Browsing by Subject "Education"
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(2022)Finland’s highly egalitarian educational system lacks official definitions and policies regarding gifted students. The Finnish National Core Curriculum proposes differentiation as the method by which to meet the diverse needs of students in the inclusive Finnish classroom. Previous research indicates that many Finnish teachers lack adequate knowledge about how to support and differentiate instruction for the gifted. This thesis focuses on gifted students’ experiences of differentiation in mixed-ability public schools in Finland. Four gifted students in grades 5 and 6 participated in one semi-structured interview where they were asked questions about assignments in school. The transcripts from the interviews were analyzed with a thematic analysis method and a hermeneutic-phenomenological research approach. Through the thematic analysis, six themes were generated from the material: Acceleration and ability grouping, lack of differentiation, finishing assignments early, inaction and unawareness in teachers, support from teachers, and dealing with peers. The results show that while all students had acceleration measures in place, the students did not seem to receive sufficiently differentiated instruction in school. They found assignments unchallenging, and finished their work early, leading to a lot of idle time in class spent doing things unrelated to the current lesson. Furthermore, the students described their teachers as passive and even unaware of the fact that assignments are too easy. Frustration and boredom seemed to be common feelings in the lived experiences of gifted students in the mixed-ability classroom, which further points toward the need for effective differentiation for gifted students.
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(2015)In the school world today more attention should be put to the attitudes towards difference. Individuals should learn to recognize and accept diversities in the society. The focus of the ethics is to assist pupils to become conscious of their personal worldview and be aware of the differences of their fellow pupil's views. Main goal is to be able to encounter others more tolerant and respect the different values in the world. The aim of ethics teaching is to support pupil's identity work to find a tolerant and open-minded cultural identity. First it's important to become aware of the personal cultural background before understanding other views and co-operate with people from different backgrounds. The aim of this research is to clarify the objectives and contents of ethics in the National Curriculum 2004. The focus is on the theme Self-Awareness and Cultural Identity. This qualitative research is based on interviews. The research studies the views of primary school ethics teachers about cultural identity, the goals of their teaching and the methods to support the development of the pupil's cultural identity in the framework of ethics. Eight primary school ethics teachers from different backgrounds were interviewed for this research. The interview was a three parted focused interview. The material was analysed with a content analysis. The teachers supported their pupil's identity work with various methods. The common view of the development was towards a respectful and tolerant cultural identity. The main results of the research suggest that teachers should develop their pupil's skills from five different content categories. The categories are the awareness of the self, cultural awareness, co-operation and interaction, cultural education and cultural competence. The results emphasize the development of different skills: thinking skills, self-regulation skills, interaction skills, co-operational skills, conversational skills and cultural skills.
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(2023)Objectives. The development of a strong ethnic identity is crucial for minority students throughout their school years. A sense of invisibility and stereotype threat may develop in the absence of a strong identity. Therefore, a rich representation of ethnicity is essential to the development of ethnic identity. This study aims to determine how minority representation is reflected in Finnish school textbooks, particularly how minorities racialized as non-white are depicted through the images found in textbooks. As earlier reports and research show that students from immigrant backgrounds perform lower than students from non-immigrant backgrounds and meaningful representation is important to avoid stereotype threat, it becomes important to examine how minorities are represented in Finnish textbooks used by all students. Methods. A content analysis was conducted to gain a greater comprehension of how minorities are portrayed in Finnish middle school textbooks which affects the development of ethnic identity. To gain insight into how students may perceive the presence of minorities in their textbooks, I examined 227 images found in several textbooks from the two main Finnish textbook publishers. Based on the variables set out, representation was categorized into categories of social hierarchy between the majority racialized as white and minority racialized as non-white found in the textbooks. Results and conclusions. Overall, the representation was 76 % for the majority racialized as white and 23.4% for the minority racialized as non-white. The greatest disparity in representation between majority and minority backgrounds was observed among professionals and academics, with the majority background appearing 80% more than the minority. On the other end of the social ladder, 'peasants' from minority backgrounds were represented more than those from majority backgrounds. The research indicates that textbooks do not give a full account of the varied backgrounds of minority students, which can have a detrimental effect on their ethnic identity and result in a sense of invisibility and stereotype threat.
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(2023)Tiivistelmä - Referat - Abstract The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of sustainability education in Chinese primary education. Society has attained unprecedented level of development as a result of science and technology, while simultaneously there is a growing call for a sustainable future. Due to the huge population and lack of awareness of sustainability in the Chinese context, education plays an important role in facilitating the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors that are needed to address the current sustainability challenges. More importantly, in China, sustainability education has not been popularized in primary and secondary schools, and various obstacles and barriers remain to the implementation of sustainability education in primary schools. The study focuses on analysing the connections between the newly published national curriculum standard in 2022 and 12 science textbooks currently used in Chinese primary schools. Throughout the research, the sequence of science textbook contents relevant to sustainability education is analysed to identify the specific teaching and learning contents, within textbooks. Qualitative content analysis and descriptive analysis are conducted to systematically describe the national curriculum standard and textbook contents related to sustainability education. Meanwhile, Python will also be used as a tool to deal with word frequency. The research will result in a theory-based model to show how sustainability education is integrated and worked in Chinese primary science education textbooks. The model is represented as a Chinese knot, representing relations of 13 elements of the learning contents and 4 core competencies. Chinese knots are traditionally believed to indicate a promising future, which also coincides the concept of sustainable development. Additionally, research-based suggestions will be discussed regarding sustainability education in Chinese primary education.
Now showing items 1-4 of 4