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Education Research in Finland

To mark the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER), which is taking place in Finland this year, Education Worldwide is dedicating this web dossier to educational research in Finland.

Finland gained worldwide renown – not just within the educational community – following its outstanding PISA results in the early 2000s. Everyone wanted to know how Finland had achieved such good results, and many sought to use the country’s education system as a model when reforming their own. Since then, the wave of enthusiasm has subsided somewhat. Finland’s PISA results have also declined slightly, although they remain well above the OECD average.

However, Finland continues to make headlines in the world of education:
From around 2015 onwards, the media repeatedly reported that Finland intended to abolish school subjects (see our fact-check). Shortly afterwards, reports emerged that Scandinavian countries, including Finland – which had always been regarded as a pioneer in digital education – were planning to scale back this very same digital education (see, for example, this article by the Reuters news agency).

So things remain exciting in the Finnish education sector. And, as a result, Finnish education researchers may be busy anticipating these developments, monitoring them as they unfold, and analysing and evaluating them in retrospect.

Find out what Finnish educational research is focusing on, which institutions carry out this research, in which journals it is published and how the research community networks in this web dossier on educational research in Finland. 

The dossier provides links to the most relevant websites on the subject. The focus is on freely accessible and free-of-charge sources.

Professional Societies, Associations & Networks

Finland

Finland
"The Finnish Educational Research Association (FERA) was founded in 1967 and it has around 600 members. [Their] main goal is to promote educational research and cooperation between researchers in the field. The cornerstones of [their] activities are the annual FERA conference, the Finnish journal of education “Kasvatus” [with [...]

Finland
Unfortunately, the Finnish Association for University Pedagogy (YPED) does not have its own English website. Therefore, we are linking to the automatic Google translation.
"The purpose of the association is to promote university pedagogical research and the research-based development of pedagogy in universities." YPED publishes [...]

Finland
The Consortium of Higher Education Researchers in Finland (CHERIF) "brings together a wide range of researchers and experts on Finnish higher education." It was founded in 1999 and currently has about 70 members. "The aim of CHERIF is to advance interdisciplinary research on higher education institutions, as well as improve the [...]

Finland
"The KOPTUKE network of universities and universities of applied sciences supports the conditions for high quality research, focusing on teacher education research and research-based development." It aims at strengthening "interaction between the departments providing teacher training in higher education". The network's website [...]

Finland
"The Finnish Society for the History of Education is a science association that was founded in 1935. The society promotes historical research concerning education and training and supports interests in such in Finland.
The society publishes the peer-reviewed journal, Kasvatus & Aika (Education & Time), which is published [...]

Finland
Although the Finnish Society for Social Pedagogics has had a new website since March 2022 - featuring a link labeled "in English" - that section, unfortunately, still reads "Under Construction". On its Finnish-language pages, the Society provides information regarding its activities - which include the promotion of and networking [...]

Finland
The Finnish Society for Research on Adult Education offers only a brief information page in English. It includes a link to the open-access, Finnish-language journal "Aikuiskasvatus", which the Society publishes jointly with the Finnish Lifelong Learning Foundation (Kvs); unfortunately, English abstracts of the articles are not [...]

Finland
"The purpose of the GERIF-network is to bring together researchers working with global education in Finland. [GERIF] focussses on encouraging academic debate and cooperation, bridging gaps between research and practice as well as presenting research in an accessible way. (...) The GERIF-network was established in 2018." GERIF also [...]

Finland
"The purpose of the GERIF-network is to bring together researchers working with global education in Finland. [GERIF] focussses on encouraging academic debate and cooperation, bridging gaps between research and practice as well as presenting research in an accessible way. (...) The GERIF-network was established in 2018." GERIF also [...]

Finland
"The Finnish Multidisciplinary Doctoral Training Network on Educational Sciences (FinEd) is a multidisciplinary network-like consortium made up of eight academic member units providing doctoral education in the educational sciences. The FinEd Network serves as a forum of cooperation for Finnish doctoral programmes in the field of [...]

Nordic Countries / Scandinavia

Denmark; Finland; Iceland; Norway; Sweden; Northern Europe
NFPF/NERA was founded in 1972 and is a research network covering all Nordic countries. The association supports educational research in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. It organises an annual congress and publishes the journal 'Nordic Studies in Education'. As of 2020, [...]

Northern Europe; Denmark; Finland; Iceland; Norway; Sweden
"NOCIES is a non-profit organisation composed of volunteer scholars, researchers and practitioners in all Nordic countries and Arctic region. Its aim is to encourage the growth of comparative and international knowledge [about education] by:

* promoting and improving learning [...]

