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There Is No Homework In Finland

42 points by caffeinewriter 13y ago

skrinko 13y ago
Finland ≠ Sweden
- caffeinewriter 13y ago
  Thanks for the heads up. Apparently I can't read.
eshvk 13y ago
I am not sure what to make of this: 1. Sure high school graduation rates are higher in Finland than in the U.S., can you actually compare those across the board? Is what a high schooler studies in Finland the same as what they study in the U.S.? Maybe there are other societal issues why people drop out in the U.S. compared to Finland which I understand has a homogenous largely white population. 2. So there is no homework in Sweden? So fucking what? There is lots of homework in India and China. If I understand correctly, those guys are supposed to be eating our lunch? 3. The teachers have masters degrees; yet it is not clear to me how adding two more years of education is going to magically transform our education system? 4. The only thing that seems intriguing to me is individual attention. Good classroom ratios. Yet is that feasible to scale up in the U.S.?
- sp332 13y ago
  1. Since Finland students only get one standardized test, it's very difficult to determine. I have no idea why that's listed as a positive thing in the graphic; you can't improve what you don't measure! 2. According to the article, Finland's average PISA scores are higher than Hong Kong or Japan. 3 & 4. Since the degrees are subsidized by the sate, there are a lot more people getting them. This helps recruit enough teachers to maintain the 12:1 student/teacher ratio.
  - mrbgty 13y ago
    Re 1. Standardized tests reminds me of software dev managers who want to track bug counts to measure productivity. There are so many factors to education that the result of any standardized test is questionable. Everyone thinks and problem solves differently and what the tests do is encourage teachers to teach students to all think in the same way in order to get the best result on the test. They teach to the test in order to make their own statistics look good so they won't be punished.
    - sp332 13y ago
      Ah, I was hoping to avoid this argument. If your students aren't doing well, having a "questionable" measurement is better than nothing.
      - Dylan16807 13y ago
        Why do you take that as a given? A bad measurement can easily lead to you going further in the wrong direction.
        sp332 13y ago
        ... How do you know you're going in the wrong direction?
- dirtyaura 13y ago
  Finland's success in Pisa scores is the reason that these practices are highlighted. Although homogenous population plays a role, Finnish scores are constantly better than almost equally homogenous Norway. However, the true reason behind the success of Finnish school system is yet unclear. One thing that certainly plays an important role is that teacher as a profession has traditionally been highly regarded in Finnish society, and it's not trivial to get in to universities to study teaching. There are other interesting aspects, for example does the language play a role: Finland has an affluent Swedish-speaking minority. There a separate schools for Swedish speakers, but they follow similar practices as the rest of the Finnish schooling system. However, for some odd reason doesn't fare as well in Pisa tests than Finnish speaking students, despite that family background of Swedish speakers have traditionally been more stable.
  - berntb 13y ago
    >>Finnish scores are constantly better than almost equally homogenous Norway. Uh, considering the high immigration into Norway -- can you back that up? (Finland is more like the rest of the EU in immigration.)
  - sampo 13y ago
    Here's some theory (very non-mainstream, I would assume) and discussion along lines similar to what you wrote: http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.fi/ http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.fi/
- oneweekwonder 13y ago
  1. You can compare PISA tests as stated in the infographic. 3. My mother has a master degree in math, she is a high school teacher. Her understanding of maths due to her degree sets her apart from the normal teachers with a educational math degree, or any other degree which was not math orientated. You can see in her yearly results she is a good math teacher. I understand this does not hold true for all people. But something that you missed in the infographic is that teachers is held in high regard, something that is lacking in my country of origin and I believe a lot of other countries. 4. I can not answer your question. But yes its proven over and over again smaller classes gives better results. Something that happened at my High school was your were sorted into classes by your marks and that really helped the kids to compete in the higher mark classes, but it also demoralised the kids in the lower mark classes. I know my mothers high school tries to follow the same kind of strategy but for technical reasons its not that possible and thus not so obvious.
  - eshvk 13y ago
    > 3. My mother has a master degree in math, she is a high school teacher. Her understanding of maths due to her degree sets her apart from the normal teachers with a educational math degree, or any other degree which was not math orientated. You can see in her yearly results she is a good math teacher. I understand this does not hold true for all people. But something that you missed in the infographic is that teachers is held in high regard, something that is lacking in my country of origin and I believe a lot of other countries. I am not clear how taking graduate courses in Mathematics which can range anything from Measure Theory, Abstract algebra to Grad. Real Analysis helps you become a better teacher to high schoolers whose interaction with mathematics should ideally have enough coverage from the basic level. The respect thing is not clear to me. Lawyers and Investment bankers are not respected here in the U.S., yet they flourish. Ultimately, if you are passionate about what you do, what people think of you (or not) shouldn't matter so much. My personal hypothesis is that people in America (parents) give way too much responsibility to the school to educate their children and expect magic to happen from people who are merely paid to take care of your children. Quit having kids or take more responsibility in teaching them. My mother is a teacher too and I recall she spent more time teaching me stuff at home before I even went to kindergarten and that definitely helped keep me ahead of the curve. Sure, her ability to teach helped her a bit but surely it is not that hard as a parent to take more of an active interest in your child's education rather than flopping helplessly and whining about schools and such. /end rant
