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Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

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

#71

Post by btilly »

sesqu wrote: post #69
r7000 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to cultural homogeneity Canada and Finland are not at all more similar than Canada and the U.S. - which was the issue here. Perhaps the Canadian and Finnish educational systems have more in common than with the U.S. which may have been your point. Does being officially bilingual, northern, and woodsy have an impact on PISA rankings? Finns do not make up a large or even a moderate proportion of Canada's…

Does being officially bilingual, northern, and woodsy have an impact on PISA rankings? If I had to guess: yes. I honestly do believe that winters and environmental controls (like pavement) affect your approach to a wide variety of problems, and are immersive enough to do so on a nationwide scale. Not so sure about language, but a lot of other people seem to be. This might manifest in educational systems more prominen…

Here is a problem with the climate hypothesis.

One of the top Canadian provinces educationally is British Columbia. The majority of the province lives in Vancouver and Victoria. Those two cities have an extremely mild climate that is similar to Seattle and bears no resemblance to Finland or the rest of Canada.

If climate was the underlying reason for education going well in Canada, then you would not expect British Columbia to do as well as it does.

(Disclaimer. I'm biased because I grew up in Victoria.)

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

#72

Post by btilly »

r7000 wrote: post #67
btilly wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a dual US/Canadian citizen who grew up in Canada, I absolutely agree with you. There are cultural differences between the USA and Canada, but they are much less than the cultural differences that I've experienced between different parts of the USA. And I'm not sure that growing up I even met anyone with Finnish ancestry outside of my own family.

Actually two of my friends ended up married to Finnish-Canadians: one from a Northern Ontario family (Thunder Bay) and one recently from Finland. So if we go by personal anecdote Canada is indeed full of Finns. :)

Part of the whole cultural mosaic thing is that ethnic groups wind up in fairly well defined geographic areas. I have no reason to doubt that there are significant Finnish communities somewhere in Canada. However I didn't notice any in Victoria, BC.

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

#73

Post by pchristensen »

yellowbkpk wrote: post #70
hugh3 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But education isn't handled at the Federal level in the US (and to the extent that it is, it damn well shouldn't be).

It's handled at the state level. According to [0], Finland has roughly 600,000 students in what we might call K-12 and according to [1] almost all of our states each have at least as many students individually and most have more than double. (Not sure what my point was, but it was interesting to find the data :)) [0] http://www.stat.fi/til/opiskt/2007/opiskt_2007_2008-01-25_ti... (Basic comprehensive school education…

Colorado, the 22nd most populous state, has 5M people. Only 9 states have ~10M or more people.

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

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

#75

Post by stretchwithme »

btilly wrote: post #59
stretchwithme wrote: post #14

perhaps delaying the mind-warping effects of school for a few extra years really helps.

That leaped out at me as well. Piaget demonstrated that brain development tends to come in spurts that are closely correlated with growth spurts. One of the key ones generally hits in the range 5-7 and gives a sudden improvement in ability to learn concrete mental operations such as the ones involved in reading, writing and arithmetic. By contrast the decades long US trend is towards pushing abstract learning younger…

because we have adopted the "no child not dragged behind" system where all we need to do is test and measure everything relentlessly.

It seems to me that mainstream schooling is like mainstream corporate employment. top-down control, mind-numbing meetings all day and the killing of individual initiative.

we need more Montessori schools and more startups!

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

#76

Post by RyanMcGreal »

yellowbkpk wrote: post #70
hugh3 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But education isn't handled at the Federal level in the US (and to the extent that it is, it damn well shouldn't be).

It's handled at the state level. According to [0], Finland has roughly 600,000 students in what we might call K-12 and according to [1] almost all of our states each have at least as many students individually and most have more than double. (Not sure what my point was, but it was interesting to find the data :)) [0] http://www.stat.fi/til/opiskt/2007/opiskt_2007_2008-01-25_ti... (Basic comprehensive school education…

Unrelated aside: I enjoyed the zero-based index for your references. :)

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

#77

Post by hugh3 »

btilly wrote: post #71
sesqu wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does being officially bilingual, northern, and woodsy have an impact on PISA rankings? If I had to guess: yes. I honestly do believe that winters and environmental controls (like pavement) affect your approach to a wide variety of problems, and are immersive enough to do so on a nationwide scale. Not so sure about language, but a lot of other people seem to be. This might manifest in educational systems more prominen…

Here is a problem with the climate hypothesis. One of the top Canadian provinces educationally is British Columbia. The majority of the province lives in Vancouver and Victoria. Those two cities have an extremely mild climate that is similar to Seattle and bears no resemblance to Finland or the rest of Canada. If climate was the underlying reason for education going well in Canada, then you would not expect British C…

Unless the important factor is the absence of extreme heat rather than the presence of extreme cold, in which case Vancouver would be just as good as Helsinki.

Destroying this hypothesis entirely, though, we have the high educational achievement of Singapore, which is hot and humid as heck every single day of the year.

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

#78

Post by tokenadult »

theoneill wrote: post #51
tokenadult wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So what percentage of the variance do they account for?

What exactly do you mean by your question? I'm not sure what you mean, but I'm happy to respond further if I can make sure to understand correctly what you are asking about.

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

#79

Post by tokenadult »

roc wrote: post #54
tokenadult wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are noticeable differences in how schools are operated in Finland ("The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.") that should be looked at in trans-national comparisons. The detailed reading I am doing currently in The Mathematics Pre-Service Teachers Need to Know http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/1308…

Absolutely, methods matter. But there appears to be a very real limit at which changing the method doesn't notably change the results. I don't have a quick cite list. But it's been consistent across literally every single study I've seen that controls for parental involvement/cultural value of education. It's more predictive than parents' education level, neighborhood, curriculum, socioeconomic status, etc. The only…

Those are some very weak correlations reported in that second link, and of course observational studies of the kind reported there have nothing to say about causation.

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

It is regrettable that United States school officials are not more curious about what is going on successfully in other countries.

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

#80

Post by tokenadult »

drunkpotato wrote: post #63
hugh3 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education in the U.S. is currently deficient, and we should look at why and how and try to find out what works. Unfortunately, it's tricky to run experiments in education, because of political considerations and largely because the result has real effects on people's lives, but it's what needs to be done to improve. Or perhaps we need to do things which it is intuitively obvious should work, but which there is curren…

The problem with your intuitionist approach is that you are myopically focusing on some issues without proposing any real solutions. You are not proposing a path from here to there. Fire bad teachers: good idea, but you need to train and attract good teachers at the same time. How do you do that? Teaching is a badly overeducated, underpaid, and under-respected profession in the U.S. Doing more to stop student truancy…

Fire bad teachers: good idea, but you need to train and attract good teachers at the same time.

I have read that the number of American adults of working age who have teaching credentials is something like double the number of currently working teachers. But studies of teacher incompetence

http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-921/incompetent.htm

show that the least capable teachers stay in the occupation the longest, and sometimes their very presence drives out the most competent teachers.

I agree that making schools less like prisons would be better both for teachers and for learners.

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