An investigation into children's agency : children's initiatives and practitioners' responses in Finnish early childhood education

This paper investigates adult–child interaction in the early years of education. The intention is to understand how children's initiatives and practitioners’ responses support and/or hinder children's agency. Our ethnographic data include 150 h of video data supplemented by observational field notes from a Finnish Early Childhood Education (ECE) centre with eight five-year-old children and two ECE practitioners. The video data were analysed abductively by using an Interaction Analysis method. The children's initiatives were found to manifest in several modes, namely asking a question, suggesting, challenging, refusing and ideating. The responses to these initiatives by the ECE practitioners included accepting, accepting after a rejection, adapting, rejecting or ignoring. The analysis points to ways in which adult–child relationships are negotiated in everyday activities, showing the relational nature of agency and suggesting that the ways in which adult engages in the child's initiations are an intricate part of children's agency.Peer reviewe

“My Treasure Box” : Pedagogical documentation, digital portfolios and children’s agency in Finnish early years education

This chapter discusses the opportunities and challenges associated with the inclusive use of digital portfolios in pedagogical documentation in Finnish early childhood education (ECE), and examines children’s participation and agency in the process. The chapter draws upon empirical data from the research and development programme of three Finnish municipalities and their ECE centres. Altogether, the empirical data comprise the digital portfolios of 71 children from six ECE groups each comprising of children aged 3 to 5 years old. This writing demonstrates how the construction of digital portfolios in these ECE groups produced a dynamic tension between the adults’ and children’s agency; between digital archiving and narrative documentation of the children’s lived experiences; and between documentation and reflection. The results also indicate how digital portfolios created inequality among the children regarding the ways in which the children were seen and heard in their portfolios, and how they were able to participate and demonstrate agency in this process. The chapter concludes by considering the conditions of participatory work in ECE classrooms in which the child’s agency. matters.Peer reviewe

Burnout and self-perceived health among Finnish psychiatrists and child psychiatrists: a national survey

Aims: This study investigated burnout and related health matters among a sample of Finnish physicians working within the field of psychiatry.Methods: A postal questionnaire was sent to one in three licensed physicians randomly selected from the register of the Finnish Medical Association (FMA). The response rate was 74% (n = 3133).Results: Psychiatrists and child psychiatrists reported burnout, threat of severe burnout, depression, and mental disorder more commonly than other physicians. Moreover, psychiatrists and child psychiatrists reported less often "good" or "rather good" self-perceived health. Depression had a moderate positive correlation with overall MBI score. Lack of possibilities to consult a colleague, and supervision of work, experience of threat of violence, and self-reported depression were significantly associated with overall burnout level and emotional exhaustion.Conclusions: Emotional exhaustion as a symptom of burnout was common among psychiatrists, especially among those working in community care, and child psychiatrists. Problems of general health, as well as mental health, among psychiatrists and child psychiatrists are in need of attention.</p

Teacher interventions in students’ collaborative work in a technology-rich educational makerspace

This study reports on an investigation of teacher interventions in students' collaborative work in an educational makerspace. We draw on a qualitative analysis of video data on teacher-student interaction derived from 94 students (aged 9-12) and their teachers in a Finnish school. The results show that the teacher interventions were both student- and teacher-initiated. Three leading teacher intervention strategies were identified, namely authoritative, orchestrating and unleashing which emerged in teacher-student interactions dealing with conceptual, procedural, technological, behavioural and motivational issues. The study demonstrates the demands makerspaces pose for teacher-student interaction, and how moving from authoritative to collaborative interaction requires collective efforts and cultural change.Peer reviewe

Towards automated analysis of research methods in library and information science

Previous studies of research methods in Library and Information Science (LIS) lack consensus in how to define or classify research methods, and there have been no studies on automated recognition of research methods in the scientific literature of this field. This work begins to fill these gaps by studying how the scope of “research methods” in LIS has evolved, and the challenges in automatically identifying the usage of research methods in LIS literature. A total of 2,599 research articles are collected from three LIS journals. Using a combination of content analysis and text mining methods, a sample of this collection is coded into 29 different concepts of research methods and is then used to test a rule-based automated method for identifying research methods reported in the scientific literature. We show that the LIS field is characterized by the use of an increasingly diverse range of methods, many of which originate outside the conventional boundaries of LIS. This implies increasing complexity in research methodology and suggests the need for a new approach towards classifying LIS research methods to capture the complex structure and relationships between different aspects of methods. Our automated method is the first of its kind in LIS, and sets an important reference for future research

Dissolving the digital divide : Creating coherence in young people's social ecologies of learning and identity building

