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Positive pedagogy relies on seeing the good in people and focusing on strengths. In addition to learning, the pedagogical trend aims to increase well-being and happiness. Character strength education, which is closely attached to positive pedagogy, supports everyone to grow into an incomparable person with their own unique set of character strengths. Previous research has shown that character strength education is widely associated with success in life in many different areas. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of character strength intervention based on See the good! -pedagogy developed by Finnish researchers Lotta Uusitalo and Kaisa Vuorinen. The study focused in particular on six character strengths, which were perseverance, self-regulation, perspective-taking ability, creativity, social intelligence, and teamwork skills. The study observed the possible change in students' understanding and development of the strengths during intervention. In addition, the study examined the importance of sex in possible changes produced by the character strength education. This longitudinal research was part of a larger project in Finland called #uuttakoulua. The research data was collected from students in basic education (n = 240) in two different parts with an electronic questionnaire. The study included both test group that received character strength education (n = 184) and a control group that participated in traditional education (n = 56). IBM SPSS Statistics 24 was used for data analyzes. The analysis methods were the analysis of variance of repeated measurements and the t-test of repeated measurements. The analyzes revealed that both the understanding of social intelligence and perseverance in the test group increased statistically significantly compared to the control group. There was no statistical significance in the development of strengths between the test and control groups. Despite this, self-regulation, perspective-taking ability and social intelligence improved regularly with the participants in test group. According to the analyzes, gender was not a determining factor in the study. The results suggest that the program has the potential to increase students' understanding of character strengths and develop related skills regardless of gender.

Aims. The aim of this study was to examine peer exclusion in ECEC. The main interest of this study was to describe peer exclusion during childrens actions while they play and communicate each other’s. This study also investigates how children acts while they exclusion others. Theoretically, the study draws upon conversational analysis approach of multimodal interaction. The research questions were: (1) What kind of is the peer exclusion in kindergarten, (2) What kind of is the social structure in situations of peer exclusion. Methods. This research was a qualitative study of interaction. The videodata used in this study was collected in a daycare center in Southern Finland in spring 2017. Data of this study consist of 25 episodes that were identified from the original 50 h video corpus. Children who participated in this study were between 1 to 4 years old. This studys episodes were analysed by multimodal interaction analysis. Results and conclusions. The peer exclusion occurred especially during childrens play. The child was excluded from play and play group. Peer exclusion appeared also using play material and toys. At that time, the child moved the toys away from the other child. Children’s birthday party conversations were also sometimes exclusionary. Exclusion occurred through language, gazes and gestures, body and body movement, and the use of material. Either one or more children participated in the peer exclusion. When one child behaved in an exclusionary manner the ”I”-speech, direct rejection speech and body movement emerged in the interaction. External factors of the child, such as younger age, were also appealed. When several children behaved in an exclusionary manner, exclusion became a group phenomenon, often verified through “we”-speech. Peer exclusion occurred especially when the adult was not present in the situation.

Objectives. Teacher attrition and the possible lack of qualified teachers has been a topic of public discussion for many years and has also raised concern in Finland. This has raised a need to examine teacher stress and the reasons behind teacher attrition. The aim of this study was to investigate how work stress, estimated by Siegrist's (1996) Effort – Reward Imbalance model (ERI model), affects class teachers' intention to leave teaching career. The main hypothesis was that high effort combined with low rewards predicts intention to leave teaching career. In addition it was investigated how different levels of effort, reward and overcommitment effect on intention to leave the profession. Methods. The data for this study were collected with a questionnaire in 2013-2014. The subjects were 1-6 grade teachers from randomly picked schools in Helsinki metropolitan area. Altogether 74 teachers from 34 schools participated to this study. The age of the participants was 43,5 years on average (range 25-63 years). Work stress was measured with ERI-questionnaire. Results. The effort-reward imbalance predicted teachers' intention to leave the profession. Also lower rewards predicted teacher's intention to leave the profession. Closer examination of the data showed that the lack of 'esteem' was the only variable that caused the connection between low rewards and intention to leave teaching. High effort or overcommitment didn't predict teachers' intention to leave the profession. Conclusions. This study shows that ERI model can predict Finnish school teachers' intention to leave teaching. Moreover this study demonstrates the importance of 'esteem' at the work environment when predicting teachers' well-being and intention to leave the profession.