ianb 13y ago
Interesting about the Master's Degree. In the U.S. teacher education seems unrelated to performance, including Master's Degrees. Which isn't how it should be. It makes me wonder if one of our great flaws here is in how we teach teachers.
- thejteam 13y ago
  If you have seen what constitutes a "masters" degree for teachers you wouldn't be surprised. Honors high school courses are more rigorous. This is not an exaggeration. My wife has taken several "masters" level teaching courses. They were easier than all of the intro level classes at our undergraduate college. The flaw is this: We need a certain number of teachers. Teachers are required to get a masters degree or they stop getting raises. So teaching colleges make it easy for anybody to get teaching masters degrees.
- tokipin 13y ago
  that may be the case to an extent, but i think the most influential aspect of teaching is something that comes naturally to some and not at all to others. so you end up with vast differences between teaching skill, completely independent of education.
Zelphyr 13y ago
Except you read all the comments in that article and the people from Finland all say they do have homework. While not as linkbaity perhaps it should be retitled, "Finland has an excellent education system."
- yason 13y ago
  School sucks in Finland too, it just might suck a bit less than in some countries. - A finn
  - cesarbs 13y ago
    Care to elaborate?
  - Jhsto 13y ago
    I feel sad about hearing this, since it's like we take too many things for granted. We do not have tuition fees and we get school meal and good, usually motivated teachers which respect the students aswell for free. I study in upper class secondary school and my peers seem to have no idea that they could educate themselves here and get high salary job aboard. Instead, they rather play video games all day and get drunk during weekend without committing any homework. This of course doesn't apply to everybody, but those who do make me feel like we do not deserve our education.
- sp332 13y ago
  I also doubt that the average US 5th grader has 50 minutes of homework every day.
  - MattGrommes 13y ago
    I don't know what the actual average is but as a parent of middle-schoolers that sounds right. I've always fought my kids' teachers to keep them from wasting too much time doing homework but if I didn't they'd probably have at least this much. A friend of my wife had to email her son's 6th grade teacher the other day explaining that the son was sent to bed early and could "only" spend 4 hours on the homework that _day_.
cs702 13y ago
In Finland, teachers are selected from the top 10% of college graduates.[1] In the US, nearly half of all new teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates.[2] Homework or no homework, Finnish students are learning directly from -- and personally interacting with -- some of the brightest minds in their country, every day. -- [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands... [2] http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Closing_the_talent_gap.pdf http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education...
- wklauss 13y ago
  My guess is that you cannot replicate that model in US because salary differences between private companies and universities are abysmal. In finland being selected to have the opportunity to become a teacher is an honor and you quality of life will not be much different than the one you'll get if you choose the private sector. In the US being on the top 10% of your college puts you in a really advantageous position for a much better paid job in the private sector.
- mathattack 13y ago
  When you combine the top 10% with a 12 to 1 student to teacher ratio, great things can happen. This seems more like the US private school model. I'm surprised they didn't mention that Finnish students start school at 7 years old. [1] I would be interested to find out about the dispersion of the Finnish results. Do they huddle around the mean, or are there very positive outliers? I don't have any personal data points, and haven't seen anything published on this. [1] http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/the-finland-phenomenon-inside-the-worlds-most-surprising-school-system-588.php http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/the-finland-phenomenon-...
- sampo 13y ago
  > In Finland, teachers are selected from the top 10% of college graduates. I'm a Finn and I have three issues with that: (A) I think high school would be a better translation for the upper secondary school, or gymnasium (1), in Finland. People usually graduate at age 19, and then apply to universities and other places. (B) Well yes, the acceptance rates for B.Sc. and M.Sc. in education (to become a schoolteacher) are 5%–10%, but a lot of people, if not accepted, will reapply the next years, so this inflates the statistics. (C) People who apply to study education, may not have been in the top 10% of their high school to begin with. (Some may have been, but a majority, no.) (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(school) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(school)
pflats 13y ago
According to the article, 7% of Finnish children don't graduate high school, compared to 25% of US children. 22% of US children live in poverty. 4% of Finnish children live in poverty.[1] Strange. Furthermore, it's my personal policy that anyone who creates an infographic with a bar graph that starts at 520 and goes up to 570 should be ignored. Either they are trying to intentionally skew interpretation of the data by presenting it in a misleading fashion, or they don't know enough about mathematics to understand why their graph is misleading. Neither one presents a reliable source. [1]http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Finland/United-States/Economy http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Finland/United-States/Ec...
- wklauss 13y ago
  Yes, Finland is a great country to live in. Also Sweden, Norway and Denmark. But people start loosing interest the moment you mention taxation. This things don't come cheap and in the US is hard to sell the idea of "high taxes = better quality of life".
