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The current research has proven that recognition of prior learning in Vocational Education and Training (VET) is based on lifelong learning. Also, that recognition of prior learning means making competence visible and giving formal status for evaluated competence. According to earlier studies, implementations of recognition of prior learning have been for example interviews, tests, personal learning plans and documents. It has also found that these implementations have an influence for example on documentation, showing proficiency or evaluation of own competence. In addition, it has been shown there are also some benefits of recognition of prior learning, such as students’ increasing motivation and productivity of VET organizations, and on the other hand some challenges like lack of resources and national insufficient instructions. The aim of this study was to increase understanding about implementations of recognition of prior learning and also the motivations behind these implementations. The study examines what kind of implementations of recognition of prior learning exist in VET. Furthermore, the study looks into reasons, benefits and improvement expressed for the implementations. The qualitative study involved persons who have participated in the recognition of prior learning in VET: four of these were part of personnel, and two of these students. The data was collected through semi-structured theme interviews. The interviewees were gathered through the contacts of Finnish National Agency of Education. The interviews were conducted as individual interviews with remote access. The data was transcribed and analyzed by using content analysis. More specific analysis was applied by Mayring’s model of inductive category development and reflectively discussed with theorical bases. This study showed that recognition of prior learning is a uniform process. Prior learning was recognized through discussions, interviews, sorting out, documentation, diplomas and other documents, tests and proof in sectors of vocational education and yet centralizing work to specific persons. The reasons expressed for implementations were portability and usability of competence data, organizing, examination of timeliness of competence, mandatory by law, organization financing, answering to students’ personal needs and personal studying paths or common teaching frame. Improvement suggested for implementations of prior learning recognition were functionality of systems, trust in competence in working life, having academic curriculums, recognition of informal learning, time and human resources, increasing the information of studying and making work easier. The last three of these were mentioned also as benefits. The results verified general meanings and challenges in recognition of prior learning.

Previous studies (Eidevald 2009, Lappalainen 2006, Odenbring 2010, Värtö 2000 and Ylitapio-Mäntylä 2009) have shown that early childhood educators have different attitudes towards girls than towards boys. In this study I examine gender and equality in child day care in Finland. The study is a multimethodic feminist and educational study. It has been conducted using content analysis as well as aspects of ethnographical research, conversation analysis and discourse analysis. The research material was collected in a Helsinki nursery school where I spent three days observing and videotaping three educators working with a group of children aged 3–5 years. I also carried out interviews with the educators. The analysis focuses on the educators’ verbal interaction with the children and their thoughts on gender and equality and how these have been taken into account in the early childhood education practices. In verbal communication I paid particular attention to the way the educators praised the girls and boys. I also examined which gendered expressions were used. In addition, I analysed two phenomena which were shown in the empirical material: boys and technology and a girl who on a few occasions was left almost entirely without attention. I divide the data from the interviews into two themes: the educators’ thoughts on girls and boys, and their views on the nursery school’s gendered and equality practices. I was also interested in finding out the educators' opinion of the way the children's parents collaborate with the nursery school. The analysis shows that the educators praise boys more than girls. Praise content and structure were also different when praising boys than when praising girls. The results confirmed earlier research findings on gendered practices in early childhood education. The interactions strengthened the view that technology belongs to boys. The girls were expected to be more independent in, for example, dressing and undressing situations. In the interviews the educators described boys more active and girls as more skillful in tasks requiring precision. They mentioned also that nowadays fathers get more involved in the collaboration with the nursery school than before. Although the educators opinion was that the nursery school promotes equality, a detailed analysis shows that equality doesn’t exist in all early childhood practices. Further studies on gender and equality are definitely needed in the field of early childhood education.