Positive deviance is a theoretical behavioural approach. It reviews the impact of education and problem solving through individual activity. Positive deviance as an approach has been involved in larger amount in the development of workplace and organization development. For the educational field the linkage is rather new and additional research was needed. This study does not focus on education as a whole but more specifically the learning process. This is due to the active characteristics of a learning process. Learning is a continuous activity and cannot be bound to certain structures and contexts only. This study wanted to bring knowledge for to support the design of education and teaching processes. The study aimed to place positive deviance to the framework of the radical educational theories. In addition to similarities clear differences were expected to be found between the theories chosen to the comparison. However, the expectation was that positive deviance can be seen as a separated radical educational approach. By reviewing a case example this study aimed to define whether positive deviance can be seen as a new type of approach, answering the current demands set on the education sector. The study was based on written materials and combined phenomenological basis with classifying text analysis. The concept of positive deviance was first defined based on earlier studies focusing on its theoretical background. After concept definition the study compared the positive deviance approach with theories of anarchist pedagogy, pedagogy of the oppressed, swarm intelligence and expansive learning. The comparison was done by using a comparison framework, structured specifically for this purpose. The following seven factors were used as the basis for the framework: activating effect, departure from norms of a referent group, intentionality of behavior, voluntary characteristics of action, individual activity, community activity, and aim to make a positive impact in the society. In order to define the applicability of positive deviance to the education sector, the functionality of the approach was described through a case study executed in Argentina in early 2000s. The study showed that positive deviance is not identical with the studied radical theories. The terminology differed somewhat between the chosen theoretical approaches. However, this did not have a significant effect on the overall comparison results. In this study the review of the case study did not give a full picture on the applicability of positive deviance to the educational field. The results of the case study, however, showed a possibility for the applicability of the approach, as long as the context factors are properly taken into account.

The purpose of this research was to find out the experiences of pre-school teachers in the use of digital service related to positive pedagogy in pre-school education. The theoretical framework of the study consisted of description of pre-school education and positive pedagogy. In addition, it examined what similarities can be found in the contents of the pre-school education curriculum and positive pedagogy. Character strengths and strength pedagogy, as well as positive feedback, were presented as more specific concepts. The framework was further specified by defining the concepts of well-being, pedagogical documentation, and digital services. The research is a qualitative interview survey based on phenomenological analysis. The interviews were executed as individual interviews remotely using Microsoft Teams. A total of three early childhood education teachers were interviewed. Interviewees participated in the City of Espoo Early Childhood Education and Positive Learning Oy joint development project. Among other things, the project aimed to teach children strengths in character through a digital service, as well as help them identify them. According to the research results, the teachers had mainly positive experiences to Huomaa hyvä! tool in pre-school education. They thought it worked well in supporting children's identification of strengths. Teachers themselves felt that they had learned to identify children's strengths differently than before and understood that something in children's activities that they had previously experienced as negative could be the child's strength in the right situation. In addition, they found that when they set a goal for some strength, it increased significantly in the group. According to the teachers, the tool also worked well as a tool for positive feedback. They felt that the positive feedback encouraged the children to reflect on their own strengths and thus they also learned to recognize them. According to teachers Huomaa hyvä! the tool served well as a tool for pedagogical documentation. They felt it was important to be able to return to the moments of success they experienced later and deal with them together with the children. The tool also supported their work and various pre-teaching processes such as action planning, implementation and evaluation. They felt that the introduction of the digital service affected their way of working as a whole.

Positive psychology in education is an ideological umbrella term for an educational approach that has an emphasis on the well-being and happiness of the individual. There are many schools that had elements from positive psychology before its creation but the first school to adopt a school wide Positive psychology in education approach in 2007 was Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, Australia. This study is a holistic approach with the attempt to understand how the teachers at Geelong Grammar School look at education and the students from a positive psychology perspective. A qualitative phenomenological hermeneutic research design was applied so that the focus could be put on the ten teachers lived experience in the school environment. Semi-structured interviews were used as a method to gather the needed data, which was thematically analysed. The results demonstrate how the teachers are impacted by the environment; the way in which the teachers deal with and view a very diverse group of students reflect the positive psychological perspectives. The teachers report clear benefits both in their class environment and also offers distinct tools in how they approach the students. Most of the teachers reported an individual benefit from a self-growth perspective. Geelong Grammar school does not demand a certain level of positive psychology, that choice is up to the teachers. This choice is reflected in the research results and shows how it impacts them personally in a positive way, and how they think it impacts the students. The results show both common universal challenges, typical for a school, but there are also challenges unique to the positive psychology environment they live in. This study facilitates the understanding of adopting positive psychology in education seen from the teachers perspective. This study also highlights some of the broader challenges in our culture and life dictated by the consequential demands of economics.

