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Home / news / Research: Finnish students’ achievement declined
Pasi Sahlberg Portrait
NEWS pasi sahlberg Thu 14, 2013 09:20

Research: Finnish students’ achievement declined

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

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