  - cesarbs 13y ago
    Some of my colleagues at Microsoft have worked in Denmark and they all complain about the taxation there and consider it unacceptable. I honestly can't understand that. I'd rather give half my salary in taxes to the government and get free education, healthcare and whatnot. My wife and I definitely don't aspire to be rich, as long as we're comfortable we're ok, so maybe that's our difference. What I don't get is how people in the US pay 25% income tax and don't get outraged for getting almost nothing back. Heck, we just put our daughter in public school, and even though it's a public school we have to pay $360 a month for full Kindergarten, otherwise she can only attend 2 hours a day. Besides that, the school has to promote fundraisers to cover their costs, because apparently the only thing the state pays for is teachers' salaries. At least 911 is free. To me it feels like all taxes I pay in the US are mostly just for funding wars :( Even in a shitty country like Brazil you get free education (up to grad school - and state universities are the best in the country), free healthcare and a state pension when you retire. Sure, it all sucks one way or another [1], not because there's not enough money but because politicians down there are extremely corrupt - fix the corruption and you get a tremendous quality of life with a 27,5% income tax. [1] Public healthcare varies from place to place - where I lived (Porto Alegre, RS) it was ok, but in poorer places they don't have a lot of necessary equipment and are understaffed. Although state universities have a lot of research funding and the best professors, the facilities are quite poor. And the state pension is very low, but that could be fixed by fixing the high level of corruption we have first.
Isamu 13y ago
Awesome - and I agree other countries could learn a thing or two from Finland (and other apparent successes.) What's left out of the analysis is the cost, especially the cost per student. That would include the fully subsidized master's degrees for teachers. In the US the spending per student can be pretty high in some areas, but performance seems low. Does anyone have a fairly detailed comparison of education practices, spending, and outcomes from various countries?
mushishi 13y ago
I'm Finnish, and saying that there's no homework is utter misinformation. You do have time to do exercises during the class, and if you're fast, you could end up having no school work but not always. And this is mostly before high school. After that you definitely get homework.
Tuna-Fish 13y ago
There's so much wrong with that infographic I don't even know where to start. There is homework in Finland. I have no clue where that idea came from. The Finnish education system doesn't really match up well enough with the USA that "high school" can be compared. A Finnish student typically starts elementary school at 7, and spends 6 years in lower elementary. Then they move to upper elementary and spend 3 years there. This is where the "responsibility to learn" ends, and every school past that is voluntary. Past those 9 years, students generally choose between vocational school or a lukio, which is sort of like high school that provides general teaching. I have no clue what that 93% number means, but it is certainly not "proportion of age class that completes lukio", as less than that sign up for one. Finnish PISA scores, and all other lower educational metrics are anomalously high when compared to similar peers worldwide. A lot of things are pointed out as reasons for this, but most of those features are also valid, for example, for other Nordic countries whose students don't perform nearly as well. Personally, I think the difference is mostly the language. Finnish language is notoriously hard to learn, but Finnish written language is very regular and phonetic. This means that elementary school students spend a lot less time learning to read and write than students in almost any other countries. This saves much time at an early age, which can then be used to learn other useful subjects, giving Finnish students a head start on their foreign peers. A lot of us, including me, actually taught ourselves to read before school with little more than repeatedly annoying our parents by asking "What does this letter sound like?". Then again, I might just be another idiot assigning my pet cause for a measured effect of uncertain origin. I wonder how students fare in other countries with phonetic written languages? As I understand, Turkey is one, and their scores are not very high. Could someone describe the Turkish education system a little?
- artificialidiot 13y ago
  That's because teachers come from the less gifted and higher education is seen as an unnecessary luxury. Importing science and technology is easier anyway...
- lazyant 13y ago
  Spanish, German, Italian are other "phonetic" languages (if that means that they are pronounced the way they are written), I think the difference is that kids learn to read/write a couple of years earlier.
devilsadvocate9 13y ago
When you adjust American PISA scores for demographics, you see that Americans of all ethnic backgrounds do better than the countries of their ancestors[1]. The mystery of why American schools are so bad disappears when you control for demographics. This might also explain the mystery of why Finland scores so much higher than Sweden and Norway. There are much higher levels of third world immigration in the latter countries. The school system is not the only difference. [1] http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is-destiny-in-education-too-but-washington-doesnt-want-you-to-k http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is...
- lyudmil 13y ago
  Why would comparing those two scores make any sense? The US has a good education system if you compare it to the world average. It's no surprise that people in that system would do better than wherever their ancestors are from because the US is virtually guaranteed to outperform a randomly chosen place in the world.
  - eshvk 13y ago
    > Why would comparing those two scores make any sense? The US has a good education system if you compare it to the world average. It's no surprise that people in that system would do better than wherever their ancestors are from because the US is virtually guaranteed to outperform a randomly chosen place in the world. Because that says that Finnish-Americans do better than Finnish people in Finland?
