Kouluarkkitehtuuri on tietämisen suunnittelua

Koulujen tilasuunnittelusta on käyty viime aikoina julkista keskustelua monenlaisista tulokulmista. Useissa puheenvuoroissa on huomioitu esimerkiksi ääneen ja sen eristykseen, terveyteen, hyvinvointiin, tilojen organisointiin sekä budjettiin liittyviä seikkoja. Haluaisin ehdottaa keskusteluun yhden näkökulman lisää, pohjautuen siihen yksinkertaiseen ajatukseen, että koulut ovat tietämisen paikkoja

Kouluarkkitehtuuri on tietämisen suunnittelua

Koulujen tilasuunnittelusta on käyty viime aikoina julkista keskustelua monenlaisista tulokulmista. Useissa puheenvuoroissa on huomioitu esimerkiksi ääneen ja sen eristykseen, terveyteen, hyvinvointiin, tilojen organisointiin sekä budjettiin liittyviä seikkoja. Haluaisin ehdottaa keskusteluun yhden näkökulman lisää, pohjautuen siihen yksinkertaiseen ajatukseen, että koulut ovat tietämisen paikkoja.</p

Syvemmälle sokkeloon : historianopetus, historiallinen ajattelu ja tieteentutkimus

Arviointia: Näinkö historiaa opitaan? /Jukka Rantala, Mikko Puustinen, Amna Khawaja, Marko van den Berg & Najat Ouakrim-Soivio -teoksen teemoja, piirteitä ja väitteitä

Historians and conceptual change in history itself: The domain as a unit of analysis

Along their path towards expertise, historians undergo conceptual changes. The purpose of this theoretical paper is to argue that conceptual change in history involves, first, a fundamental shift from an understanding of history as the past to an understanding of history as human production. And second, expert conceptual change involves understanding multiple approaches to the production of history. Each approach is associated with constraints on historical concepts and meta-concepts. We outline differences and similarities between these broad approaches through a framework that merges epistemic cognition and historical theory. Currently, there exists no singular conception of history to set as an unproblematic aim of epistemic education, and conceptual change must therefore embrace the aim of understanding of multiple conceptions.</p

Aims in the practice of historiography: An interview study with Finnish historians

Many recent approaches to history education—such as ones related to historical thinking, historical reasoning, or inquiry-based learning—have brought the practice of historiography (i.e. historical research and writing) to the center the learning about history. Students are to learn about how historical knowledge is constructed, and this is often pursued by instructional methods such as modeling or simulating expert historians’ practices in classrooms. In this paper, we approach historiography primarily as an epistemic practice that shaped in part by (historians’) aims or goals.  Understanding those aims can contribute significantly to our understanding of the historical inquiries that ensue. Yet education has not made these aims a central focus of research or instruction. Therefore, we explored academic historians’ aims in their practices of historiography. We interviewed 26 Finnish historians about their ongoing research endeavors. Our results display a range of aims in academic historiography, including general epistemological concepts (e.g. knowledge), dialogical aims (e.g. question existing ideas), textual products, dissemination (e.g. popularizing), bringing about societal change (e.g. influence sense of possibilities), connection to present, and emotions. These findings improve our understanding of the diversity of historiography as an intentional practice, and thus provide a better ground for developing the kind of history education that builds on historians’ practices.</p

Changes in healthy and unhealthy working life expectancies among older working-age people in Finland, 2000-2017

Background Raising the statutory retirement age has been a common policy response to population ageing, but health problems may restrict labour force participation in older ages. We examined the development of healthy and unhealthy working life expectancies in Finland from 2000 to 2017 using different measures of health problems. Methods Healthy and unhealthy working life expectancies were calculated for the age range 50-65 years using the Sullivan method. The health measures were limiting long-standing illness, self-rated health, mental health problems and self-assessed work ability. Results Healthy working life expectancy was highest when health was measured by work ability. From 2000 to 2017, working years in full ability between the ages 50-65 increased from 6.2 (95% confidence interval 5.9-6.4) to 8.2 (8.0-8.5). Healthy working life expectancy increased also when measured by the other indicators. Unhealthy working years also increased, except when health problems were measured by limiting long-standing illness. The share of years in work increased both within the healthy and the unhealthy years, the increase being larger or equally large for the latter. Within the healthy and unhealthy years measured by the other three indicators, the share of working years increased irrespective of whether work ability was full or limited, but the increase was larger for limited work ability. Conclusions In Finland, healthy working life expectancy has increased irrespective of how health is measured but also working with health problems has become more prevalent. The estimates for healthy working years are highest when a direct measure of work ability is used.Peer reviewe

