Helsingin yliopistossa 9.2.2024 järjestetyn Ainedidaktisen symposiumin teemana oli perustaitojen opetus ja arviointi. Tapahtumassa tematiikkaa lähestyttiin monesta näkökulmasta. Symposiumissa käyty keskustelu ja tämän teoksen artikkelit osoittavat selvästi, että perustaitojen oppimiseen liittyy paitsi geneerisiä, myös oppiainespesifejä erityispiirteitä. Ainedidaktisen tutkimuksen tärkeä tehtävä onkin tunnistaa näitä tekijöitä ja kehittää keinoja perustaitojen syvällisen oppimisen tueksi.

Kansainväliset tutkimukset osoittavat, että opettajien perus- ja täydennyskoulutuksen vaikutukset näkyvät kouluopetuksen kehittymisenä ja parempina oppimistuloksina. Koska suomalaisten oppilaiden matematiikan osaaminen on heikentynyt, on täydennyskoulutuksen vaikuttavuutta syytä tutkia. Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan kuinka kaikille asteille, varhaiskasvatuksesta ammatilliseen koulutukseen, yhteinen matematiikan täydennyskoulutus edistää työssä kehittymistä ja millaisia haasteita opettajat (N=140) kokevat täydennyskoulutukseen osallistuessaan. Tuloksia tarkastellaan mielekkään oppimisen teoreettisen mallin kautta. Keskeisenä ulottuvuutena on opitun siirtovaikutus. Tutkimuksemme mukaan opettajien kiire on täydennyskoulutuksen vaikuttavuuden suurin este. Sen sijaan yhteistoiminnallisuus nähdään vaikuttavuutta edistävänä tekijänä. Kollegojen merkitys hahmottuu aineistossa niin vaikuttavuutta edistävänä kuin hidastavana tekijänä, mutta oppilaitokselta yhteisönä ei juuri osata odottaa tukea uusien ideoiden toteuttamiseen. Tällöin myös yhteiset haasteet kuten moniulotteinen kiire jää opettajan itsensä selätettäväksi. Tämä on täydennyskoulutuksen vaikuttavuuden ongelmakohta, jonka ratkaiseminen edellyttää oppilaitoksen roolin hahmottamista toisin. Opettajat ottavat paljon henkilökohtaista vastuuta opetuksen kehittämisestä, jolloin täydennyskoulutuksen vaikuttavuus riippuu pitkälti yksittäisten opettajien innosta ja sinnikkyydestä. "It's busy". The effectiveness of mathematics teaching in-service training from the teacher's point of view International studies show that the effects of basic and continuing education for teachers can be seen in the development of school teaching and better learning results. Since the mathematics skills of Finnish students have weakened, it is worth investigating the effectiveness of in-service training. The study examines how joint mathematics in-service training for all levels, from early childhood education to vocational training, promotes professional development and what challenges teachers (N=140) experience when participating in in-service training. The results are examined through the theoretical model of meaningful learning. The key dimension is the transfer of learning. According to our research, teachers' experiences of a shortage of time is the biggest obstacle to the effectiveness of in-service training. Instead, cooperation is seen as a factor that promotes effectiveness. The importance of colleagues appears in the material as both a factor that promotes effectiveness and as a factor that impedes it, but the participating teachers do not expect the educational institution as a community to support them in the implementation of new ideas in teaching. In this case, even common challenges such as the multidimensional experience of shortage of time are left for the teacher to sort out by themselves. This is a challenge for the effectiveness of in-service training, the solution of which requires a different understanding of the role of the educational institution. Teachers take a lot of personal responsibility for the development of teaching, so the effectiveness of in-service training largely depends on the enthusiasm and perseverance of individual teachers. Keywords: teachers’ in-service training, effectiveness, meaningful learning, mathematics teaching. Fulltext in Finnish.

Two middle school educators earned a Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching fellowship. A Fulbright Finland Foundation inter-country travel grant provided the grantees with a unique opportunity to connect and collaborate at the University of Helsinki. Within this research, they described their inquiry experiences. The research included examining authentic student-centered learning continuums and phenomenon-based learning in Finland and teachers’ adaptability in relation to meeting the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse math classrooms in the Netherlands. This paper summarizes how cross-cultural dialogues, classroom observations, and informal interviews with educators, students, and thought leaders informed each grantee’s discovery of how student-centered learning is structured, delivered, and valued in Finland and the Netherlands. This article (1) describes how communication empowers middle school mathematics students, (2) analyzes the learning-to-learn framework, and (3) provides insights into how to utilize language diversity in a mathematics classroom.

