This study investigated the development of study engagement from the end of upper secondary school through the first and second years of higher education. The participants experienced the challenges related to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic while they were either university students or preparing for university entrance exams. The study…

The aim of this study was to examine what kind of school performance and behaviour profiles could be identified among students in the final grade of basic education in the Swedish speaking parts of Finland (N = 1149, grade 9), how these differed in temperament and how temperament could explain profile differences in first language (L1, Swedish)…

This research investigates university students' success in their first programming course (CS1) in relation to their motivation, mathematical ability, programming self-efficacy, and initial goal setting. To our knowledge, these constructs have not been measured in a single study before in the Finnish context. The selection of the constructs is in…

We study the extent and consequences of biases against immigrants exhibited by high school teachers in Finland. Compared to native students, immigrant students receive 0.06 standard deviation units lower scores from teachers than from blind graders. This effect is almost entirely driven by grading penalties incurred by high-performing immigrant…

Background: Although research clearly demonstrates the importance of motivation in mathematics learning, relatively little is known about the developmental dynamics between different facets of mathematics motivation and performance, especially in the early years of schooling. Aims: In a longitudinal setting, we examined (1) how children's ability…

Research on student retention in higher education (HE) physics could benefit by studying emotions in the context of engagement and learning. However, popular retention theories include only a narrow selection of emotions, creating a need to look elsewhere. In this study, we borrow the lens of an affective engagement model, the framework of an…

We present a study on the development of Finnish first-year physics majors' attitudes towards physics, as measured by the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey, before, during, and after the period of mandatory remote learning due to the coronavirus pandemic. We find that in the years before the pandemic, these attitudes did not change,…

Background: Questions about the optimum age for young people to complete their compulsory education, and how this relates to issues of equity, are familiar topics of debate in many jurisdictions. The aim of educational equity has been fundamental in Finnish education, upheld through decades of reforms. A recent reform has extended compulsory…

Interest research offers different hypotheses about the association between interest and learning outcomes. The standard hypothesis proposes that interest predicts learning outcomes: people acquire new knowledge about a topic they find interesting. The affective by-product hypothesis assumes that learning predicts interest: by learning something,…

Experiencing bereavement due to the death of a close person is rife in the lives of young people. This review aimed to investigate how bereavement affects educational outcomes of students at various educational levels and what factors may be involved in moderating these outcomes. The systemic review was conducted according to the PRISMA guidelines…

This paper quantifies the learning gain that accrues to 15-year-old students over one year of schooling in 18 countries and economies, where the cohort eligible to sit the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)ISA test overlaps with two distinct school cohorts. School-entry regulations are used as an exogenous source of…

The study explores Finnish compulsory school language teachers' formative and summative assessment practices. It aims at finding out what formative and summative assessment modes and tools the teachers use and what kind of evidence they collect for students' final grades. The data were gathered through questionnaires administered in national…

There is a crisis of many years in Israel in the subject of mathematics learning. In the last PISA tests, conducted by the OECD during the last ten years, Israel is placed 39-41 among all the countries participated the research. It was also found that all the years Israel "won" to be one of the first three countries with the highest…

The present study investigated students' (N = 404) interpretations of the main message and use of modes in a persuasive multimodal video on vaccines. It also examined whether students' topic knowledge, language arts grades, and self-identified gender were associated with their interpretations. Students analyzed a YouTube video in which two…

Changing majors or dropping out are of great concern to universities worldwide, but the role of learning approaches in terms of students' persistence has not been previously studied. Changing majors, especially in chemistry, is a severe problem in Finland. Here, learning approach data were collected with the ChemApproach questionnaire from 733…