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This is a narrative research about the career paths of adult immigrants in Finland. The study is conducted in the context of a course that prepares immigrants to study in higher education in Finnish. Based on earlier research immigrants’ paths to work life are often complex and include overlapping studies. Different kinds of transitional courses and trainings have emerged to support educational transitions. There is little research of preparatory courses that focuses on the narratives of students taking part on a preparatory course. This research aims to describe career paths of the students studying in a preparatory course, and the most defining factors of the career paths progress. This phenomenon is specifically examined from a theoretic point of view based on agency of the students. 10 interviews were conducted with different students studying in a preparatory course. The course focused on the field of social and health services. The data was collected and analysed through the means of narrative methods. The interviews were semi-structured theme interviews that included questions about the students’ backgrounds, study experiences in the preparatory course and their visions for the future. The approach contains features of the life-course research branch in the narrative methodology. The results of the study illustrate the different factors on individual-, community- and society levels that affected the students’ career paths either progressively or restrictively. Different factors from individual attitudes and ways of action to policies of educational organizations affected the progression of career paths in the students´ stories. For example, motivation and Finnish language skills, the preparatory course and good studying opportunities in Finland appeared to be progressive factors for career paths. On the other hand, as restricting factors were described for example challenging life situation for studying, lack of high skill level Finnish teaching and bureaucratic obstacles in the education system. The different factors are put into perspective in type stories that describe the most typical career paths of the students in the preparatory course. For the highly educated the preparatory course seemed to be a secondary choice in their career paths and an adjustment to the current situation. The one’s with children described studying as motivating but challenging in their busy phase of life. The young adults who were the closest to the typical studying phase of life appeared to be very committed to their career choice and seemed to experience the least contradiction related to studying.

The aim of this study was to examine the L2 learner identity of upper secondary school 1st year students. The starting point of the study was to get an overall picture of how students describe themselves as L2 learners and what meanings they give to their experiences related to language learning. In addition, the factors that guide students' language learning were investigated. The material was collected as students' essays on the topic “I as a foreign language learner”. In total, there were 41 essays in the research material. The content was analyzed by means of a narrative approach. The theoretical background is both a sociocultural view of learning and an ecological concept of language learning, which focuses on learners' identities and motives. According to the research results, students were able to honestly and openly analyze the features related to their own language learner identity and also to identify their own learning strategies and the factors that affect their study and learning. Motivation and maintaining motivation became the most important factors influencing learning and studying, as also previous studies have shown. Motivation was especially influenced by the grades and received feedback, finding the language learning situations and opportunities meaningful and interesting, the support and help available in problem situations, and the experience of being considered as an individual even in a large group. Self-efficacy beliefs were also important factors in learning. Most students also had clear insights into how their own learning could be improved and made more effective, but these ideas were not used in their own work. There could be a wide range of problems in studying in several areas of language learning, and students ’ability to use the right kind of strategies seemed deficient. Through the essays, it became clear that a negative image of oneself as a learner is created very easily and same person’s L2 learner identity can vary greatly between different languages. The study found that many students need strong and ongoing support and assistance in building their own language learner identity so that, for example, a possible cycle of negativity could be broken early. Equally, those who are successful in their studies need encouragement and guidance. It is good for the teacher to be aware of the different language learner identities of the students and also to try to influence these identities constructively.

Aims. The purpose of this thesis is to study subject teachers’ conceptions of the support in learning and school attendance given in Finnish upper secondary schools. Due to the amendment of the Basic Education Act the support is now three tiered and emphasizes early interventions, which requires subject teachers to have more special pedagogical knowhow than they used to. This study aims to analyse, how subject teachers see their own role implementing the support and how the subject teacher system and structures of the school affect to teachers’ possibilities to support their students. Methodology. The thesis is a qualitative case study and the analysing methods are discourse analysis and thematic analysis. The research material consists of six semi-structured interviews of subject teachers. Results and conclusions. The study groups are heterogeneous and too big in relation to students’ needs. Teachers have to prioritize, to whom they give the support. Opportunity for consultation and cooperation with the special needs teacher is highly appreciated when implementing the support. Subject teachers’ familiarity with the students is considered important. Subject teachers’ knowledge about the three tier support system is mediocre, yet they consider not to have time for further education. The teachers are interested in learning of the students. However, because of lack of competence and time subject teachers externalize the implementation of the support to the special needs teacher. Being a form teacher expands the subject teachers’ job description to documenting and coordinating the support. In schools the functioning practises that would strengthen subject teachers’ commitment in all three tiers of support needs to be established. By reorganizing the structures of teaching and cooperation, it is possible to improve the subject teachers’ possibility to provide the support that the students’ needs require. The subject teachers’ special educational competence should be increased. The subject teachers don’t have sufficient knowledge about the three tier support system and they consider documentation of the support unnecessary. They may nonetheless, be able to support the students successfully by using different kinds of pedagogical methods and various well-timed and individualised measures of support.