The existing co-teaching practices in teachers’ professional learning emphasize collaboration between pre-service and in-service teachers. Although this collaboration is usually defined by a mentor–student relationship with asymmetric power relations, successful co-teaching practices in schools are considered to involve parity, resulting in mutual learning for all involved parties. In this study, we designed a model for teachers’ professional learning in which pre- and in-service teachers collaborate and have shared goals, with the aim of equal responsibilities for planning and implementing instruction, despite the teachers’ diverse backgrounds. During the 4 years of piloting and developing the model in the Finnish teacher education context, we investigated how the participants reflected on the co-teaching process. We analyzed data from collaborative reflection sessions to identify the challenges and benefits of this untypical form of collaboration. The findings showed that asymmetric backgrounds may cause challenges, but that if these are overcome, they can also create opportunities for valuable co-teaching experiences for all the participants. Helping the participants initiate the co-teaching process and take different roles appeared to be essential for a successful process. We discuss the findings regarding the development of co-teaching practices in teacher education and in schools.

Higher education and lifelong learning projects aimed at adults have become more widespread and have sparked a debate on how to restructure higher education policies and support lifelong learning. In Finland, a recent initiative in higher education policy is based on the theme of continuous learning. Different supporting structures and practices at the governmental level are being sought. During the academic year 2017-2018, the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland funded a project that provided pedagogical studies in teaching for 16 IT professionals. The aim was to enable the participants to focus on the educational field and find new options for their careers. We utilised a narrative research approach to explore the types of adult learners' storylines and positions that were constructed during these studies, of which we identified three: the storyline of different alternatives, in which participants positioned themselves as a career path builders, the storyline of becoming a teacher, in which participants positioned themselves as a teacherhood reflectors and becoming a teacher was an enriching alternative, and the storyline of looking forward, in which participants positioned themselves as a developers and mainly saw their studies as expanding their ongoing career opportunities.

Matematiikka-ahdistuksen kohtaaminen ja siihen vaikuttamisen keinot ovat yhä korostuneemmin osa laadukasta matematiikan opetusta. Tutkimuskirjallisuutta niin matematiikka-ahdistuksen vaikutuksista kuin siihen vaikuttamisen keinoista on runsaasti. Sen sijaan kansallista tietoa siitä, millaisena juuri valmistuvat opettajat kokevat valmiutensa ahdistuksen kohtaamiseen on niukasti. Tässä tutkimuksessa selvitettiin haastattelututkimuksen keinoin, millaista on opintojensa loppuvaiheessa olevien opettajaopiskelijoiden tietämys matematiikka-ahdistuksesta ja siihen vaikuttamisesta, sekä millaisia toiveita heillä olisi teeman käsittelemiseksi opettajaopinnoissa. Analyysin perusteella opiskelijat kokivat olevansa kyvykkäitä kohtamaan matematiikka-ahdistusta ja etsimään siihen erilaisia vaikuttamisen keinoja itsenäisesti, mutta toivoivat, että koulutuksessa näitä keinoja tarkasteltaisiin selkeästi nykyistä enemmän. In English Reducing math anxiety is an increasingly important part of mathematics teaching. There is a lot of research about the effects of math anxiety and how it can be reduced. However, Finnish prospective teachers' thoughts about their readiness for facing math anxiety in the classroom need to be looked more closely. This study focuses to find out what is the prospective teachers' knowledge about facing up math anxiety in the classroom, and how they see the topic should be taken care during the teacher education. Based on the analysis of eight prospective teachers' interviews, we could conclude that the students expected that they were able to face math anxiety in the classroom with several ways. Nevertheless, they hoped that methods for facing math anxiety should be more thoroughly and clearly looked at in teacher education and thus facilitate their preparedness to face math anxiety in the classroom.

The use of open problem-solving tasks in mathematics education challenges teachers' beliefs, knowledge and practices.This article examines the practices of two primary teachers and their 3rd to 5th grade classes during a three-year in-service teacher training project aiming to increase mathematical problem-solving in class.Three lesson videos and two interviews with each teacher were used to provide the data for this study.The results show how different teachers in terms of their beliefs, knowledge and practices during the problem-solving activities can produce mathematically different learning opportunities.Teacher Ann saw mathematics as too rigorous, and to combat this, gave her pupils a great deal of autonomy.Her pupils were encouraged to come up with creative solutions.Teacher Beate emphasized mathematical understanding.Her pupils were guided cognitively and they came up with mathematically elegant solutions.In teaching open problem-solving both autonomy and cognitive guidance are needed.