Association of short poor work ability measure with increased mortality risk : a prospective multicohort study

Publisher Copyright: © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.OBJECTIVES: To examine whether a single-item measure of self-rated work ability predicts all-cause mortality in three large population-based samples collected in 1978-1980, 2000 and 2017. SETTING: A representative sample of the population of Finland. PARTICIPANTS: The study population comprised 17 178 participants aged 18 to 65 from the population-based Mini-Finland, Health 2000 and FinHealth 2017 cohort studies, pooled together. In all cohorts, self-rated work ability was assessed at baseline (1978-80, 2000-2001 and 2017) using three response alternatives: completely fit (good work ability), partially disabled (limited work ability) and completely disabled (poor work ability) for work. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: All-cause mortality from national registers. Cox proportional hazards models were adjusted for socioeconomic characteristics, lifestyle factors, self-rated health and mental health problems. RESULTS: Of the participants, 2219 (13%) were classified as having limited and 991 (5.8%) poor work ability and 246 individuals died during the 4 year follow-up. The age- and sex-adjusted HR for mortality risk was 7.20 (95% CI 5.15 to 10.08) for participants with poor vs good work ability and 3.22 (95% CI 2.30 to 4.43) for participants with limited vs good work ability. The excess risk associated with poor work ability was seen in both genders, all age groups, across different educational levels, self-rated health levels and in those with and without mental health problems. The associations were robust to further adjustment for education, health behaviours, self-rated health and mental health problems. In the multivariable analyses, the HR for mortality among those with poor vs good work ability was 5.75 (95% CI 3.59 to 9.20). CONCLUSIONS: One-item poor self-rated work ability -measure is a strong predictor of increased risk of all-cause mortality and may be a useful survey-measure in predicting severe health outcomes in community-based surveys.Peer reviewe

Moving mathematics out of the classroom: Using mobile technology to enhance spontaneous focusing on quantitative relations

Spontaneous focusing on quantitative relations (SFOR) has been shown to be a strong predictor of rational number conceptual development in late primary school. The present study outlines an intervention program that examines the possibilities to enhance late primary school students’ SFOR tendency. The intervention program harnessed mobile technology in order to allow students to explore and identify quantitative relations in their everyday environment, including situations outside of the classroom. A total of 38 thirteen-year-olds from two classrooms participated in the seven-week long quasi-experimental study. One classroom spent five lessons over five weeks participating in activities which involved uncovering, defining and describing multiplicative relations in their everyday surroundings. In comparison to a business as usual control group, results show the intervention to be successful in enhancing SFOR tendency. These results suggest that it is possible to utilize mobile technologies to enhance students’ awareness of the possibilities to use quantitative relations as explicit targets of focusing and reasoning in nonexplicitly mathematical situations.</p

Towards an Integrated Online Learning System for Microscopic Pathology: Two Teaching Examples

Microscopy is an essential basis for exploring and understanding pathological disease mechanisms. As a discipline, pathology is highly dependent on visual imaging technologies. Currently, digital pathology is a standard method with special advantages in both clinical histopathological diagnostics as well as the education of (undergraduate and postgraduate) medical students and pathology residents. However, to date, the available digital applications lack features to optimally support online collaborative learning and teaching of histopathology, such as possibilities for learners to individually perform tasks (e.g. annotate) on digital slides, opportunities for groups to reflect on their work and to receive feedback from more knowledgeable peers or supervisors. Such shortcomings have recently become more imminent, due to shifts toward more online learning in pathology education. Therefore, the cLovid (collaborative learning of viewing and decision-making skills) project set out to build an integrated online learning system featuring • an open-source webmicroscope (an extension to the OMERO viewer) with enhanced features for annotating whole-slide images, allowing integration with assessment and feedback software; • an online assessment software—e.g., VQuest, in our design—for constructing assignments using various types of responses (e.g. marker questions, which are ideal for visual domains), suitable for developing image interpretation skills through active learning with large images • an open-source software dashboard (PRISMA) for synthesizing and visualizing students’ responses in tasks using various types of responses, allowing teachers to provide collective feedback to groups of students, as well as a joint platform for communication for both on-site and remote settings. Subsequently, the project team carried out two teaching pilots to demonstrate how this system can be used for teaching with guided activity, collaboration, feedback, reflection and possibilities for the teachers to model diagnostic reasoning. The teaching examples involved the pathology curriculum of second-year undergraduate medical students (N=70) in two European universities and the training of pathology residents (N=16) in Finland. In this paper, we present the development of the integrated system for online teaching and learning of histopathology and exemplify its use in the two scenarios. Lessons learned from the teaching pilots will be discussed