Objective: Prenatal maternal stress has been associated with a higher risk of psychiatric problems of the offspring in childhood. Recently, the study focus has started to shift to stress that is associated to the pregnancy itself, i.e. pregnancy-specific stress, which has been found to have better predictive value on different offspring outcomes in the first years of life, but research of its association with psychiatric problems of the child is still scarce. In this large, longitudinal and prospective study we examined the association between pregnancy-specific stress and psychiatric symptoms of the child at preschool age. We also examined whether the associations are independent of mothers' concurrent wellbeing when evaluating the child and whether the sex of the child or the timing of exposure to pregnancy-specific stress would have moderating effects on the presumed associations. It was hypothesized that higher levels of pregnancy-specific stress would be associated with higher levels of psychiatric problems and that exposure to pregnancy-specific stress specifically on the first and/or second pregnancy trimester would result in higher amounts of psychiatric problems. Methods: This study is part of a multidisciplinary PREDO-project. The current study sample comprised 1888 mother-child pairs. The mothers filled the Pregnancy Experience Scale which was used to measure mothers' pregnancy-specific stress (frequency and intensity of hassles) four times during pregnancy. They also filled the Child Behavior Checklist which was used to measure psychiatric symptoms of the child (total, internalizing and externalizing problems) once at the 2-5 year follow-up point. Linear regression analysis was used as analytic method. Mothers' concurrent depression and multiple socio-demographic, prenatal and birth outcome factors associated with a risk of psychiatric problems were used as covariates. Results and conclusions: Higher levels of pregnancy-specific stress predicted higher levels of total, internalizing and externalizing problems of the child in preschool age, independently of several covariates. The interaction between the sex of the child and pregnancy-specific stress did not predict psychiatric problems. Pregnancy-specific stress experienced in all of the three pregnancy trimesters predicted psychiatric problems and none of the trimesters were found to be consistently more vulnerable for the exposure to pregnancy-specific stress. The frequency of hassles was consistently associated with psychiatric problems independently of mothers' concurrent depression and was found to be a better predictor of psychiatric problems than the intensity of hassles. The current results extend the research on pregnancy-specific stress and offer new insight to the developmental origins of psychiatric problems by demonstrating the independent etiological predictive role of fetal developmental factors; specifically of prenatal stress.

Objective. Based on previous studies, foster care adolescents placed due to behavioral problems have an elevated risk to psychosis. In this large register based longitudinal study we aimed to investigate the prevalence of psychosis among Finnish reform school adolescents compared to matched peers in general population. We also intended to assess the possible differences in psychosis liability among five cohorts of reform school adolescents and examined the possible correlation between instability of out-of-home placements or the age at the time of first out-of-home placement with later psychosis. It was hypothesized that reform school adolescents had greater risk for psychosis, the number of adolescents with psychosis in reform schools was increasing and that instability of placements and early age at the time of fist out-of-home placement would be associated with an elevated risk for psychosis. Methods. The subjects (N=1159, M/F=749/410) were chosen from the Finnish welfare registry by status "placement in reform school" the last day of the years 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006 or (/and?) 2011. A control group (N=5676) matched on age, gender and place of birth was obtained from the Population Register Centre, Finland. The information about child's involvement in child welfare services and out-of-home placements was collected from the Finnish welfare register, and the data from schizophrenia spectrum disorders was collected from the Finnish hospital discharge register. Results. Prevalence of psychosis among reform adolescents was 7.1%, which was significantly higher than among general population controls (0.8%) (χ² = 205.550, df =1, P<.000). After controlling for gender and cohort, reform school adolescents had a 9.44 fold risk for psychosis compared to controls (OR=9.440, p<.000). There was no difference in psychosis liability between the five study cohorts after controlling for the difference in cohorts' follow-up times. The instability of out-of-home placements and the age at the time of first out-of-home placement were not associated with an elevated risk to psychosis. Conclusions. Results of this study show clearly that psychosis is a common problem among reform school adolescents, and indicates that reform school adolescents are a population, where the identification of early psychosis should be readily and reliable accessible. Only by recognizing early psychotic symptoms it is possible to offer intervention procedures, which in turn might prevent psychosis from becoming a chronic illness, decrease other mental health and substance abuse problems and thus enhance the overall functioning and quality of life of reform school adolescents.

