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Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

news.bbc.co.uk

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Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#41

Post by tokenadult »

cromulent wrote: post #28
tokenadult wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have provided a good summary of the submitted article, without expressing an opinion on its conclusions. Allow me to respond to quoted point 2. 2. Low immigration - so "Finnish as a second language" is not a problem there. A counterexample to this being especially important is the country Singapore, with four official languages (Modern Standard Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and English in decreasing order of number of h…

Although the article mentions the second language thing, Finland actually has two official languages, Finnish and Swedish. All official documents are in both, and street signs are in both, with the local dominant language on top. They also teach English at the Finnish schools. My eldest son goes to an English school in Helsinki and he is taught Finnish, French, and of course English.

Thanks for reminding everyone of that. And of course Swedish

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_language

and Finnish (Suomi)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_language

are not even cognate languages, being from two different language families. So students in Finland learning English in their school courses are learning a language with what are to them rather puzzling grammatical patterns. By contrast, many Americans don't attempt to learn any foreign language while in K-12 schooling.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#42

Post by yardie »

drunkpotato wrote: post #21
Adrock wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equally unfashionable is the idea that there are advantages to homogeneous societies and classrooms.

Your statement is glib and unproductive. Obviously there are advantages to homogeneous societies. There are advantages to heterogeneous societies, which the U.S. is a pretty good example of. The point is not which is "better", but what lessons can we take to improve the things in our society which are deficient? Education in the U.S. is currently deficient, and we should look at why and how and try to find out what w…

A lot of big universities have research schools where they test schooling techniques on students, run assessments and see what works. The problem is most of these schools are near big universities. So you've got an overwhelming amount of students who are nurtured in an education rich environment (mama is a professor, papa is an adjunct, etc.), they are well ahead of the rest of the country as far as educational experiences. Then when they run the tests and think they have a success, it usually results in failure once they try to roll it out to schools in a completely different environment.

What they should be doing is working on the baseline students, inner city schools, poor areas. But this requires professors to get out their comfort zones and they don't want to do that.

A lot of these research schools are very competitive. They'll basically ace any test you put in front of them just because they can.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#43

Post by andreyf »

yardie wrote: post #20
lotharbot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed what I think is the key point: 5. instead of making a big deal out of kids being "behind", they recognize that everyone learns at their own rate. Kids don't get labeled as "dumb" or "incapable", they just keep being taught.

^^^^^ As a parent you'd be amazed at how many people think their kid is special because they can do one thing that other babies at that age don't. Things like, "He walked before other babies","She started talking at a few months","She eats normal food and can hold a spoon". My wife fell into this trap when kids his age were walking or talking and he was just scooting along. I told her I'd worry about it if he's still…

This isn't just silly, but can actually be dangerous. The "checkpoints" we have for learning are determined by our third-party mental model of that activity, not by the first-person experiences of the learner. A child will learn to do something when they are mentally and physically prepared to do it in the first person, when a whole variety of variables we have no awareness of align.

Even something which may appear isolated from other areas of development (walking, talking, holding a spoon) is an extremely superficial heuristic for the development of millions of interconnected systems within a child's body.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#44

Post by sesqu »

LargeWu wrote: post #12
shin_lao wrote: post #6

There are 5 M inhabitants in Finland. How much do they spend in their education system? Does it scale to a country of, say, 50 M inhabitants?

I don't see how it wouldn't. It's not like if you have 10 times as many students then you'll build a school 10 times as big. You'll instead build 10 times as many schools, all operating more or less independently at roughly the same scale as each other. There might be an additional layer of administration or two, which may cause some inefficiencies in certain areas that may be offset by economies of scale in others.

Actually, Finland has been shutting down small schools in favor of less bigger ones for a while now, for administrative and financial reasons. So I guess you build three schools three times as big, or something.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#45

Post by [deleted] »

r7000 wrote: post #38
roboneal wrote: post #3

Summary: 1. Finnish parents read with their children. 2. Low immigration - so "Finnish as a second language" is not a problem there. 3. Education and educators are valued highly by Finnish culture. 4. And contrary to all our K-4 efforts, kids don't start school to 7.

