24 Nov Project dissemination at preseminar of the FERA Conference on Education
Today the Finnish team’s dissemination work continued online at a pre-seminar to the Finnish Educational Research Association (FERA) Conference on Education, The pre-seminar was organized by the Teaching and Assessing Transversal Competences in Formal and Informal Learning Environments project, funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland. The Research Group for Education, Assessment and Learning (REAL), responsible for coordinating the project, is a collaboration between Tampere University, the University of Helsinki, and the University of Jyväskylä.
The pre-seminar presented a range of research on transversal skills in presentations and workshops. National research coordinator Iida-Maria Peltomaa represented and presented the ATS STEM project at the pre-seminar. A particularly interesting workshop, lead by Tiina Mäkelä and Kristóf Fenyvesi, both of whom are Postdoctoral researchers at the University of Jyväskylä, discussed learning environments that support the development of transversal skills or competencies in a STEAM context.
Laatuska, a new digital learning environment aimed to help teachers assess transversal skills according to the Finnish National Core Curriculum for basic education, in both subject-specific teaching and interdisciplinary learning modules, was also presented in the pre-seminar. Laatuska is “a gamified way for students to reflect on their own strengths and areas of improvement, taking into account their own level of development. Students can think about and set goals for themselves that relate to knowledge, skills, attitudes, values and their own willingness to act.” Furthermore, teachers are able to set goals for student skills development and knowledge attainment. The learning environment aims to make assessment more transparent and help students to “understand what will be practiced and assessed at any given time and why”.
Kristóf Fenyvesi also presented interactive, online learning materials that are being developed by University of Jyväskylä’s teacher education students for the course, “Mathematics Learning for Sustainable Development in Multidisciplinary Context” and an open access material bank containing expert videos and lectures on transversal skills and corresponding theoretical frameworks and a compilation of popular texts to support the understanding and teaching of transversal competences.
In the future the hope is to foster more collaboration or synergistic work to advance shared topics between national projects, projects co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, and international projects in general.