“You be Sure Now to be Honest in Your Assessment”: Teaching and Learning Self-Assessment

When taking part in the everyday practices of the school, the pupil ‘metalearns’ implicit institutional knowledge about educability and its proper criteria. The aim of this study was to examine one important school practice, self-assessment: How is self-assessment ‘taught’ to children, what is assessed through the self-assessment method, how is self-assessment introduced to children, and how do they perceive those situations? The ethnographic research focused on the classroom situations of one class of first-graders during one autumn term. The data were collected by means of regular observation, video recordings, short interviews, documents, and informal conversations with the teachers, pupils and parents. The findings indicated that the frequency of self-assessment episodes was particularly high in the domains of writing, mathematics, and social skills and behaviour; self-assessment situations were a ‘natural’ part of everyday teaching practices. According to our observations, the result of the self-assessment was considerably explicit. The teacher made sure that the pupils assessed their performance in the way she wanted. The teaching of self-assessment also teaches the child what assessment criteria the school regards as important and how well the child fulfils these criteria. According to our analysis, these important assessment criteria are objectiveness (compliance to standard), honesty, and individuality (a product that ‘looks like’ its author). The children practised self-assessment actively and were apparently capable of assessing their own performance. Our results suggest that ‘the self’ in self-assessment is paradoxical: you can assess yourself as long as you assess the right things in the right way.     

Finnish parents’ attitudes toward entrepreneurship education

This study set out to investigate parental attitudes toward entrepreneurship education as evaluative directing components of social representations. A nationwide sample of parents (N = 625) was asked to indicate their opinions on a set of statements about entrepreneurship education. The parents’ attitudinal orientation suggested that they would rather avoid entrepreneurship education than approach it. Additionally, parental evaluations contained indecision and polarised opinions, and most parents saw it as unlikely or were unsure whether their children would become entrepreneurs. Parental attitudes correlated with the established representations of education and subsequent policy stands, suggesting that entrepreneurship education has been made familiar by anchoring attitudes in the field of educational debates. It was suggested that current trends in educational policy and work life may stimulate the formation of polemical social representations pertaining to entrepreneurship education.     

Burnout among Finnish and Chinese university students

In this study the levels of experienced burnout of Finnish and Chinese university students are compared using School Burnout Inventory (SBI). This study is motivated by earlier studies, which suggest that the level of student burnout is different in the culturally distinct Finnish and Chinese university systems, but which are based on different research instruments for the two groups. The sample studied consisted of 3,035 Finnish students and 2,309 Chinese students. Because of the cross‐cultural nature of this study the level of structural equivalence of SBI between the cultural groups was examined and the effect of different response styles on the results was taken into account. Both standard and robust statistical methods were used for the analyses. The results showed that SBI with two extracted components is suitable for cross‐cultural analysis between Finnish and Chinese university students. Virtually no difference was found in experienced overall burnout between the Finnish and Chinese students, which means that both university systems contain factors causing similar levels of student burnout. This study also verified that controlling for the response styles is important in cross‐cultural studies as it was found to have a distinct effect on the results obtained from mean‐level comparisons.     

Children’s notions of the malleability of their academic competencies

This study set out to examine children’s notions of the malleability of their academic competencies and the relations of these notions to the child’s grade-level and gender and the parent’s educational level. In interviews of a total of 103 boys and girls of the third and the sixth grade, children of academically and vocationally educated parents were asked to rate their potential for improving their competencies in mathematics and Finnish. The children were asked to use intrapersonal and normative criteria in their ratings. The ratings were found to form distinct domains of the notions of malleability, as they did not correlate with each other. The children’s ratings of their current competencies, i.e. their academic self-concepts, turned out to be related to their normative ratings of the malleability of their competencies. The findings further suggested that the children’s notions of the malleability of their academic competencies became more pessimistic in the course of their school years.

