Since 1996, educational effectiveness has been understood in Finland to include not only
subject specific knowledge and skills but also the more general competences which are not the
exclusive domain of any single subject but develop through good teaching along a student’s
educational career. Many of these, including the object of the present assessment, learning to
learn, have been named in the education policy documents of the European Union as key competences
which each member state should provide their citizens as part of general education (EU
2006).
In spring 2012, the Helsinki University Centre for Educational Assessment implemented a
nationally representative assessment of ninth grade students’ learning to learn competence. The
assessment was inspired by signs of declining results in the past few years’ assessments. This
decline had been observed both in the subject specific assessments of the Finnish National Board
of Education, in the OECD PISA 2009 study, and in the learning to learn assessment implemented
by the Centre for Educational Assessment in all comprehensive schools in Vantaa in 2010.
The results of the Vantaa study could be compared against the results of a similar assessment
implemented in 2004. As the decline in students’ cognitive competence and in their learning
related attitudes was especially strong in the two Vantaa studies, with only 6 years apart, a
decision was made to direct the national assessment of spring 2012 to the same schools which
had participated in a respective study in 2001.
The goal of the assessment was to find out whether the decline in results, observed in the
Helsinki region, were the same for the whole country. The assessment also offered a possibility
to look at the readiness of schools to implement a computer-based assessment, and how this has
changed during the 11 years between the two assessments. After all, the 2001 assessment was the
first in Finland where large scale student assessment data was collected in schools using the
Internet.
The main focus of the assessment was on students’ competence and their learning-related attitudes
at the end of the comprehensive school education, but the assessment also relates to
educational equity: to regional, between-school, and between- class differences and to the relation
of students’ gender and home background to their competence and attitudes.
The assessment reached about 7 800 ninth grade students in 82 schools in 65 municipalities.
Of the students, 49% were girls and 51% boys. The share of students in Swedish speaking
schools was 3.4%. As in 2001, the assessment was implemented in about half of the schools
using a printed test booklet and in the other half via the Internet. The results of the 2001 and
2012 assessments were uniformed through IRT modelling to secure the comparability of the
results. Hence, the results can be interpreted to represent the full Finnish ninth grade population.
Girls performed better than boys in all three fields of competence measured in the assessment:
reasoning, mathematical thinking, and reading comprehension. The difference was especially
noticeable in reading comprehension even if in this task girls’ attainment had declined
more than boys’ attainment. Differences between the AVI-districts were small. The impact of
students’ home-background was, instead, obvious: the higher the education of the parents, the
better the student performed in the assessment tasks. There was no difference in the impact of
mother’s education on boys’ and girls’ attainment. The between-school-differences were very
small (explaining under 2% of the variance) while the between-class differences were relatively
large (9 % – 20 %).
The change between the year 2001 and year 2012 is significant. The level of students’ attainment
has declined considerably. The difference can be compared to a decline of Finnish
students’ attainment in PISA reading literacy from the 539 points of PISA 2009 to 490 points, to
below the OECD average. The mean level of students’ learning-supporting attitudes still falls
above the mean of the scale used in the questions but also that mean has declined from 2001. The
mean level of attitudes detrimental to learning has risen but the rise is more modest. Girls’
attainment has declined more than boys’ in three of the five tasks. There was no gender difference
in the change of students’ attitudes, however. Between-school differences were un-changed
but differences between classes and between individual students had grown. The change in
attitudes—unlike the change in attainment—was related to students’ home background: The
decline in learning-supporting attitudes and the growth in attitudes detrimental to school work
were weaker the better educated the mother. Home background was not related to the change in
students’ attainment, however. A decline could be discerned both among the best and the weakest
students.
The results of the assessment point to a deeper, on-going cultural change which seems to affect
the young generation especially hard. Formal education seems to be losing its former power
and the accepting of the societal expectations which the school represents seems to be related
more strongly than before to students’ home background. The school has to compete with students’
self-elected pastime activities, the social media, and the boundless world of information
and entertainment open to all through the Internet. The school is to a growing number of young
people just one, often critically reviewed, developmental environment among many. The change
is not a surprise, however. A similar decline in student attainment has been registered in the
other Nordic countries already earlier. It is time to concede that the signals of change have been
discernible already for a while and to open up a national discussion regarding the state and future
of the Finnish comprehensive school that rose to international acclaim due to our students’
success in the PISA studies.
Source:
University of Helsinki – Faculty of Behavioral Sciences, Department of Teacher of Education Research Report No 347
Authors: Jarkko Hautamäki, Sirkku Kupiainen, Jukka Marjanen, Mari-Pauliina Vainikainen and Risto Hotulainen
Learning to learn at the end of basic education: Results in 2012 and changes from 2001
14/11/2013 Link to the study (in Finnish) here