Canada also scores highly in PISA rankings. However it is officially bilingual, has high immigration, many ESL and FSL students. Within Canada: Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec score higher than the national average and they are the provinces with the highest in-migration.

[deleted]

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#46

Post by fhars »

r7000 wrote: post #38
roboneal wrote: post #3

Summary: 1. Finnish parents read with their children. 2. Low immigration - so "Finnish as a second language" is not a problem there. 3. Education and educators are valued highly by Finnish culture. 4. And contrary to all our K-4 efforts, kids don't start school to 7.

Canada also scores highly in PISA rankings. However it is officially bilingual, has high immigration, many ESL and FSL students. Within Canada: Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec score higher than the national average and they are the provinces with the highest in-migration.

Finland is officially bilingual, too, and a significant number learn finnish as a second language (like this Thorvalds guy you might have heard about). The rest start learming swedish as the second language in grade 3, IIRC.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#47

Post by sesqu »

yardie wrote: post #42
drunkpotato wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statement is glib and unproductive. Obviously there are advantages to homogeneous societies. There are advantages to heterogeneous societies, which the U.S. is a pretty good example of. The point is not which is "better", but what lessons can we take to improve the things in our society which are deficient? Education in the U.S. is currently deficient, and we should look at why and how and try to find out what w…

A lot of big universities have research schools where they test schooling techniques on students, run assessments and see what works. The problem is most of these schools are near big universities. So you've got an overwhelming amount of students who are nurtured in an education rich environment (mama is a professor, papa is an adjunct, etc.), they are well ahead of the rest of the country as far as educational exper…

Interestingly, I'm under the impression that Finnish research schools tend to be small and remote ones, but maybe that's just my poor geography showing.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#48

Post by sesqu »

r7000 wrote: post #30
Adrock wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equally unfashionable is the idea that there are advantages to homogeneous societies and classrooms.

Are there any reasons to believe that is relevant? If you take PISA scores to be a good indicator than there are homogeneous and non-homogeneous societies near the top and bottom. Canada ranks right up there with Finland every year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PISA sometimes topping Finland in a category. It is easy to find countries that are culturally homogeneous near the bottom of the rankings as well.

Canada and Finland are culturally far more similar than the US and Finland. Both are also bilingual, northern, woodsy and even share some genetics (Finns mostly migrated to Canada, Michigan etc. way back when that was happening).

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#50

Post by tokenadult »

_h4xr wrote: post #35
vdm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a slippery slope, next stop is saying that large poor families are just lazy and want to have sex instead of work and be smart. And that has nothing to do with being PC. cf. Guns, Germs and Steel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

That is definitely not an answer. Grandparent suggested that genetics plays a role in why people in one country are different from people in another. And you respond by saying that if he says that, he might say something else, which you find even more unacceptable! It should be possible to admit that if 1) you're dealing with a country of genetic relatives, and 2) genetic factors are responsible for 60-80% of the var…

genetic factors are responsible for 60-80% of the variance in IQ

That is untrue, and is known to be untrue by the leading researchers on human behavioral genetics.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1177649

The current view by the researchers most familiar with the data is that broad heritability figures report, for a given sample, simply that monozygotic twins tend to be more similar than dizygotic twins, and close relatives tend to be more similar (across a HUGE range of human behavioral traits) than more distant relatives. But the pre-Mendelian methodology of compiling broad heritability figures FAILS as a prediction of how subject one trait or another is to environmental influences. It is well known that some traits with very high heritability (physical stature is the classic example) are nonetheless very subject to variance in differing environments. No one should take one heritability figure or another as a statement about how much or how little a trait can vary if the environment is manipulated experimentally. Any good, current genetics textbook mentions this.

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