Fin(ish) of Finnish lessons!  Universiteit Helsinki en Finland-propagandist slaan alarm.

 De eerder zwakke prestaties van de Finse 15-jarigen op ‘Finse’ toetsen voor wiskunde e.d. zijn al vele jaren gekend (o.a. studie van2006 van de universiteit van Helsinki).  Onderwijskrant heeft er destijds  herhaaldelijk over gepubliceerd. Toch wordt tot op vandaag Finland nog steeds als een onderwijsparadijs op alle vlakken voorgesteld – zoals onlangs nog in Klasse van september 2013.  

De propagandist van het Finse mirakel, Pasi Sahlberg, heeft die zwakke leerresultaten steeds en moedwillig verzwegen tijdens zijn vele  propaganda-sessies in de verschillende landen.  Het recent onderzoek van de universiteit van Helsinki (zie een vorige blog)  kan/durft  Sahlberg niet langer doodzwijgen.

Een panikerende Sahlberg twitterde vandaag: ‏@pasi_sahlberg  : Working on a column on "What if Finland loses its top-notch in education?". Ideas, please!   We vernemen nu dat de 15-jarigen volgens de onderzoeken van de universiteit van Helsinki  eerder zwak presteren, dat de relatie met de SES er ook vrij hoog is, dat de verschillen tussen de klassen vrij hoog zijn …. Allemaal zaken die haaks staan op de sprookjes over onderwijsparadijs Finland.  Maar intussen is de idee dat Finland op alle vlakken een onderwijsparadijs is en dat dit vooral een gevolg is van zijn comprehensieve (gemeenschappelijke) lagere cyclus secundair onderwijs een standaardopvatting geworden, die nog moeilijk uit te bannen is.  Dergelijke kwakkels zijn uiterst taai. 

We vermelden ook uitdrukkelijk dat de onderzoekers van de universiteit van Helsinki stellen dat men zich moet afvragen of precies de comprehensieve structuur van het Fins onderwijs niet een belangrijke oorzaak is van de zwakke leerprestaties: "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.’ Ook in de propaganda  voor comprehensief onderwijs in Vlaanderen  werd de voorbije jaren voortdurend verwezen naar het succes van zo'n onderwijsstructuur. Men stelde ook dat we net als in Finland het huiswerk moesten afschaffen, het aantal lesuren drastisch moesten verminderen, geen punten meer mochten geven, enz.
   

Ook Science guide besteedde op 15 november aandacht aan deze kentering in Finland slaat alarm. De bijdrage is vermeldenswaard.

Hoe gaat het met de Finse scholier? Pasi Sahlberg presenteert zorgelijke trends, op basis van onderzoek naar de daling van de resultaten. “Formal education seems to be losing its former power and the accepting of the societal expectations seems to be related more strongly than before to students’ home background.”

De culturele verandering in de gezinnen en positie van de school en het onderwijsbestel is volgens Sahlberg een van de meest diepgaande oorzaken van een opvallende afname van de onderwijsprestaties. Deze raakt zowel meisjes als jongens, al blijven de meisjes relatief voorop lopen. De impact van het sociaal kapitaal en de onderwijs-gerelateerde omstandigheden bij de scholieren thuis en de gezinnen neemt hierdoor toe.

Signs of declining results

‘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.

Girls performed better 

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 assessment reached about 7800 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.  

Decline of attainment

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.

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