This study explored what kind of mathematics is needed in cabinetmakers' everyday work and how problem solving is intertwined in it. The informants of the study were four Finnish cabinetmakers and the data consisted of workshop observations, interviews, photos, pictures and sketches made by the participants during the interviews. The data was…

The present study aims to explore global expertise of including 21st century skills in teacher preparation programs and the reality of including (information and communication, thinking and problem solving, as well as interpersonal and self-directional) skills in these programs. It also highlights the differences in the reality of including 21st…

Purpose: While the number of entrepreneurship education programmes offered around the world is on the rise, research into the assessment of entrepreneurship education programmes is still lacking. The purpose of this paper is to take the stance that entrepreneurship education has to focus on a set of transversal competences aimed at teaching…

With regard to the growing interest in developing teacher education to match the twenty-first-century skills, while many assumptions have been made, there has been less theoretical elaboration and empirical research on this topic. The aim of this article is to present our pedagogical framework for the twenty-first-century learning practices in…

This paper examines the perceptions of vocational expertise and school-to-work pathways among WorldSkills Competition (WSC) achievers and their co-workers and employers within the Finnish context. At the biennial international WSC, young people (aged 18-to-23 years) from over 60 countries demonstrate their skills in more than 40 trades.…

There has been a major shift in educational learning goals--as seen most recently by Goal 4.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals--focused on global citizenship education and education for sustainable development. The shift concerns recognition of the need for education systems to equip learners with competencies such as problem solving,…

PBL is learning through becoming conscious of practical and abstract problems and finding ways how to solve them. It can be a pattern which doesn't follow traditional divisions of disciplines. In this article the material was collected from two, in the first sight, very different groups. One was music students (N = 62) who had to learn to solve…

Creativity and marketing imagination are essential core competencies for marketers. Therefore, higher marketing education emphasizes creativity in several ways. However, assessing creativity and creative problem solving is challenging and tools for this purpose have not been developed in the context of marketing education. To address this gap, we…

The aim of this study was to create an instrument to measure elementary teachers' interest in teaching chemistry. The interest in chemistry teaching instrument (ICTI) was created to measure both the affective and cognitive components of interest. After establishing the face and content validity of the instrument, the internal consistency of the…

In this research we present how a group of Finnish adult preservice teachers (n=21) incorporated 21st CS through their methods of working instructional methods in the final practicum in autumn 2013. The research material consists of pre-service teacher's practicum plans, taped lessons and written practicum synthesis. The nature of teaching has…

In the light of the European Union's interest in creativity and innovation, this paper, drawing on data from the EU project Creative Little Scientists (2011-2014), explores the teaching and learning of science and creativity in Early Years education. The project's conceptual framework, developed from detailed analysis of relevant literatures,…

Problem solving is a critical skill for engineering students and essential to development of creativity and innovativeness. Essential to such learning is an ease of communication and allowing students to address the issues at hand via the terminology, attitudes, humor and empathy, which is inherent to their frame of mind as novices, without the…

Despite much public discussion about the importance of creativity and innovation-friendly teaching in Finnish higher education, the impact of the general opinion on actual teaching practices has been limited. In the Finnish computer science education the teaching mostly follows a pattern of lectures, fixed exercise sets, and exams. With this…

This article presents the authors' critique of lessons proposed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21). The authors initiate a discussion about content that they hope will play out in schoolhouses and statehouses across the country. They take on a different task: they present a handful of lesson ideas from P21 that could enhance studies…

The studies in this volume explore a number of issues in education today. One paper reveals what actually motivates teachers to develop their career, another, how to teach primary teachers to talk about visual art. Children's artworks were explored in one article to see how they relate to their adjustment to school. In another, a case study was…