The objective of the study is to understand the prevalent conception of social and educational equality in National Core Curriculum for Basic Education as part of normative steering of education. National Core Curriculum for Basic Education gives directions for the objectives in content, pedagogy and goals in education. The curriculum is seen as a political document, whereupon its objectives are studied from an ideological point of view. This aims for taking notice on curriculum's functional forms. Additionally, objectives of social and educational equality are studied as practices in society. Equality politics is analyzed from the perspectives of values as well as societal structures. This forms the premise of goals in educational equality. The reference material are the definitions of equality in the National Core Curriculum 2014. The study was carried out utilizing critical discourse analysis. The interpretation of the analysis was abductive where observations are treated as objects of analysis by a given approach. Possible consequences followed by the alternative arrangements of the sentences in the curriculum were argumented with the objective of more specific observations and interrelations of the consequences. The analytical part focused on the possibilities by the curriculum framework to pursue equality. Main interests were the institutionalized and ideologist discourses that are used to construct social and educational equality in the curriculum. Special attention was given to study the possibilities to implement equality formed by the framework. A particular consideration in the curriculum was taken for the equality discourses that have the power to mould their surroundings. The curriculum forms discourses where their legitimation is formed by the presumption of equality as an achieved state of things. Through this transformation equality obtains significant features that become common. On the other hand, the content of the curriculum is somewhat contradictory to achieve genuine equality. Concept of equality that remains somewhat undefined leads to fragmentation which in turn pushes more towards inequality rather than equality due to the ambiguous nature of the interpretation.

Aim. During the last decade, there has been a lot of discussion about agency as a part of children’s lives in and out of school. Agency has even become one of the priorities of Finnish education in the National Core Curriculum for Basic Education. Still, the definition of agency remains ambiguous, even contradictory; there is no univocal way to define the phenomenon. One way to conceptualise agency is to view it as an individual’s (or group’s) ability to influence on their life circumstances and practices in which they are involved (Rainio, 2010). Rainio has identified dialectical contradictions in supporting students’ agentive participation in education. One such contradictory dimension is between agency and control in educational relationships. It is important that teachers find ways to balance with this dialectics to enable pupils to practice their agency in the pressures of school’s structure, rules and other educational aims. The aim of this study is to find and specify the ways in which the teacher can, by employing certain interaction and pedagogical techniques, give pupils’ agency an opportunity to be realised in the context of phenomenon based learning in special education (see also Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011; Rainio, 2010). Methodology. Qualitative video research was utilised as the method of research in this study. The data of this research was collected by videotaping phenomenon based learning in class of special education. At the time of taping there were eight pupils and one special education teacher present. In this study 7 h 54 min of videotape was analysed using interaction analysis. The aim of the analysis was to identify all the episodes in which the teachers was enabling pupil agency. These episodes were then compared with each other to identify the common interactional patterns employed by the teacher. Results and conclusion. Five different ways of enabling student agency were identified in this study: making pupils accountable authors, active positioning, recognising and appreciating ideas and contributions, sharing authority and transferring authority. The results were parallel to what Lipponen and Kumpulainen (2011) have reported as empowering agency of pre-service teachers. The results indicate that it is important to enable every pupil to participate in the teaching event in a way that supports the empowerment of their agency by taking into account their own level of development as well. By doing so the teacher is developing pupils’ agency and empowering their ability to make a difference in their own life. This is a particularly significant observation in terms of integrated pupils with special needs. The explicated examples in this study give teachers practical tools to enable and empower pupils’ agency in everyday life at schools.

The aim of this study was to investigate which goal orientation has effects on the school's 8th - 9th grade students' feelings of autonomy. This was studied in all 8th - 9th grade students'. Previous studies have shown that motivation is a complicated process. It is affected by students' goals, expectations, intrinsic motivation, and experience of autonomy and assessments of ones abilities, self-esteem and fear of failure. Motivation was explained by goal orientation theory and self-determination theory. The data was collected using quantitative methods. All study subjects were eight and ninth graders (N202) in one Finnish middle school. Data was collected in Autumn 2010 of all the school's eight and night graders by paper questionnaire. Data from the questionnaires was put in to IBM SPSS Statistics 21 software, which was used for analysis. Factor analysis, correlation matrix and regression analysis were used for research method. Main results of this study were that differently goal oriented students experience autonomy in learning differently. Student who have positive attitudes towards school tend to experience more autonomy in learning than student who have more negative attitudes towards school. Mastery orientation predicts student's experiences of teachers help and experiences of autonomy the best. Performance orientation, performance approach and performance avoidance goal correlated positively with of teachers help and experiences of autonomy. Work-avoidance goal correlated negatively with experiences of teachers help.