- tokenadult 13y ago
  This argument appears to be cribbed from a blog post by another author that same year. But this is factually incorrect. 1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009, http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mrs.asp http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mr... and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science. Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mrs.asp http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mr... shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources. 2. All the authors who write on this issue, whether they grew up in the United States or grew up somewhere else, ignore the fact that educated persons in most other countries have acquired English as a working language for personal communication. It amazes me that commenters on international educational comparisons don't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis, http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-Language/dp/0826404049 http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-L... which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is already an impressive achievement. As long as international educational comparisons don't include comparisons of second language ability acquired by schooling, it will be easy for the United States to rank misleadingly high in those comparisons. 3. Moreover, the author's conclusion is suspect even on the basis of the PISA mathematics scores, correcting thoughtfully rather than crudely for demographic factors. More experienced educational researchers who published a peer-reviewed popular article, "Teaching Math to the Talented" http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ dug into the same PISA 2009 data and reached a differing conclusion: "Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests." The PISA program itself has published summary reports suggesting, based on the same 2009 data, that the United States schools underperform relative to levels of public spending on the school system, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf with the report noting that "successful school systems in high-income economies tend to prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of classes," which is not the policy in most states of the United States. Based on those data, a scholar commented, "There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them," http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-education-comparison_x.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu... The PISA program issued another report on how disadvantaged students overcome their backgrounds in national school systems, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf and the United States underperforms the average of OECD countries in this regard too. 4. The blog post author is counting on readers not to challenge his assumption that "American ethnic groups" are causally related to comparing varied national populations with culturally distinct historical experiences and differing school systems. The author's argument appears to be based on a discredited hypothesis built on poorly collected data about the origin of group differences in IQ, with the peer-reviewed refutations of the hypothesis published well before the blog post. Dolan, C. V., Roorda, W., & Wicherts, J. M. (2004). Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GAT-B in Holland and the JAT in South Africa. Intelligence, 35, 155-173. http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 38, 1-20. http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf Anyway group differences of the kind to which the author refers are, according the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, based mostly on environmental factors, Nisbett RE, Aronson J, Blair C, Dickens W, Flynn J, Halpern DF, Turkheimer E. Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. Am Psychol. 2012 Sep;67(6):503-4. doi: 10.1037/a0029772. http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdiffs.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi... so they still raise the question of how learning environments may be improved for learners in some social groups in the United States. http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf
Matti 13y ago
For somewhat less idealistic blog posts on education, Educationrealist is worth reading: http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/2012-in-review/ http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/2012-in-rev... http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/most-popular-posts-and-favorites/ http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/most-popula...
mkoryak 13y ago
I have always prided myself on almost never doing my homework in high school. I did enough to get into college with a 2.1 GPA. I think I would have been much better off if I was assigned less homework or if not doing homework did not lower my grades, I would have had a better GPA.
jiipee_2 13y ago
Uhhuh... There IS homework in finland, on all degrees of school. There are 17-20 students / teacher on average in elementary school, but some areas sport figures of 40+ (But true: almost all of the teachers have university degree on suitable field, quite often pedagogy.) 55% went to college (2010) (References in Finnish: http://www.minedu.fi/etusivu/arkisto/2012/1406/koulutus.html?lang=fi http://www.minedu.fi/etusivu/arkisto/2012/1406/koulutus.html... http://www.oph.fi/download/131532_Opettajat_Suomessa_2010.pdf http://www.oph.fi/download/131532_Opettajat_Suomessa_2010.pd...)
crusso 13y ago
Without doing my own research, any article that opens with "no homework in Finland" that is immediately denounced as untrue by Finnish people is to be mostly disregarded as dubious. I do note the irony of proclaiming the greatness of a lack of standardized tests (because they're useless, right?) in one infographic while using a standardized test to prove how great the Finnish education system is.
deleted 13y ago
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milliams 13y ago
Title: There Is No Homework In Finland In text: "Finnish students rarely do homework until their teens" This is an extremely misleading title. In the UK I didn't start doing homework until I started secondary school at 11 (apart from the odd fun project) so it's hardly different to that.

