All human decision-making is based on different expectations and assumptions about the future. Futures literacy, consisting of knowledge, emotions, and skills, is an essential competency for the 21st century. Educational steering documents, as the Finnish national curriculum, state that the teachers shall scaffold the students in problem solving,…

Central goals of higher education in STEM domains include learning of problem solving and self-assessment skills. To achieve these goals, we propose a novel self-assessment method called the Solve-Correct-Assess-Negotiate (SCAN) method of assessing problem solving that includes both formative and summative elements. We study students' learning…

This study aims at better understanding of the use of self-assessment to support high-achieving students in first-year university mathematics. The students, who had not previously self-assessed their skills and knowledge in mathematics, were given two self-assessment exercises during a calculus course: they assessed their prior knowledge and…

A national-level dataset (n = 7770) at grade 1 of primary school is re-analyzed to study preconditions in proficiency in mathematical concepts, operations and mathematical abstractions and thinking. The focus is on those pupils whose preconditions are so low that they are below the first measurable level of proficiency in the common framework with…

Developing students' skills in solving mathematical problems and supporting creative mathematical thinking have been important topics of Finnish National Core Curricula 2004 and 2014. To foster these skills, students should be provided with rich, meaningful problem-solving tasks already in primary school. Teachers have a crucial role in equipping…

Many studies emphasise the need for supporting higher education students to develop general competences. In this study, we report on the first cycle of a designbased research project conducted in the Design Factory context. The aim of the project is to understand how general competences can be integrated into course modules and within…

This is a qualitative study with a twofold aim. The first aim is to describe and analyse teachers' perceptions of advantages and challenges with a model for continued professional development (CPD) for primary school teachers. The CPD course was about inquiry-based learning (IBL) in science education. The second aim of the study is to analyse the…

Project-based learning (PBL) is a promising teaching method for integrated science education that has gained momentum in educational research and curriculum reforms, especially as a method to enhance 21st century skills and connected worldview. How teachers implement PBL greatly affects students' content understanding and development of skills.…

Although one of key ideas behind the introduction of STEM (or STEAM) as a unifying concept, is to emphasize the interdisciplinary character of many real world problems, there is a non-trivial educational challenge in exceeding existing subject boundaries and implementing multidisciplinary activities into the classroom. The present case study…

There is limited research on teaching and learning of programming in primary school and even less about aspects concerning teaching programming from teachers' viewpoint. In this study, we explore how Finnish 1-6 primary school teachers (N=91), teaching at schools with Swedish as the language of instruction, relate to programming and teaching of…

This study employs interviews and observations to investigate instructional rationales of two purposefully sampled teachers with divergent classroom discourse practices in Swedish-speaking Finnish lower secondary mathematics classrooms. Studies on classroom discourse often point to beliefs and contextual factors shaping teachers' discourse…

The history and evolution of science assessment remains poorly known, especially in the context of the exam question contents. Here we analyze the Finnish matriculation examination in biology from the 1920s to 1960s to understand how the exam has evolved in both its knowledge content and educational form. Each question was classified according to…

This study investigated common features of students' attitudes towards studying science and mathematics in comprehensive and secondary schools in three countries. Data were obtained by conducting a survey (N = 581) in Norway, Finland and Russia. A Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) provided a model with a three-factor solution consisting of…

In this article, we report from a group (N=98) of students from two campuses of one Finnish university, on their study habits, and to what extent they use different kinds of learning materials in university mathematics courses. Our results show that the older students are more communicative with their teachers, whereas the younger students ask for…

In project-based learning, pupils have two central learning objectives: to understand the content of the subject and to develop their twenty-first-century skills. This article concerns the use of project work in mathematics learning, considered here in the context of the Finnish national core curriculum, mathematical proficiency, and pupils'…