The aim of the present study was to examine what kinds of achievement goal orientation profiles can be identified among sixth-graders and how students with different profiles differ with respect to their education-related personal goals and goal appraisals as well as their academic achievement. Usually researchers have adopted a variable-centred approach and investigated interactions between variables but this study adopted a person-centred approach, which enables the investigation of multiple goals simultaneously. The data used in this study were drawn from the Mind the Gap -research project (2013-2017), funded by the Academy of Finland. The participants were 761 sixth grade students from 32 schools. Utilizing K-means cluster analysis, groups of students with different motivational profiles were identified. The open-ended answers concerning students' education-related personal goals were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Group differences in goal appraisals and academic achievement were examined by means of analysis of variance (ANOVA). Four different achievement goal orientation profiles were found and they were labelled as: indifferent, mastery-oriented, success-oriented and avoidance-oriented. Indifferent students were aware of the importance of school but they were also characterized by avoidance tendencies. Mastery-oriented students predominantly emphasized learning and strove for self-improvement. Success-oriented students aimed for both relative (i.e., outperforming others) and absolute (i.e., getting good grades) success, but they also wanted to learn. Finally, avoidance-oriented students were the least motivated towards schoolwork. The mastery-oriented and success-oriented students had the highest academic achievement and they were most committed and used most time and effort to their educational goals. Indifferent and success-oriented students were more stressed about their educational goals than mastery-oriented students. These results support the idea that schools should recognize and pay attention to differently motivated students. For example, avoidance-oriented students need more aid and support in school engagement than others. Furthermore, success-oriented students need encouragement to study for themselves than others. Also, schools should be aware of that performance-oriented learning environment may increase the social comparison and competition behaviors which may impair motivation.

The aim of this study was to examine what kinds of achievement goal orientation profiles can be identified among sixth grade students and how students with different kinds of motivational profiles differ with growth and fixed mindset. In addition, the aim was to find out whether girls and boys differed in achievement goal orientations, mindsets and placement in achievement goal orientation groups. This study adopted a person-centred approach, which enables the investigation of multiple goals simultaneously. It’s important to identify and support students who are motivated in different ways. The study hypothesized that students with different motivational profiles may also favor different ways to think related to learning and intelligence. Previous studies have shown that teaching of the growth mindset in schools can be seen as a pedagogical approach that is belivieved to have an impact on students motivation and school performance. The data used in this study was part of Mind the Gap research project. The participants (N = 761) were sixth grade students from 32 schools in Helsinki. Participants were divided into groups by using K-means cluster analysis. Group differences in mindsets and gender differences in mindsets and achievement goal orientations were examined by one way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Placement in achievement goal orientation groups were examined with Chi square-test. Four different achievement goal orientation profiles were identified and the groups were labelled as performance-oriented, mastery-oriented, indifferent and avoidance-oriented. The most students favour growth mindset more than fixed mindset. Some small differences between groups could be identified in mindsets. Performance-oriented group prefer more fixed mindsets and mastery-oriented was emphasized more growth mindset. Avoidance-oriented prefer less growth mindset than other groups. Small differences in achievement goal orientations were found between girls and boys, but no differences were found in mindsets. There were more girls than boys in mastery-oriented group. Otherwise girls and boys were evenly placed in achievement goal orientation groups. Based on the results, it can be assumed, that mindsets are related to motivational differences. Favoring a growth mindset in teaching could have beneficial effect on motivation and learning.

