Does Finnish basic education treat pupils as equal as expected?

Kuvaus

The Finnish education system has been founded on equal and equitable basic education. The characteristic of the system has been uniform basic education for everyone in a neighborhood school irrespective of pupils’ background. As a consequence, school differences in Finland have been remarkably smaller than in most OECD-countries. However, recently the differences between schools have been slightly increasing.
Our study focuses on the equality and equitability of current Finnish basic education. As an indicator, we use evaluations of learning outcomes in three different school subjects at the end of basic education. These nationally representative sample based evaluations have been carried out by the Finnish National Board of Education and the Finnish Education Evaluation Centre. We examine the equality by analyzing the results of learning outcomes between genders and between Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking schools. We also take into account the education of the pupils’ parents and take an overview of school differences and the correspondence of school grades and learning outcomes.
Our data consist of learning outcomes in Social studies (2012; n = 4 158) Mathematics (2015; n= 4 779) and English (advanced syllabus; 2014; n = 3 273) at the end of basic education. Our preliminary results show that the effect of gender and parents’ education to learning outcomes is quite remarkable but, the effect is slightly different in Finnish speaking schools than in Swedish speaking schools.
The main goal of the Finnish education system, including school grading, is to give an equal access to secondary education regardless of pupils’ gender, language of instruction or parents’ educational background. In our presentation, we discuss whether the Finnish Education system works as expected at the end of basic education and suggest certain measures to cure the pitfalls detected.

Aikajakso	30 toukok. 2017
Tapahtuman otsikko	NoFa 6-conference 2017: : Interplay between general and subject specific knowledge about teaching and learning in school and teacher education - perspectives
Tapahtuman tyyppi	Konferenssi
Sijainti	Odense, TanskaNäytä kartalla
Tunnustuksen arvo	Kansainvälinen