This chapter discusses current research on educational efforts to connect school learning with young people’s digital practices in- and out-of-school. Instead of focusing on divides between in-school and out-of-school learning or between the “digital generation” and other age groups, in this chapter we discuss what recent research says about the ways in which school can become a space in which young people’s digital practices can transformatively converge with schooling, and how this convergence is related to their learning and identity building. We begin our narrative reflection of current research by focusing on the myth of digital natives. Next, we will conceptualize recent efforts to researching and understanding young people’s engagement, learning and identity building across sites and contexts. We will then turn to illuminating some key rationales of current educational research on creating convergence in young people’s social ecologies via the use of digital technologies and media. We conclude our reflections by pointing out that although there are some promising findings on how digital technologies and media can create convergence in young people’s engagement and learning across sites and contexts, less research attention is given to young people’s personal sense-making and self-making mediated by their digital practices, and how formal education could build on those practices for academic, vocational and/or civic ends.Peer reviewe

ERO modelling of net and gross erosion of marker samples exposed to L-mode plasmas on ASDEX Upgrade

In this paper, we report experimental and numerical investigations of gross and net erosion of gold (Au) and molybdenum (Mo), proxies for the common plasma-facing material tungsten (W), during L-mode plasma discharges in deuterium (D) in the outer strike-point region of the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak. To this end, erosion profiles of different marker spots (for Au, dimensions 1 x 1 and 5 x 5 mm(2)) and marker coatings (for Mo) have been determined and modelled using the ERO code. The smaller marker spots were designed to quantify the gross-erosion rate while on the bigger markers local prompt re-deposition of Au allowed obtaining data on net erosion. The experimental results indicate relatively uniform erosion profiles across the marker spots or coatings, very little re-deposition elsewhere, and the largest erosion taking place close to the strike point. Compared to W, the markers show up to 15 times higher net erosion but no major differences in the poloidal migration lengths of Au and W can be seen. Gold thus appears to be a proper choice for studying migration of W in the divertor region. The ERO simulations with different background plasmas are able to reproduce the main features of the experimental net erosion profile of Au. Of the studied parameters, electron temperature has the strongest impact on erosion: doubling the temperature enhances erosion by a factor of 2.5-3. In contrast, for Mo, the simulated net erosion is similar to 3 times smaller than what experimental data indicate. The discrepancies can be attributed to the deviations of the background plasma profiles from the measured ones as well as to the applied models or approximations for the ion temperature, plasma potential, and sheath characteristics in ERO. In addition, the surrounding areas of the marker samples being covered with impurities and W from previous experiments may have considerably reduced the actual re-deposition of Mo. All the simulations predict a toroidal tail of re-deposited particles, downstream of the markers, but the particle density seems to be below the experimental detection threshold. The comparison between the 1 x 1 mm(2) and 5 x 5 mm(2) marker spots further reveal that re-deposition drops from >50% toPeer reviewe

Motive-demand dynamics creating a social context for students’ learning experiences in a making and design environment

Making and design environments, often referred to as makerspaces, have aroused recent educational interest. These environments typically consist of spaces that support interest-driven engagement in hands-on creative activities with a range of digital artefacts. Although a variety of benefits from participating in making and design activities have been proposed, we currently have limited understanding of students’ learning experiences in makerspaces situated in schools. Following Hedegaards’ conceptualisations, we investigate motive-demand dynamics in students’ social activity in a school-based digital making and design environment, ‘The FUSE Studio’. We highlight our findings via vignettes selected from 65 h of video recordings of 94 students (aged between 9 and 12 years old) carrying out activities; the recordings were collected intermittently from an elective course over one semester. Our study illustrates how the students’ learning experiences were shaped through tension-laden interplay between the motives and demands of their activity situated across personal, relational and institutional contexts. The findings make visible how established ways of working and being at school interacted and came into tension with the students’ motive orientations, thereby limiting and at times transforming the social context of their learning. Our work also demonstrates how the analysis of motive-demand dynamics offers one useful conceptual tool to unpack students’ learning experiences in novel learning environments.Peer reviewe

Effect of component quality on sensory characteristics of a fish soup

The foodservice industry is a highly competitive branch where customer satisfaction and loyalty is dependent on the price and the quality of the food. To improve cost competitiveness, instead of fresh ingredients, more preprocessed items are used as components in dishes. This may impair the perceived product quality, and thus potentially decrease customer satisfaction. The effects of the component quality on a single dish were tested by serving fish soup in a consumer study (n = 205), and by serving the dish to an in‐house panel (n = 17) using a modified check‐all‐that‐apply method. The variable used for the quality of the fish and vegetable components was a previously unprocessed/fresh component being compared to a processed. This study showed that in a modular dish, each component had an effect on the perceived quality of the dish. When replacing a preprocessed component with a fresh one, the perceived pleasantness increased to a higher level. The fish as the main dish component had the largest effect on the quality. Fresh fish has the ability to enhance the taste of soup, even with frozen vegetables. The results from this study indicate that the effect of freshness can also be perceived in the cooked product. </p