Spectaculaire daling
van leerprestaties in Finland & debat over (nefaste) gevolgen
van comprehensieve, lagere cyclus s.o. in Finland, Zweden ... Onze beleidsmakers, Klasse van september
2013, stellen (comprehensief) Finland steeds
voor als een onderwijsparadijs
inzake hoge leerresultaten en sociale gelijkheid. Volgens Finse onderzoekers
van de universiteit van Helsinki was dit de voorbije jaren geenszins het geval.
Dit bevestigt wat Onderwijskrant al een
aantal jaren beweert -mede op basis van eerdere studies van de universiteit van
Helsinki.
New study: Finnish
students achievement declined significantly (Onderzoek van universiteit
Helsinki).
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 students 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 mothers 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 attitudesunlike the change in attainmentwas 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 youngpeople 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 studentssuccess in the
PISA studies.
Source:
University of Helsinki - Faculty of Behavioral Sciences,
Department of Teacher of Education Research Report No 347Authors: 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
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