Finland ≠ Sweden

caffeinewriter 13y ago
Thanks for the heads up. Apparently I can't read.

eshvk 13y ago

I am not sure what to make of this: 1. Sure high school graduation rates are higher in Finland than in the U.S., can you actually compare those across the board? Is what a high schooler studies in Finland the same as what they study in the U.S.? Maybe there are other societal issues why people drop out in the U.S. compared to Finland which I understand has a homogenous largely white population. 2. So there is no homework in Sweden? So fucking what? There is lots of homework in India and China. If I understand correctly, those guys are supposed to be eating our lunch? 3. The teachers have masters degrees; yet it is not clear to me how adding two more years of education is going to magically transform our education system? 4. The only thing that seems intriguing to me is individual attention. Good classroom ratios. Yet is that feasible to scale up in the U.S.?

sp332 13y ago
1. Since Finland students only get one standardized test, it's very difficult to determine. I have no idea why that's listed as a positive thing in the graphic; you can't improve what you don't measure! 2. According to the article, Finland's average PISA scores are higher than Hong Kong or Japan. 3 & 4. Since the degrees are subsidized by the sate, there are a lot more people getting them. This helps recruit enough teachers to maintain the 12:1 student/teacher ratio.
- mrbgty 13y ago
  Re 1. Standardized tests reminds me of software dev managers who want to track bug counts to measure productivity. There are so many factors to education that the result of any standardized test is questionable. Everyone thinks and problem solves differently and what the tests do is encourage teachers to teach students to all think in the same way in order to get the best result on the test. They teach to the test in order to make their own statistics look good so they won't be punished.
  - sp332 13y ago
    Ah, I was hoping to avoid this argument. If your students aren't doing well, having a "questionable" measurement is better than nothing.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      Why do you take that as a given? A bad measurement can easily lead to you going further in the wrong direction.
      - sp332 13y ago
        ... How do you know you're going in the wrong direction?
dirtyaura 13y ago
Finland's success in Pisa scores is the reason that these practices are highlighted. Although homogenous population plays a role, Finnish scores are constantly better than almost equally homogenous Norway. However, the true reason behind the success of Finnish school system is yet unclear. One thing that certainly plays an important role is that teacher as a profession has traditionally been highly regarded in Finnish society, and it's not trivial to get in to universities to study teaching. There are other interesting aspects, for example does the language play a role: Finland has an affluent Swedish-speaking minority. There a separate schools for Swedish speakers, but they follow similar practices as the rest of the Finnish schooling system. However, for some odd reason doesn't fare as well in Pisa tests than Finnish speaking students, despite that family background of Swedish speakers have traditionally been more stable.
- berntb 13y ago
  >>Finnish scores are constantly better than almost equally homogenous Norway. Uh, considering the high immigration into Norway -- can you back that up? (Finland is more like the rest of the EU in immigration.)
- sampo 13y ago
  Here's some theory (very non-mainstream, I would assume) and discussion along lines similar to what you wrote: http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.fi/ http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.fi/
oneweekwonder 13y ago
1. You can compare PISA tests as stated in the infographic. 3. My mother has a master degree in math, she is a high school teacher. Her understanding of maths due to her degree sets her apart from the normal teachers with a educational math degree, or any other degree which was not math orientated. You can see in her yearly results she is a good math teacher. I understand this does not hold true for all people. But something that you missed in the infographic is that teachers is held in high regard, something that is lacking in my country of origin and I believe a lot of other countries. 4. I can not answer your question. But yes its proven over and over again smaller classes gives better results. Something that happened at my High school was your were sorted into classes by your marks and that really helped the kids to compete in the higher mark classes, but it also demoralised the kids in the lower mark classes. I know my mothers high school tries to follow the same kind of strategy but for technical reasons its not that possible and thus not so obvious.
- eshvk 13y ago
  > 3. My mother has a master degree in math, she is a high school teacher. Her understanding of maths due to her degree sets her apart from the normal teachers with a educational math degree, or any other degree which was not math orientated. You can see in her yearly results she is a good math teacher. I understand this does not hold true for all people. But something that you missed in the infographic is that teachers is held in high regard, something that is lacking in my country of origin and I believe a lot of other countries. I am not clear how taking graduate courses in Mathematics which can range anything from Measure Theory, Abstract algebra to Grad. Real Analysis helps you become a better teacher to high schoolers whose interaction with mathematics should ideally have enough coverage from the basic level. The respect thing is not clear to me. Lawyers and Investment bankers are not respected here in the U.S., yet they flourish. Ultimately, if you are passionate about what you do, what people think of you (or not) shouldn't matter so much. My personal hypothesis is that people in America (parents) give way too much responsibility to the school to educate their children and expect magic to happen from people who are merely paid to take care of your children. Quit having kids or take more responsibility in teaching them. My mother is a teacher too and I recall she spent more time teaching me stuff at home before I even went to kindergarten and that definitely helped keep me ahead of the curve. Sure, her ability to teach helped her a bit but surely it is not that hard as a parent to take more of an active interest in your child's education rather than flopping helplessly and whining about schools and such. /end rant