This article introduces the AFinLA-e thematic issue on plurilingualism in the school. Lately, multilingualism has been a buzzword in both sociolinguistic research and applied linguistics. Through the reform of national core curriculum for basic education, multilingualism, alongside language awareness, has also become an inextricable part of public educational discussions and the normative framework of basic education. There remain, however, questions about how all these changes translate into linguistically responsive classroom pedagogy and practices that support achieving learning goals, the process of language socialization, and pupils’ plurilingual identities. Our aim is to give a brief general introduction into the flourishing field of multilingualism research, its developments, approaches and trajectories, and describe the contributions that the articles in this issue make into the growing body of work in the Finnish context. We also identify three future trajectories for research on plurilingualism in the school.

Ideals play a key role in a student teachers’ identity work. They form targets to strive for and a mirror for reflection. In this paper, we examine Finnish mathematics student teachers’ metaphors for the teacher’s role (N= 188). We classified the metaphors according to a model that identified teachers as subject matter experts, didactical experts, and pedagogical experts, with the addition of another two categories, self-referential and contextual. For the exploration of emerging professional identities, we studied the self-referential metaphors, which formed the most common category in the data. We observed that every third metaphor described either student teachers’ personalities or their incompleteness as teachers, or new beginnings or eras. Although these aspects were expected, they also inform us as teacher educators of the values and ideals that student teachers have in terms of teaching and being a teacher. The metaphors that mathematics student teachers produced illustrated their identity processes and their emerging identity as a mathematics teacher.

The aim of our article is to find suitable integrative phenomena for both visual arts and mathematics, with a focus on preserving the nature of each of these subjects and their specific methods of acquiring and processing information. This article builds a picture of how to design and conduct an integrative learning continuum which genuinely preserves the nature of mathematics. To draw conclusions, we combined datasets from mathematics teacher education and the lower secondary school context. We found out that suitable integrative phenomena can relate to concepts shared by each of the integrating disciplines, such as ratio; or they can be typical processes of knowledge acquisition and construction, such as sorting. The teaching experiments revealed that the integrative phenomena appropriate for use in school must enable a joint investigative learning experience. The third finding was that the pupils needed teacher support to view the subjects more broadly. [GRAPHICS] .

The article discusses the development of an educational model intended to support teachers’ professional development in science education. In this research and development project, LumaLähetit, pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, and teacher educators formed teams to collaboratively plan teaching and produce material for inquiry-based and integrative science instruction in primary schools. The results are based on three design cycles of the model. Thus far, ten schools, 24 in-service teachers, 30 pre-service teachers, and 560 pupils have participated. The results, which are based on the qualitative content analysis of participants’ open answers to a questionnaire, indicate that the developed collaborative model for science education supported preservice teachers and in-service teachers’ professional development in many ways. Several processes mediating the embodiment of the designed model were identified, especially during the second or third design cycles. Participants reflected on theory and practice. They experienced increased knowledge about inquiry and integrative approaches, collaborated in teams to some extent, and found this to be supportive during the project. Also, pre-service teachers appreciated the opportunity to teach in the schools. In general, careful goal setting, collaboration between the participants, and guidance by teacher educators during the initiation of the project were found to be crucial to the further success of the project. The results highlight a need for further research in order to better meet to the challenges of team teaching, inquiry-based instruction, and integrative teaching. The designed model was developed between the cycles and must be further developed in the future, especially in terms of supporting collaboration and clarifying theoretical concepts during the project.

While the metaphors for mathematics and for teaching mathematics have received some attention, there is a lack of research on metaphors for technology. This study sought to investigate mathematics student teachers’ metaphors for technology in teaching mathematics. Based on metaphor theory and two theories of technology, the author analyzed 60 student teachers’ metaphors for technology. The findings reveal that student teachers’ views of using technology in mathematics teaching are ambiguous. The instrumental view of technology was dominating the data. Although the participating student teachers seem mainly to have a positive attitude towards technology, they need adequate opportunities in teacher education to explore the pedagogical and educational use of technology.