Objectives. The aim of the present study was to examine the differences in experiences of non-material rewards and work engagement in relation to individual- and employment factors. In addition, the study examined relationships between non-material rewards and experiences of work engagement. Non-material rewards refers to organization's policies, values and practices that individuals experience as rewarding. Work engagement is a fulfilling, positive, affective–cognitive and work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption. Both, non-material rewards and work engagement have been found to be related to individuals' emotions and well-being. Based on previous research, the assumption is that the experiences of non-material rewards and work engagement differ when comparing individual- and employment factors. In line with research on well-being at work, this study assumes also that there are positive relationships between non-material rewards and the experiences of work engagement. Methods. The study involved 512 employees who work in vocational schools. Factor analysis was formed to describe the internal structures of non-material rewards and work engagement. General Least Squares analysis with Direct Oblimin rotation was performed for the non-material rewards and the solution was forced into four factors, based on the previous research. For work engagement, Maximum Likelihood analysis was performed and one factor was extracted. Because there came only one factor, the rotation could not be performed. The differences in experiences of non-material rewards and work engagement in relation to individual- and employment factors were examined by using t-test and analysis of variance. The relationships between non-material rewards and experiences of work engagement was examined with regression analysis. Results and conclusions. Experiences of non-material rewards differed by gender and form of employment relationship. Men experienced more fairness regarding rewards than women, and employees in fixed-term employment relationship experienced more appreciation and feedback at work than employees in permanent employment relationship. Experiences of work engagement differed by gender and age. Women experienced more work engagement than men, and 51-55 year-old employees experienced more work engagement than employees under 35. There was positive relationship between two of the dimensions of non-material rewards (rewards from formal competence and appreciation and feedback) and experiences of work engagement. According to the results, experiences of non-material rewards and work engagement differed between some of the individual- and employment factors. In addition, there were positive relationships between non-material rewards and work engagement. Taking these results into account when designing reward systems, can promote well-being and even work engagement in organizations.

Household chores are an important part of household functioning. Their significance is also examined in the perspective of household production. Domestic work upbringing, however, has been studied only marginally and no definition of the concept of domestic work upbringing was found in previous scholarly publications. However, previous scientific publications suggest that household chores have an educational dimension. This thesis fills this identified knowledge gap and examines the practices and educational principles of mothers' domestic work upbringing. Additionally, it explores the goals that mothers aim to achieve through the domestic work upbringing they provide. The data for this qualitative study was collected through an online questionnaire. The online questionnaire was open on a Facebook group ‘ÄiTyLIt’ for two weeks in March 2023. The online questionnaire for parents of children under 12 years of age consisted primarily of open-ended questions. The survey data includes 214 mothers' responses, which I have analyzed by means of theoretical content analysis. Atlas.ti analysis software was used to assist the analysis. The mothers' practices and educational principles of domestic work upbringing were di-verse. They can be categorized as child-centered, functional, verbal, time-based and reward-based practices and principles. In addition, some mothers reported using a chore list or a reward chart as a tool for domestic work upbringing. Many mothers reported that they consider the age and skill level of the child, as well as the child's own desire, enthusiasm or personality when raising a child to do household chores. Plenty of the mothers in this study did housework together with their children. This was often based on routine and a desire for an equal division of labor. Furthermore, many mothers praised, encouraged and thanked their children for doing household chores. The aims of domestic work upbringing were mainly focused on the child's own life skills and the shared household. Mothers especially wanted to teach children skills of independence, responsibility, self-help and doing one’s own share. Moreover, mothers wanted to communicate to their children that household chores are part of everyday life and for everyone in the household. In conclusion, it can be proposed that through domestic work upbringing mothers want to contribute to the well-being of both the child and the household, which may also have a positive impact on societal action as a whole.