ianb 13y ago

Interesting about the Master's Degree. In the U.S. teacher education seems unrelated to performance, including Master's Degrees. Which isn't how it should be. It makes me wonder if one of our great flaws here is in how we teach teachers.

thejteam 13y ago
If you have seen what constitutes a "masters" degree for teachers you wouldn't be surprised. Honors high school courses are more rigorous. This is not an exaggeration. My wife has taken several "masters" level teaching courses. They were easier than all of the intro level classes at our undergraduate college. The flaw is this: We need a certain number of teachers. Teachers are required to get a masters degree or they stop getting raises. So teaching colleges make it easy for anybody to get teaching masters degrees.
tokipin 13y ago
that may be the case to an extent, but i think the most influential aspect of teaching is something that comes naturally to some and not at all to others. so you end up with vast differences between teaching skill, completely independent of education.

Zelphyr 13y ago

Except you read all the comments in that article and the people from Finland all say they do have homework. While not as linkbaity perhaps it should be retitled, "Finland has an excellent education system."

yason 13y ago
School sucks in Finland too, it just might suck a bit less than in some countries. - A finn
- cesarbs 13y ago
  Care to elaborate?
- Jhsto 13y ago
  I feel sad about hearing this, since it's like we take too many things for granted. We do not have tuition fees and we get school meal and good, usually motivated teachers which respect the students aswell for free. I study in upper class secondary school and my peers seem to have no idea that they could educate themselves here and get high salary job aboard. Instead, they rather play video games all day and get drunk during weekend without committing any homework. This of course doesn't apply to everybody, but those who do make me feel like we do not deserve our education.
sp332 13y ago
I also doubt that the average US 5th grader has 50 minutes of homework every day.
- MattGrommes 13y ago
  I don't know what the actual average is but as a parent of middle-schoolers that sounds right. I've always fought my kids' teachers to keep them from wasting too much time doing homework but if I didn't they'd probably have at least this much. A friend of my wife had to email her son's 6th grade teacher the other day explaining that the son was sent to bed early and could "only" spend 4 hours on the homework that _day_.

cs702 13y ago

In Finland, teachers are selected from the top 10% of college graduates.[1] In the US, nearly half of all new teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates.[2] Homework or no homework, Finnish students are learning directly from -- and personally interacting with -- some of the brightest minds in their country, every day. -- [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands... [2] http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Closing_the_talent_gap.pdf http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education...

wklauss 13y ago
My guess is that you cannot replicate that model in US because salary differences between private companies and universities are abysmal. In finland being selected to have the opportunity to become a teacher is an honor and you quality of life will not be much different than the one you'll get if you choose the private sector. In the US being on the top 10% of your college puts you in a really advantageous position for a much better paid job in the private sector.
mathattack 13y ago
When you combine the top 10% with a 12 to 1 student to teacher ratio, great things can happen. This seems more like the US private school model. I'm surprised they didn't mention that Finnish students start school at 7 years old. [1] I would be interested to find out about the dispersion of the Finnish results. Do they huddle around the mean, or are there very positive outliers? I don't have any personal data points, and haven't seen anything published on this. [1] http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/the-finland-phenomenon-inside-the-worlds-most-surprising-school-system-588.php http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/the-finland-phenomenon-...
sampo 13y ago
> In Finland, teachers are selected from the top 10% of college graduates. I'm a Finn and I have three issues with that: (A) I think high school would be a better translation for the upper secondary school, or gymnasium (1), in Finland. People usually graduate at age 19, and then apply to universities and other places. (B) Well yes, the acceptance rates for B.Sc. and M.Sc. in education (to become a schoolteacher) are 5%–10%, but a lot of people, if not accepted, will reapply the next years, so this inflates the statistics. (C) People who apply to study education, may not have been in the top 10% of their high school to begin with. (Some may have been, but a majority, no.) (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(school) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(school)

pflats 13y ago

According to the article, 7% of Finnish children don't graduate high school, compared to 25% of US children. 22% of US children live in poverty. 4% of Finnish children live in poverty.[1] Strange. Furthermore, it's my personal policy that anyone who creates an infographic with a bar graph that starts at 520 and goes up to 570 should be ignored. Either they are trying to intentionally skew interpretation of the data by presenting it in a misleading fashion, or they don't know enough about mathematics to understand why their graph is misleading. Neither one presents a reliable source. [1]http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Finland/United-States/Economy http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Finland/United-States/Ec...

