Multiple aspects of validity theory in the service of an oral proficiency assessment project

Non Peer reviewe

What Kind of Feedback is Perceived as Encouraging by Finnish General Upper Secondary School Students?

Our main aim in this study was to compare encouraging feedback practices in Finnish general upper secondary foreign language classes and examine how students perceive language teachers’ assessment practices. The participants were 160 students of English, 95 students of Swedish, and 27 students of French from six general upper secondary schools. The data comprised one open-ended question and one Likert scale question with nine items. Both qualitative and quantitate methods were used to analyze the data. The results showed that content was the most important feature in feedback that was perceived as encouraging by students. The results further indicated that students considered teacher assessment practices to be primarily summative, but differences were also found between schools. The evidence from this study suggests that students appreciate teacher feedback, but do not perceive it to be an intrinsic part of teacher assessment practices. The importance of formative assessment and feedback should be more heavily emphasized in foreign language teacher education

What Kind of Feedback is Perceived as Encouraging by Finnish General Upper Secondary School Students?

Our main aim in this study was to compare encouraging feedback practices in Finnish general upper secondary foreign language classes and examine how students perceive language teachers’ assessment practices. The participants were 160 students of English, 95 students of Swedish, and 27 students of French from six general upper secondary schools. The data comprised one open-ended question and one Likert scale question with nine items. Both qualitative and quantitate methods were used to analyze the data. The results showed that content was the most important feature in feedback that was perceived as encouraging by students. The results further indicated that students considered teacher assessment practices to be primarily summative, but differences were also found between schools. The evidence from this study suggests that students appreciate teacher feedback, but do not perceive it to be an intrinsic part of teacher assessment practices. The importance of formative assessment and feedback should be more heavily emphasized in foreign language teacher education

The Perceptions of Student Teachers of Online Pedagogical Courses and Assessment Practices in Finnish Subject Teacher Education

The purpose of this case study was to explore how student teachers at the University of Helsinki perceived pedagogical courses in emergency remote teaching. The dataset consists of the responses of 79 students to an online questionnaire and interviews with five students. Descriptive statistics, multiple linear regression analysis, and content analysis were used to analyze the data. The students pointed out that, on average, teachers have mastered the pedagogy of remote teaching well, although older teachers had more challenges than younger teachers. The quality of teaching was reported as being high. Teachers’ pedagogical knowledge was the strongest predictor of successful remote teaching. In terms of assessment, teachers mostly used essays and other written assignments to assess students’ achievement. According to most students, the assessment practices were implemented successfully. The results provide insights for developing remote teaching in teacher education

The Perceptions of Student Teachers of Online Pedagogical Courses and Assessment Practices in Finnish Subject Teacher Education

The purpose of this case study was to explore how student teachers at the University of Helsinki perceived pedagogical courses in emergency remote teaching. The dataset consists of the responses of 79 students to an online questionnaire and interviews with five students. Descriptive statistics, multiple linear regression analysis, and content analysis were used to analyze the data. The students pointed out that, on average, teachers have mastered the pedagogy of remote teaching well, although older teachers had more challenges than younger teachers. The quality of teaching was reported as being high. Teachers’ pedagogical knowledge was the strongest predictor of successful remote teaching. In terms of assessment, teachers mostly used essays and other written assignments to assess students’ achievement. According to most students, the assessment practices were implemented successfully. The results provide insights for developing remote teaching in teacher education

Yhdeksäsluokkalaisten opiskelukäytänteet englannin, ruotsin ja ranskan oppitunneilla ja vapaa-ajalla

The article reports on a quantitative investigation of the differences in Finnish 15–16 year- old students’ self-reported foreign/second language (L2) study practices and use across three languages: English (n=3,476), Swedish (n=1,679), and French (n=1,023). The data set consisted of (a) a questionnaire about students’ background and L2 study practices/use and (b) their L2 speaking and writing proficiency. The differences between the languages were generally small although the students reported to do their homework in Swedish considerably less regularly than in English and French and English was used more outside classroom than Swedish and French. The differences in the background variables and the correlations between the language practices/use and the language proficiency were generally small, too, although doing homework in French correlated moderately with proficiency. The findings imply paths to enhance coherence across language education integration of language learning in and outside school