Goals. The aim of this study was to examine what sort of achievement goal orientation profiles it is possible to identify among high school students, how differently motivated students differ in social engagement and how school belongingness predicts students’ goal orientation profiles. Achievement goal orientations describe one’s general orientations and tendencies towards learning. They are associated with different patterns of goals, meaning, coping, and behavior. Social engagement describes the willingness to cooperate and share ideas with peers and school belongingness can be described as a social and emotional connection with school. It is important to examine the connection between motivation and social context in order to fully understand the field of achievement goal orientations and to support students’ motivation and development. Methods. The data (N = 1202) was collected from high school students from 34 different high schools in Helsinki during the spring 2018. Participants filled in questionnaires that measured mo-tivation, social engagement and school belongingness. In this study, person-oriented approach was utilized and in this approach, it is crucial to identify different subgroups and examine group differences. Participants were divided into groups by using Two Step Cluster analysis and group differences in social engagement were examined by analysis of variance. It was analyzed with multinomial regression analysis, how school belongingness predicts belonging into different achievement goal orientation groups. Results and conclusions. Five different achievement goal orientation groups were identified and the groups were labelled as mastery-, performance-, performance-avoidance-oriented, multiple-goals-oriented and avoidance-oriented. Mastery- and performance-oriented students expressed higher social engagement and social engagement avoidance at school than the other groups. School belongingness predicted belonging into different achievement goal orientation groups and especially external belongingness seems to be significant factor for students achievement goal orientations. It seems that striving for learning and mastery is especially beneficial in terms of social engagement and belongingness in school. The result was in line with previous studies examining the connection between motivation and social context.

The basis of this research is the situation of educational equality in Finland. Previous research shows the strong heritability of education and the differentiation of students' skills according to socio-economic backgrounds. The influence of socio-economic backgrounds on learning outcomes has become even stronger in recent years. The skills learned and the competence achieved in primary and lower secondary education (basic education) can be defined as human capital. Capital deficits are linked to intergenerational disadvantage. Previous research suggests that there is a connection between receiving support at school and a weaker social background. This study, carried out with a qualitative research strategy, aims to answer what kind of work practices in special education in primary and lower secondary education aim to influence the learning and educational differences linked to the students' different socio-economic backgrounds. The research data consists six interviews (semi-structuded) of special education teachers working in the region of Southern Finland. The interview material is analyzed using qualitative content analysis. A key finding of the study is that the work of special education teachers reveals practices that seek to address learning and educational differences that are linked to students' socio-economic backgrounds. The work practices are divided into five categories: cooperation in student networks, understanding education and teaching as a broad entity, student-orientation as the basis of the teacher's work, and special education in the school's operational culture. The work practices have a close connection to the framework and concepts of the sociology of education and to the key factors of educational equality.

It is an undeniable fact that the peaceful working conditions at school have a societal meaning, as the previous studies have shown it has positive impact on teaching-studying-learning process. Therefore, it is important to maintain order in the classroom expediently by using proactive and reactive classroom management strategies. The aim of this study is to research the phenomenon of the peaceful working conditions and, by utilizing that information, to create an instrument which enables to measure the classroom management strategies. The specific interest of this study is to study the most typical classroom management strategies used by classroom teachers. Moreover, the study investigates how the classroom management strategies represent three classroom management styles (instructional management, behavioral management, people management) and what kind of impact work experience and grade have on the classroom management strategies. Participants included 117 qualified classroom teachers who had worked during the school year of 2018–2019. The data was collected via a questionnaire, which was created as a result of my research on the phenomenon of the peaceful working conditions, and by utilizing previous instruments. The validation of this questionnaire was verified by using factor analysis and Cronbach’s alpha. The questionnaire was published on Facebook and sent to the classroom teachers of a certain school in Espoo. The data was analyzed by using descriptive and inferential statistics and Kruskal-Wallis-test. The most typical proactive classroom management strategies among classroom teachers were praising, prompting and giving positive feedback, while the most typical reactive strategy to maintain order were reminding pupils about expectations and given instructions. Altogether classroom teachers’ strategies represented comprehensively all three styles of classroom management. Out of these, behavioral management was the most used. Work experience and grade seemed to have statistically significant meaning only in a few strategies. Based on the results of this study, it is justified to say that classroom teachers have a wide range of classroom management strategies which arise from earlier research. This is significant when considering the comprehensive wellbeing of teachers and students.