, and on young scientists’ expertise education. Modelling in the virtual world plays a major role in the science of these nanomodellers, as it increasingly does in many fields of science. This study therefore adds to our understanding of the nature of recent scientific knowledge building and expertise development, which can be used in the education of the scientists of the future.     

Communication strategies to overcome functional and psychological resistance to Internet banking

This paper aims to investigate how customers experiencing different kinds of resistance to Internet banking perceive the information and guidance offered by the service provider. A postal survey was conducted and 251 effective responses from Internet banking non-users were received. Based on the earlier literature a typology of consumer resistance to innovations is proposed and four resistance segments, namely Non-Resistors, Functional Resistors, Psychological Resistors and Dual Resistors are identified. The results show that those customers reporting both functional and psychological resistance to Internet banking are more dissatisfied with the information and guidance offered by the service provider compared to those with only psychological resistance or no resistance to the innovation. Communication strategies to reduce and overcome different kinds of resistance to Internet banking are proposed.     

Enculturation into Technoscience: Analysis of the Views of Novices and Experts on Modelling and Learning in Nanophysics

In physics, the borderline between pure science and technology is increasingly diffuse. Physics can be seen as technoscience, a merged scientific and technological enterprise. The notion of technoscience has emerged from studies in the philosophy of science and sociology of science, and also seems to arise quite naturally in discussions with practicing scientists and as an underpinning of actual scientific practices. Nanophysics, the activities of which are closely connected with the advancement of technology and where modelling and simulations are extensively used, is a natural place to test how the ideas contained in technoscience can be used to understand these central activities and how they are learned. The views of physicists, both experts and novices, working on modelling and simulation problems in nanophysics and nanotechnology are examined in this study using multidimensional methods, to discover their views on how knowledge in their research field is acquired, constructed and justified??and how novices are enculturated into these knowledge-construction processes. Additionally, attention is paid to the question of the skills that are needed and how these skills, alongside the views of modelling, develop as a novice becomes an expert. The need to understand these basic epistemological processes is quite apparent from the viewpoint of understanding science, as well as in terms of using this understanding to guide education. The results of the analysis strongly suggest that ideas characterising technoscience are also present in the practitioners?? views; the technoscientific view can thus be used to understand and support the poorly understood process in which novices are enculturated as researchers in the field.     

Phonological and sensory short-term memory are correlates and both affected in developmental dyslexia

We investigated whether poor short-term memory (STM) in developmental dyslexia affects the processing of sensory stimulus sequences in addition to phonological material. STM for brief binary non-verbal stimuli (light flashes, tone bursts, finger touches, and their crossmodal combinations) was studied in 20 Finnish adults with dyslexia and 24 healthy controls. To determine sensory Item STM, participants were asked to match pairs of sequences of increasing length. In Time STM, participants matched pairs of five-stimulus-sequences of increasing stimulus onset asynchrony between the stimuli. Phonological STM was studied with digit span forwards and backwards, pseudoword span, pseudoword matching span, and pseudoword repetition. Earlier results associating phonological STM impairment with dyslexia were replicated. Dyslexic participants also performed more poorly than controls in sensory STM, suggesting that they have general difficulties in representing temporal sequences in STM. Further, sensory STM, phonological STM, temporal acuity, and reading ability were correlated, pointing to shared processes.     

Combining formal education and citizen science: a case study on students’ perceptions of learning and interest in an urban rat project

Abstract

Citizen science is a valuable tool in environmental and formal education in creating scientific knowledge for the researchers and facilitating learning and fostering a positive relationship toward the environment and study species. We present a case study on the Helsinki Urban Rat Project in which students surveyed rat occurrence in their own near environments. According to our results, experientiality, involvement, meaningfulness, freedom to choose, ease of participation, and the rats themselves contributed to students’ increased interest in participation. Furthermore, students described diverse factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge that they acquired during their participation. In general, students described negative attitudes toward rats, but they less negative views on rats after participation. We reflect on the success of the citizen science project and implications of planning a future citizen science project and incorporating citizen science in formal education.