Research Institutes & Research Centers

Finland
The Ministry of Education and Culture provides a list of Finnish universities with links to their homepages. If you scroll down in the left menu bar, you can also find a list of university consortia and Universites of Applied Sciences. [Abstract: Editors of Education Worldwide]

Finland
The Centre for Educational Assessment (CEA) is a research group within the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Established in 1996, the Centre conducts empirical studies on the assessment of achievement and competence, with a particular focus on "learning strategies". Among other activities, it is [...]

Finland
"FINEEC started its operations on 1 May 2014. It was formed by combining the evaluation activities of the Finnish Higher Education Evaluation Council, the Finnish Education Evaluation Council and the Finnish National Board of Education. (...) [FINEEC] is an independent government agency responsible for the evaluation of education [in [...]

Finland
"The Centre for University Teaching and Learning (HYPE) at the University of Helsinki conducts research on active learning, psychosocial wellbeing, learning-centred teaching and changes in education in higher education as well as other educational contexts." The website offers information on current news, research (publications & [...]

Finland
"The Faculty of Education and Culture consists of three units with different tasks.
The Unit of Education is a research and learning community investigating the state of education in society and reshaping education. (...)The Faculty also includes the Tampere University Teacher Training School, which trains future teachers, and [...]

Finland
"Higher Education Group (HEG) is a research group within the Faculty of Management and Business at Tampere University. (...) HEG has specialized in research topics of higher education management, governance and finance." The website provides information on study programmes, research projects, cooperations and publications (including [...]

Finland
"UTUPEDA Centre for University Pedagogy and Research operates in the University of Turku. The Centre conducts multidisciplinary research and develops and offers university pedagogical education based on scientific research...". The website primarily provides links to relevant information regarding pedagogical study programs, counseling [...]

Finland
"In the years 1990–2021, in the University of Turku had Research Unit for the Sociology of Education (RUSE), whose operations merged at the beginning of 2022 with the Department of Social Research and its subjects." This page provides comprehensive information regarding projects conducted by the research unit. The key research areas [...]

Finland
The Finnish Institute for Educational Research (KTL/FIER) was founded in 1968 at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. As a national, multidisciplinary center for educational research, it fulfills a national mandate in the field of educational research under the auspices of the Ministry of Education and Culture. The national [...]

Finland
"The Faculty of Education and Psychology is a multidisciplinary expert organisation for training, research, and development in the fields of education and psychology." It runs a Center for the study of society, philosophy and education and has the following research units:

* Innovative continuous learning solutions [...]

Finland
The School of Educational Sciences and Psychology is part of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Eastern Finland. Its research areas are: Education and Adult Education, Special Education, Guidance, Psychology. The website furthermore provides a lot of information on research groups and projects, as well as studies at the [...]

Finland
The faculty's "research and teaching on the phenomena of education, teaching and learning explores issues of inclusion, equality, non-discrimination and sustainability with a Northern emphasis." The website provides a lot of information on research projects and publications based on the university's database. Furthermore you can learn [...]

Finland
The department focuses on the following educational areas: Adult Education; Education, Preschool teacher; Education, Teacher training; General Pedagogy; Home Economics; Sloyd (crafts/Scandinavian woodcarving tradition); Special Education. The links to research projects and publications are not yet functional, as they refer to the [...]

Scholarly Journals

Research topics, trends & history

Finland
A brief overview of the current circumstances under which educational research is conducted in Finland. The text focuses less on specific current topics in Finnish educational research. The text was written by Marjatta Lairio of the Faculty of Education, Jyväskylä University. [Abstract: Editors of Education Worldwide]

Finland
This website provided by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture lists the Finnish results of all PISA-Studies since the year 2000. Furthermore, you will find a short summary of the reasons generally put forward for explaning Finland's ongoing success in doing the PISA Test. For [...]

Finland
The University of Helsinki's research portal offers both basic and advanced search options for persons, publications, projects, research infrastructures, research units, (research) datasets, activities, awards, and press/media related to the university. Additionally, users can view international and national project collaborations on a [...]

"This chapter considers the historical roots of critical studies of Finnish education, particularly sociology, politics, and the history of education. It presents an interview with six emeriti professors who have participated in constructing the academic field. The chapter highlights their views about the greatest achievements of societally-oriented educational research in [...]

This publication is part of the yearbook series of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers in Finland (CHERIF). "The Yearbook, despite its name, is not an annual publication, but represents an effort by CHERIF to publish, with some regularity, issues of significance concerning Finnish higher education. (...) For this Yearbook, an open call for papers was issued widely, [...]

This scoping review examines the trends and themes of teacher education research in the specific educational context of Finland. It focuses on peer-reviewed studies published between 2011 and 2021, including empirical data collected from students in Finnish teacher education programmes. The first objective was to analyse the trends in the research volume, research methods and [...]

"This chapter offers a review of global education (GE) research in Finland for over ten years, starting from 2007. The discussions on GE have involved a broad range of partners from the government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and academia. In this review we aim to identify the contributions of the research on these discussions as well as what gaps in knowledge have [...]