Objectives. This Master's Thesis is related to the University of Helsinki's research Pieni Oppiva Mieli (POM), which focuses on early childhood education. Pieni Oppiva Mieli research applies the MindUP™ -program, as is also done in this Master's Thesis. The MindUP™ program is based on the theories and research data of neuroscience, social and emotional learning, positive psychology and mindful awareness. Earlier studies with children of school age have found out that the MindUP™ -program promotes children's well-being and social skills, reduces stress, increases obedience, and provides guidance and academic skills. (Schonert-Reichl et al. 2015.) This Master's Thesis brings children's perspective to the subject and provides information to the research Pieni Oppiva Mieli (POM) and to early childhood education on how the welfare and learning of the children can be supported by exercises like the MindUP™ -program. This Master's Thesis examines 1) How did brain-focused teaching appear in children's stories? This was explained through the sub-questions and asked: 1A) How did children's stories about brain and behavior change during the intervention? 1B) What did the children think about their self-regulation skills in different interaction situations in their daycare? Methods. The research focused on a child-centered research and featured aspects of inclusive action research. The study involved a six-month pedagogical intervention, which involved the exercises of the MindUP™ -program in the daycare centre. The study covered 10 five-year-old children of this group. The children were interviewed five times during the intervention of the exercises related to the MindUP™ -program, with a total of 45 interviews. An analysis of narrative, content analysis and quantification were used to understand the material. Results and Conclusions. From the interviews' responses, it can be seen that children use the language learned in the MindUP™-program. Children also describe their feelings and refer to practical situations in their stories. The answers to the interviews can clearly identify how children's knowledge about brain and behavior changed. In this study the term self-regulation (mielen malttaminen) refers to how the child is able to regulate his / her behavior in the various interaction situations in the daycare centre. Based on children's stories, it can be seen that children think of tools from MindUP™ -program when they are telling about situations which require self-regulation. In a role of a teacher, researcher also saw these things come true in practice.

Goals. Event schema, also known as a script, contains information about a structure of a particular event; about the sequences of events and their temporal order. With the information the scripts contain, one can anticipate and plan for future events and actions. People with traumatic brain injury (TBI) can have difficulties in the verbal planning of actions. Previous international research has shown that the scripts produced by people with TBI contain fewer actions central to the schema, than scripts produced by healthy control subjects. The aim of this study is to examine what kind of scripts Finnish speaking subjects with TBI and their healthy control subject counterparts generate in a script generation task consisting of eight scripts. This study also examines whether the script type has influence on the features of the generated scripts. Methods. Fifteen subjects with TBI and fifteen healthy control subjects participated in the study. The researcher collected the research material during the spring and summer 2015. The research material consisted of the scripts generated by the subjects and control subjects, as well as the results of the control tasks (Boston Naming Test, Rapid Automatized Naming Test, semantic and phonemic fluencies). The subjects were asked to generate event schemas for eight everyday tasks belonging to four schema categories. The categories were 'open high frequency' (go shopping, go for a walk), 'open low frequency' (apply for a job, go on a vacation), 'closed high frequency' (make coffee, brush teeth), and 'closed low frequency' (go to a doctor, go to a restaurant). Closed scripts are related to events where the actions involved in their execution are well established and tightly related to each other. Open scripts are less structured and have loose connections between the actions involved. High and low frequency scripts differ on how frequent the event is. Time given for generating each script was 60 seconds. The scripts were scored for the total number of events produced, the number of event repetitions, the informativeness of the script, and the meaningfulness and the centrality of the events. The results of the qualitative analysis were displayed in a statistical form and analyzed with the non-parametrical Mann-Whitney U -test. Results and conclusions. The results showed that the scripts produced by the subjects with TBI were less informative and contained less actions than the scripts produced by the healthy control subjects, regardless of the script type. Closed scripts were found to be more informative than open scripts, and the subjects produced more actions to the closed than to the open scripts. When the high and low frequency scripts generated by the subjects with TBI were examined, no significant difference was found between the two script types. The results of this study can be explained by the disturbances in executive functions, and disturbances in the working memory as well as the episodic memory, all of which can affect the subject's ability to produce a coherent story and recall actions belonging to a certain event.

Goals. The aim of this thesis was to examine how Finnish curriculums of 2004 and 2014 differ from each other in relation to thinking skills, learning to learn and multidisciplinary learning sets. These three themes were selected as subjects for research, as they are an integral part of the concept of broad-based competence introduced in the new curriculum. Broad-based competence is defined as the skills that the learner is expected to need in order to cope with future challenges. The purpose of this thesis was to find out whether these themes are also present in the Finnish curriculum of 2004 and if so, how their discourse may differ from the 2014 curriculum. This type of systematic comparison has not been made between these curricula before and also not with these themes. Thinking skills and learning to learn were studied separately from the multidisciplinary learning sets, as they are areas of broad-based competence, whereas multidisciplinary learning sets are more of its method. Thinking skills and learning to learn were dealt with, in particular, Robert Sternberg's theories of intelligence and its sub-areas. Methods. The data of the thesis are therefore the Finnish curriculums of 2004 and 2014. However, only the general parts were included in this thesis, as the goal was to get a picture of the underlying ideas and perspectives of each curriculum. The study was carried out using two mutually supportive analytical methods. The analysis started with a computer-based, instrumental thematic text analysis, which aims to find references to certain themes from the texts using a dictionary built by the researcher. This method was chosen because it was a clear and simple way to visualize the differences between the references in the texts. Another analytical method was a content analysis in which theory-based and data-based methods were used. Concerning thinking skills and learning to learn, content analysis was made by using the theory-based method with Sternberg's theories as a basis. Data-based analysis was used when studying multidisciplinary learning sets. Results and conclusions. The thinking skills were referred to equally as much in the general parts of the curricula of 2004 and 2014, but the content of the curriculum for 2014 was more comprehensive and could easily be categorized using Sternberg's theories. The same was true of learning to learn, although it was apparent that in relation to the curriculum of 2004, there were more references to learning to learn than in the curriculum of 2014. In the case of multidisciplinary learning sets, the result again indicated that the curriculum of 2014 was broader both in terms of content and text. Based on these results, it can be generally interpreted that although these same themes have been dealt with in the previous curriculum, the new curriculum has really become substantively centralized and sought to find a wide range of these perspectives.

