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ARE FINLANDS SCHOOLS AS GOOD AS THEY SEEM?
Montrose42s Blog, November 28, 2013 |
It may come as some
surprise to educators here, but their counterparts in Finland are not as
excited about the high ranking afforded
to Finlands schools by PISA studies ,as they are. Many teachers and Heads
there, in truth, are slightly embarrassed about all the fuss, partly because they are aware of weaknesses
in their system, and partly because they think that PISA measures only a narrow
band of the spectrum of school learning.
Finnish practitioners like many here, realise the danger and the
consequences of teaching to the test,
rather than to learn and understand.
Gabriel Sahlgren, a Swedish academic working for the centre
right think tank CMRE, shares the view
that Finlands education system is by no means perfect. Writing in a Spectator
blog, earlier this year ,he pointed out that while Finland scores well on PISA,
this particular league table is actually designed to test everyday rather than
curriculum-based knowledge. This means that it lacks key concepts of importance
for further studies in mathematically intensive subjects, such as engineering,
computer science, and economics. This is an obvious defect: such subjects are
likely to be crucial for developed countries future economic well-being. He
continues The Finnish fan club rarely talks about its mathematics performance
in TIMSS, an international survey focusing more on curriculum-based knowledge
which plummeted over the last decade. Finnish eighth-graders today perform
slightly lower than seventh-graders did in 1999, lagging the top-scoring
nations by a considerable margin. Not so miraculous, after all, suggests
Sahlgren. Its perhaps not surprising, he says, that over 200 Finnish academics
in 2005 warned about complacency as a result of the PISA success. Others
questioned whether it represents a victory at all since important knowledge
had been sacrificed along the way.
It is also the case that the number of young people in Finland obtaining higher education
degrees is not growing at the same pace as in many other developed nations.
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.
As Pasi Sahlberg points out The change between the year
2001 and year 2012 is significant. The level of students attainment has in
fact 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. A decline could be
discerned both among the best and the weakest students.
It is also the case that
between 2000 and 2009 Finnish students in the lowest socio-economic
category (Group 1) fell an astonishing 31% ,in Reading.
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 HotulainenLearning to learn at the end of basic education: Results in
2012 and changes from 2001 http://www.helsinki.fi/cea/julkaisut/index.html
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