Browsing by Author "Nuorteva, Maija"

The new Finnish curriculum (FNBE, 2014) calls for active and engaging learning that supports students' agency and active role in their own learning. It emphasizes creating meaningful contexts that interrelate also with students' out-of-school interests. Research shows participating with organized out-of-school activities has a positive relation to school grades. In addition, it seems that school engagement is low among Finnish 6th graders (Salmela-Aro et al., 2016). However, little is known of what currently interests Finnish pupils and how their topics of interest are related to academic well-being. This study explores the topics of interest and interest-driven participation and further, their relation to school engagement, school burnout and grades (GPA) of 6th graders. The study was part of Mind the Gap project (Academy of Finland #265528) and the participants (n=735) were 6th graders from Helsinki. I conducted content categorization of the whole sample that showed a rich variation of interests, largest categories being sports (43.8%) and arts (27.9%). The quantitative analyses looked at the intensity and form of the activities. I identified three interest profiles with two-step cluster analysis: Organized team participators, Informal individualistic participators and Intensive participators. The Organized team participators were most interested in team sports. They reported high school engagement, low burnout and high GPA whereas Informal individualistic participators had lower school engagement, high GPA and moderate school burnout. They were the most interested in music and arts. Intensive participators, who were especially interested in social interaction, were engaged to school, but had higher levels of burnout and the lowest GPA. The results indicate lack of supporting interest-driven participation in schools: only Intensive participators were almost as active inside as outside of school. It may be difficult for teachers to adopt new practices that call for supporting interest-driven participation. However, it would be important to use students' personal interests to bridge between school world and students' lives and to promote student agency and support school engagement.