wklauss 13y ago
Yes, Finland is a great country to live in. Also Sweden, Norway and Denmark. But people start loosing interest the moment you mention taxation. This things don't come cheap and in the US is hard to sell the idea of "high taxes = better quality of life".
- cesarbs 13y ago
  Some of my colleagues at Microsoft have worked in Denmark and they all complain about the taxation there and consider it unacceptable. I honestly can't understand that. I'd rather give half my salary in taxes to the government and get free education, healthcare and whatnot. My wife and I definitely don't aspire to be rich, as long as we're comfortable we're ok, so maybe that's our difference. What I don't get is how people in the US pay 25% income tax and don't get outraged for getting almost nothing back. Heck, we just put our daughter in public school, and even though it's a public school we have to pay $360 a month for full Kindergarten, otherwise she can only attend 2 hours a day. Besides that, the school has to promote fundraisers to cover their costs, because apparently the only thing the state pays for is teachers' salaries. At least 911 is free. To me it feels like all taxes I pay in the US are mostly just for funding wars :( Even in a shitty country like Brazil you get free education (up to grad school - and state universities are the best in the country), free healthcare and a state pension when you retire. Sure, it all sucks one way or another [1], not because there's not enough money but because politicians down there are extremely corrupt - fix the corruption and you get a tremendous quality of life with a 27,5% income tax. [1] Public healthcare varies from place to place - where I lived (Porto Alegre, RS) it was ok, but in poorer places they don't have a lot of necessary equipment and are understaffed. Although state universities have a lot of research funding and the best professors, the facilities are quite poor. And the state pension is very low, but that could be fixed by fixing the high level of corruption we have first.

Isamu 13y ago

Awesome - and I agree other countries could learn a thing or two from Finland (and other apparent successes.) What's left out of the analysis is the cost, especially the cost per student. That would include the fully subsidized master's degrees for teachers. In the US the spending per student can be pretty high in some areas, but performance seems low. Does anyone have a fairly detailed comparison of education practices, spending, and outcomes from various countries?

mushishi 13y ago

I'm Finnish, and saying that there's no homework is utter misinformation. You do have time to do exercises during the class, and if you're fast, you could end up having no school work but not always. And this is mostly before high school. After that you definitely get homework.

Tuna-Fish 13y ago

There's so much wrong with that infographic I don't even know where to start. There is homework in Finland. I have no clue where that idea came from. The Finnish education system doesn't really match up well enough with the USA that "high school" can be compared. A Finnish student typically starts elementary school at 7, and spends 6 years in lower elementary. Then they move to upper elementary and spend 3 years there. This is where the "responsibility to learn" ends, and every school past that is voluntary. Past those 9 years, students generally choose between vocational school or a lukio, which is sort of like high school that provides general teaching. I have no clue what that 93% number means, but it is certainly not "proportion of age class that completes lukio", as less than that sign up for one. Finnish PISA scores, and all other lower educational metrics are anomalously high when compared to similar peers worldwide. A lot of things are pointed out as reasons for this, but most of those features are also valid, for example, for other Nordic countries whose students don't perform nearly as well. Personally, I think the difference is mostly the language. Finnish language is notoriously hard to learn, but Finnish written language is very regular and phonetic. This means that elementary school students spend a lot less time learning to read and write than students in almost any other countries. This saves much time at an early age, which can then be used to learn other useful subjects, giving Finnish students a head start on their foreign peers. A lot of us, including me, actually taught ourselves to read before school with little more than repeatedly annoying our parents by asking "What does this letter sound like?". Then again, I might just be another idiot assigning my pet cause for a measured effect of uncertain origin. I wonder how students fare in other countries with phonetic written languages? As I understand, Turkey is one, and their scores are not very high. Could someone describe the Turkish education system a little?

artificialidiot 13y ago
That's because teachers come from the less gifted and higher education is seen as an unnecessary luxury. Importing science and technology is easier anyway...
lazyant 13y ago
Spanish, German, Italian are other "phonetic" languages (if that means that they are pronounced the way they are written), I think the difference is that kids learn to read/write a couple of years earlier.

devilsadvocate9 13y ago

When you adjust American PISA scores for demographics, you see that Americans of all ethnic backgrounds do better than the countries of their ancestors[1]. The mystery of why American schools are so bad disappears when you control for demographics. This might also explain the mystery of why Finland scores so much higher than Sweden and Norway. There are much higher levels of third world immigration in the latter countries. The school system is not the only difference. [1] http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is-destiny-in-education-too-but-washington-doesnt-want-you-to-k http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is...