People have had supernatural beliefs through the ages. Explanation for supernatural beliefs is sought in the thinking styles. Studies in this area have systematically reported that intuitive thinking style is positively related to supernatural beliefs, while findings about connections between analytical thinking and supernatural beliefs are more controversial. From standpoint of dual-process theory analytical and intuitive thinking consist several dimensions. Moreover, thinking styles have been conceptualized and assessed different ways in different studies. These might be the explanations for controversial results. Research questions were: How are thinking styles related to supernatural beliefs? Are components of analytical thinking related to supernatural beliefs in the same way? How are these components related to each other? What is the role of participant's sex and age in moderating the association between thinking styles and supernatural beliefs? Participants (n=3084) were recruited via internet discussion forums and electronic students mailing lists. Recruitment message provided a link to the online questionnaire. Thinking style was measured using CRT-, REIm- and AOT -scales. Religious and paranormal beliefs were assessed by questionnaires. This study replicated previous results in order that analytical thinking was inversely related, and intuitive thinking positively related to supernatural beliefs. When all the other sub dimensions of different thinking styles were controlled, it appeared that only actively open-minded thinking and intuitive thinking (when assessed by self-report questionnaire) showed unique effects on supernatural beliefs. Regarding sub dimensions of analytical thinking and their mutual connections, only need for cognition and ability to reflect were related to each other moderately. Ability to reflect and actively open-minded thinking, as well as need for cognition and actively open-minded thinking were connected to each other only quite weakly. Results showed that subject's sex and/or age moderated partially connections between thinking styles and supernatural beliefs: With men need for cognition was more strongly connected to paranormal beliefs, than with women. In case of actively open-minded thinking the situation was opposite. In cognitive reflection there was no such sex-differences. Respondent's sex and age moderated the association between actively open minded-thinking and paranormal beliefs. This connection didn't occur anymore with men in elder age group but with women it existed. Connection between intuitive thinking and paranormal beliefs was also moderated by subject's sex and age. With men intuitive thinking was more strongly associated to religious beliefs, than with women. The current study contributes new information concerning the moderating role of subject's sex and/or age in the association between thinking styles and supernatural beliefs.

The relationship between personality and driving is a widely studied topic. These studies have emphasized the role of single personality traits, especially novelty seeking. This is a narrow view of personality. In this study, beside novelty seeking, I studied the impact of Cloninger's psychobiological theory and Gray's BIS-BAS theory on driving. Contextual mediated model was used which suggests that personality has influence on risky driving via self-assessed driving skills. Self-assessed driving skills can be divided to perceptual-motor skills and safety skills. This study was based on four previously collected samples. Personality was assessed using Temperament and Character Inventory-Revised (TCI-R), Zuckerman's Brief Sensation Seeking scale (BSSS) and Carver and White's BIS-BAS questionnaire. Driving behaviour was assessed using Driver Behaviour questionnaire (DBQ) and self-assessed driving skill using Driver Skill Inventory (DSI). Participants were also asked about their annual mileage, accidents and traffic violations. As previous research suggests, self-assessed perceptual-motor skills predicted risky driving and safety skills predicted safe driving. SEM models suggested that character traits of psychobiological theory predicted less violations via self-assessed driving skills in students' sample. Temperament traits did not predict risky driving besides harm avoidance. These effects were present for both genders when annual mileage was controlled. In a sample of conscripts, high activation of behavioural activation system and sensation seeking predicted high perceptual-motor skills and low safety skills. The results show that low character traits predicted risky driving. Risky drivers evaluated themselves high on perceptual-motor skills but low on safety skills. It seems to be possible that personality and self-assessed driving skills can be used to identify sub-groups of drivers that differ from the concerning risky driving.