Aim of study. The aim of this study was to determine how the processing of pitch cues in spoken words is affected by listeners' native language. In previous studies, listeners' have shown a better sensitivity to acoustic features that are linguistically relevant in the native language. It has also been shown that the processing of pitch information is lateralized to the left hemisphere when the information is linguistically distinctive and lateralized to the right hemisphere when it is not carrying linguistically relevant information. The processing of lexical pitch has been shown to be language specific. Pitch is lexically discriminating in Estonian, but not in Finnish. Therefore, native speakers of Estonian were hypothesized to show a better sensitivity to changes in pitch than the native speakers of Finnish. They were also hypothesized to show a lateralization to the left when processing linguistically discriminating changes in pitch. Methods. 12 native speakers of Estonian and 12 native speakers of Finnish participated in the study. Mismatch negativity (MMN) components of event-related potentials (ERP) were measured with electroencephalography (EEG). Stimuli consisted of Estonian words, which showed differences in duration and pitch. Results and conclusions. Scalp maps of neural activation suggested a larger sensitivity for small changes in pitch for the Estonian group, as well as a tendency towards lateralization of the processing of pitch cues to the left hemisphere for the Estonian group, and to the right for the Finnish group. These observations were supported by a significant interaction effect between language group, lateralization, and stimulus type. However, further pairwise comparisons were only marginally significant. Due to large variation in the Estonian group, the group was split based on geographical background information, since the use of pitch cue has been shown to vary regionally in Estonia. This analysis indicated regional variation in the processing of the pitch cue; the western Estonian group showed lateralization to the left hemisphere while processing stimuli with a small change in pitch. The findings of this study are in line with previous studies, showing that the native language affects the processing of pitch. It also suggests that the local language variety has an impact on these processes.

Graduation from university takes usually longer than the target time. This study focuses on exploring procrastinating university students. Strategic delayers and unnecessarily delaying students were excluded from the study. The aim of this study is to find out what kind of goal orientations procrastinators have and what kind of counselling would enhance study progress. Research questions were: 1) What kind of goal orientations procrastinators have? 2) What kind of needs of counselling procrastinators have? 3) Is there a connection between goal orientations and the need for counselling? Goal orientations were constructed on the basis of the students' goals, motivation and self-regulation skills. The data consist of transcribed interviews of eight students from Faculty of Arts. Students were identified as procrastinators in a previous study. The method of analysis was an abductive content analysis. Based on the data, categories that described most clearly students' goal orientations and needs of counselling were constructed. Connection between goal orientations and needs for counselling were explored by cross-tabulating goal orientations and needs for counselling which were found out of the data. As a result four goal orientation groups were formed: intrinsically motivated goal-oriented, intrinsically motivated without a goal, externally motivated goal-oriented, externally motivating without a goal. Students without a goal did not have a clear aim for the studies or for the future. Goal-oriented students knew what kind of degree they wanted and how to make use of it in the future. Intrinsically motivated students liked to study in itself and they were truly interested in learning new knowledge and developing their expertise. Externally motivated students were interested in the university degree and its value in the working life. The level of self-regulation skills were low in all groups except for the intrinsically motivated goal-oriented students. The needs for counselling formed three main groups: the lack of information, support for study skills and individual counselling. The lack of information included problems with course-registration, lack of study guide and general information after first autumn semester. Students needed support for writing scientific essays and for learning methods. Individual counselling was needed for making study plans. There was not a clear connection between goal orientations and needs of counselling. The needs for counselling were distributed unevenly. Most of the students experienced lack of information. The need for individual counselling was emphasized by students without a goal, which is explained with uncertain plans for studies and for the future. So, the need of counselling seems to be very individual and there is no connection to goal orientations. As a conclusion the course for personal study plan should be individualized so that the study plans would be checked together with supervisor. Learning methods and academic writing skills should be taught during the first study period. Individual counselling should be available throughout the studies, also after the first semester. Guidance services at the University of Helsinki should be clarified and a basic student counsellor office should be created.