Self-supervised end-to-end ASR for low resource L2 Swedish

Publisher Copyright: Copyright © 2021 ISCA.Unlike traditional (hybrid) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), end-to-end ASR systems simplify the training procedure by directly mapping acoustic features to sequences of graphemes or characters, thereby eliminating the need for specialized acoustic, language, or pronunciation models. However, one drawback of end-to-end ASR systems is that they require more training data than conventional ASR systems to achieve similar word error rate (WER). This makes it difficult to develop ASR systems for tasks where transcribed target data is limited such as developing ASR for Second Language (L2) speakers of Swedish. Nonetheless, recent advancements in selfsupervised acoustic learning, manifested in wav2vec models [1, 2, 3], leverage the available untranscribed speech data to provide compact acoustic representation that can achieve low WER when incorporated in end-to-end systems. To this end, we experiment with several monolingual and cross-lingual selfsupervised acoustic models to develop end-to-end ASR system for L2 Swedish. Even though our test is very small, it indicates that these systems are competitive in performance with traditional ASR pipeline. Our best model seems to reduce the WER by 7% relative to our traditional ASR baseline trained on the same target data.Peer reviewe

Att läsa bedömningsuppdraget

The last decades have seen regular and frequent modifications of the wording of school curricula in the Nordic countries together with increased appeals from teachers for further clarification. The paper analyzes how assessment of the subject English is presented in Sweden and Finland at the lower and upper secondary levels. The aim was to explore how much space was given to assessment in the texts, the types of expectations on school staff the texts generate, and the competences required to meet these, while considering the predominant curriculum theories reflected in these texts.  It is a comparative case study combining qualitative and quantitative methods. The results show an imbalance between the two countries when it comes to space allocated to assessment.  The Finnish curriculum is more extensive and distinct compared to the Swedish one.  In both countries teachers’ main obligation is to make assessments based on knowledge and praxeological competence. Systematic and deliberative curriculum theory permeates both, but the shorter Swedish general guidelines give more space for local interpretation than the more detailed Finnish guidelines. Nevertheless, there are several issues in both curricula that can cause ambiguity. The importance of more distinct and transparent guidelines is thus apparent.

Arviointiuudistuksen alkutaipaleella : Perusopetuksen päättöarviointitutkimuksen loppuraportti

Opetus- ja kulttuuriministeriön rahoittamassa tutkimushankkeessa on tutkittu perusopetuksen päättöarviointiuudistuksen käyttöönottoa. Tutkimus oli osa opetus- ja kulttuuriministeriön vuosina 2020–2022 toteuttamaa varhaiskasvatuksen ja perusopetuksen laatua ja tasa-arvoa parantavaa Oikeus Oppia -kehittämisohjelmaa. Tutkimuksen toteutti Jyväskylän yliopiston Koulutuksen tutkimuslaitoksen ja Helsingin yliopiston Kasvatustieteellisen tiedekunnan muodostama tutkimusryhmä. Tutkimushankkeeseen sisältyi kolme osa-aluetta: 1) opetustoimen johdon ja rehtoreiden näkökulma uudistukseen, 2) opettajien näkökulma uudistukseen sekä 3) perusopetuksen päättöarvosanojen muutokset. Tutkimus rajattiin viiteen oppiaineeseen: äidinkieli ja kirjallisuus, matematiikka, fysiikka, englanti ja historia. Tutkimushankkeen tulokset perustuvat opetustoimen johdolle, rehtoreille ja opettajille tehtyihin kyselyihin ja haastatteluihin sekä rekisteriaineistoon perusopetuksen päättöarvosanoista. Loppuraportissa on kuvattu, miten uudistusprosessi on kunnissa ja kouluissa edennyt, miten opetustoimen henkilöstö kokee uudistuksen, miten he tulkitsevat uusia arviointilinjauksia ja päättöarvioinnin kriteereitä sekä miten päättöarvosanat ovat muuttuneet uudistuksen jälkeen. Raportissa esitetään myös suosituksia siitä, miten arviointilinjauksia ja päättöarvioinnin kriteereitä tulisi kehittää jatkossa