Author Index,Volume 5

Authors Index

Author Index, Volume 5     

School Subjects as Social Categorisations

The present study set out to examine school subjects in terms of social categorisations of a child’s educability. A group of academically educated (N = 180) and vocationally educated parents (N = 249) with a child in the third grade of comprehensive school were asked to indicate their child’s strongest and weakest school subject and to give reasons for their choices. The parents’ most frequent choices for both the strongest and the weakest subject turned out to be mathematics and Finnish, which substantiates the pivotal role of the cognitive-verbal competencies in defining the child’s educability. The choices were guided by the child’s gender, so that mathematics was typically regarded as the strongest subject of boys and the weakest subject of girls and conversely, Finnish was regarded as the strongest subject of girls and the weakest subject of boys. The parent’s educational position organised the reasons given for the subject choices so that self-serving attribution was stronger among the academically educated than the vocationally educated parents, suggesting that the parents’ education relates to the trust they place on their child’s educational potential.     

Three Years Later: A Follow‐Up Study of Parents' Assessments of Their Children's Competencies1

The present study is a follow‐up of one that was designed to examine the changes that have occurred in parents' views of a child's competencies during the child's first 3 years of school. Parents with a university education (N=180) and a vocational education (N=249) were asked to assess their children's competencies in domains representing school subjects and abilities in preschool and at the end of the 1st and 3rd school years. The findings indicated that parents' initial optimistic views had prevailed. Furthermore, our findings on the gender‐ and education‐dependent differences suggested that the underlying social psychological organization of parental assessments already has taken shape by the time the child enters school.     

Gendered Views of Ability in Parents’ Perceptions of Their Children’s Academic Competencies

The present study was designed to examine whether parents’ views of their child’s academic competencies are structured by gendered conceptions of abilities. In a longitudinal research design, a group of parents (N = 391) were asked to assess their third-grade child’s competence in mathematics and Finnish and to respond to a set of attitude statements; when the child reached the fifth grade, the parents were asked to reassess his/her competencies. It was found that the influence of the gender stereotype was partly domain-specific: The stereotype concerning Finnish organized the parental competence assessments as early as the child’s third grade and also predicted the assessments made about the child over the next two grades, whereas the stereotype concerning mathematics only predicted the assessments made as late as the fifth grade. In the Finnish competence assessments, the gender stereotype moderated the overall gender-of-the-child effect, whereas in the mathematics competence assessments, the gender-of-the-child effect was evinced only by the parent group that endorsed the gender stereotype. Culture-bound gender expectations and attitudes toward the expectations are significant, then, for parents’ assessments of their child’s competencies as early as the elementary school years.     

Parents' perceptions of their child's academic competencies construe their educational reality: Findings from a 9‐year longitudinal study

Academically and vocationally educated parents were asked to assess their child's academic competencies and motivation when the child was in preschool, then every 2 years till the end of the child's comprehensive school. It was found that the initial increasing trend in the parental attributions of competence stabilized and even turned downwards and that the education‐ and gender‐bound differences in the attributions, already manifest at the preschool stage, were still in evidence and had got more varied forms. It is suggested that parental perceptions of competencies are activated in a socially structured field of meanings and that highly educated parents construe their educational reality in terms of the social representation of natural giftedness.     

How are children’s perceptions of the malleability of their academic competencies related to their teachers’ and parents’ views?

The study examined children’s and their parents’ and teachers’ perceptions of the malleability of the child’s academic competencies. A total of 103 third- and sixth-graders and their parents and teachers were asked to rate how much the child could improve her/his competencies in mathematics and Finnish. The participants were asked to use intrapersonal and interpersonal criteria in their ratings, i.e., to rate the child’s potential for improvement in comparison with his/her own current competencies and in relation to her/his peers’ competencies. The results showed a tendency that older children’s perceptions were closer to their parents’ and teachers’ views than those of younger children. Children of academically educated parents showed a stronger correlation with their teachers’ and parents’ intrapersonal perceptions than children of vocationally educated parents. The results also suggested that the teachers and parents trusted in boys’ intrapersonal potential in Finnish more than in girls’ but there were no gender-differences in their perceptions concerning mathematics. In all, the children’s intrapersonal perceptions of their improvement potential were the most optimistic, followed by their parents’ and lastly by their teachers’ perceptions.