lyudmil 13y ago
Why would comparing those two scores make any sense? The US has a good education system if you compare it to the world average. It's no surprise that people in that system would do better than wherever their ancestors are from because the US is virtually guaranteed to outperform a randomly chosen place in the world.
- eshvk 13y ago
  > Why would comparing those two scores make any sense? The US has a good education system if you compare it to the world average. It's no surprise that people in that system would do better than wherever their ancestors are from because the US is virtually guaranteed to outperform a randomly chosen place in the world. Because that says that Finnish-Americans do better than Finnish people in Finland?
tokenadult 13y ago
This argument appears to be cribbed from a blog post by another author that same year. But this is factually incorrect. 1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009, http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mrs.asp http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mr... and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science. Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mrs.asp http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mr... shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources. 2. All the authors who write on this issue, whether they grew up in the United States or grew up somewhere else, ignore the fact that educated persons in most other countries have acquired English as a working language for personal communication. It amazes me that commenters on international educational comparisons don't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis, http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-Language/dp/0826404049 http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-L... which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is already an impressive achievement. As long as international educational comparisons don't include comparisons of second language ability acquired by schooling, it will be easy for the United States to rank misleadingly high in those comparisons. 3. Moreover, the author's conclusion is suspect even on the basis of the PISA mathematics scores, correcting thoughtfully rather than crudely for demographic factors. More experienced educational researchers who published a peer-reviewed popular article, "Teaching Math to the Talented" http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ dug into the same PISA 2009 data and reached a differing conclusion: "Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests." The PISA program itself has published summary reports suggesting, based on the same 2009 data, that the United States schools underperform relative to levels of public spending on the school system, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf with the report noting that "successful school systems in high-income economies tend to prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of classes," which is not the policy in most states of the United States. Based on those data, a scholar commented, "There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them," http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-education-comparison_x.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu... The PISA program issued another report on how disadvantaged students overcome their backgrounds in national school systems, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf and the United States underperforms the average of OECD countries in this regard too. 4. The blog post author is counting on readers not to challenge his assumption that "American ethnic groups" are causally related to comparing varied national populations with culturally distinct historical experiences and differing school systems. The author's argument appears to be based on a discredited hypothesis built on poorly collected data about the origin of group differences in IQ, with the peer-reviewed refutations of the hypothesis published well before the blog post. Dolan, C. V., Roorda, W., & Wicherts, J. M. (2004). Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GAT-B in Holland and the JAT in South Africa. Intelligence, 35, 155-173. http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 38, 1-20. http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf Anyway group differences of the kind to which the author refers are, according the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, based mostly on environmental factors, Nisbett RE, Aronson J, Blair C, Dickens W, Flynn J, Halpern DF, Turkheimer E. Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. Am Psychol. 2012 Sep;67(6):503-4. doi: 10.1037/a0029772. http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdiffs.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi... so they still raise the question of how learning environments may be improved for learners in some social groups in the United States. http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

Matti 13y ago

For somewhat less idealistic blog posts on education, Educationrealist is worth reading: http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/2012-in-review/ http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/2012-in-rev... http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/most-popular-posts-and-favorites/ http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/most-popula...

mkoryak 13y ago

I have always prided myself on almost never doing my homework in high school. I did enough to get into college with a 2.1 GPA. I think I would have been much better off if I was assigned less homework or if not doing homework did not lower my grades, I would have had a better GPA.

jiipee_2 13y ago

Uhhuh... There IS homework in finland, on all degrees of school. There are 17-20 students / teacher on average in elementary school, but some areas sport figures of 40+ (But true: almost all of the teachers have university degree on suitable field, quite often pedagogy.) 55% went to college (2010) (References in Finnish: http://www.minedu.fi/etusivu/arkisto/2012/1406/koulutus.html?lang=fi http://www.minedu.fi/etusivu/arkisto/2012/1406/koulutus.html... http://www.oph.fi/download/131532_Opettajat_Suomessa_2010.pdf http://www.oph.fi/download/131532_Opettajat_Suomessa_2010.pd...)

crusso 13y ago

Without doing my own research, any article that opens with "no homework in Finland" that is immediately denounced as untrue by Finnish people is to be mostly disregarded as dubious. I do note the irony of proclaiming the greatness of a lack of standardized tests (because they're useless, right?) in one infographic while using a standardized test to prove how great the Finnish education system is.

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milliams 13y ago

Title: There Is No Homework In Finland In text: "Finnish students rarely do homework until their teens" This is an extremely misleading title. In the UK I didn't start doing homework until I started secondary school at 11 (apart from the odd fun project) so it's hardly different to that.