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Self-assessment has been shown to have positive effects on students' self-regulated learning strategies and academic achievement. However, self-assessment and self-assessment instruction are under-researched areas among students with intellectual disability. This data-driven qualitative study aimed at examining the self-assessment expressions students with intellectual disability documented in their learning diaries and how the teacher and teaching assistants used video recordings to facilitate students' self-assessments in one Finnish special needs education class. The naturally occurring research data consisted of both students' tablet-based learning diaries (N = 6) and video recordings of students' self-assessment situations (N = 17). The results show that students' self-assessment expressions varied from short and vague expressions to argumentative and reflective assessments. The use of video recordings served various functions, such as directing and instructing students, demonstrating assessment and providing feedback. The outcomes of this study demonstrate how the self-assessment practices of students with intellectual disabilities can be facilitated by using video.

In flexibly scheduled early childhood education and care (ECEC), the timing of care depends on parents' non-standard working hours. Multiple individual schedules and care times in a child group may cause irregularity in a child's daily structures, and a child may miss a standard hour's activities that are led by teachers with a pedagogical education. In this context, the significance and definition of pedagogy is vague and tensional. This study aimed at disclosing discursive tensions related to pedagogy in flexibly scheduled ECEC constructed in interviews by Finnish teachers and childcare nurses (n = 31). The analysis of the interview data followed the principles of discursive psychology. Consequently, three discursive tensions related to pedagogy were found: (1) children's right to learn vs. their need for care, (2) educators' educational background vs. personal strengths as a standpoint for pedagogical work and (3) pedagogy as standardised vs. meeting children's individual needs. As an implication, it appears problematic if we consider education and care as opposites. Instead, they should be viewed from a holistic pedagogical perspective, as each child has the right to high-quality pedagogy despite the timing of care. Moreover, children's individuality should be at the core of planning pedagogical activities.

The principles of inclusive education largely accepted by governments of different countries require differentiated classroom instruction to meet the diverse needs of individual students. Despite this, teachers have differing experiences and understandings about implementing differentiated instruction (DI) and heterogeneous classrooms. This narrative study aimed at exploring the meanings of DI in the Eritrean context, where teachers are not explicitly familiar with the concept, although their teaching practices reflect some level of differentiation. The research data consisted of 17 narrative interviews with Eritrean mathematics and science teachers. The results of the narrative analysis showed that the teachers constructed five meanings of DI in their narratives: as a caring orientation, as a flexible pedagogic approach, as a self-reflective process, as a failed attempt and as a demanding approach. The majority of the narratives were found to produce positive meanings of DI, and the teachers constructed strong agency towards carrying out DI. These examples of sophisticated DI practices in the teachers' positive narratives could be utilised to implement DI, even in situations where teachers have limited resources and training and in contexts with large class sizes.

Planning support and education services requires multifaceted information from professionals, parents, and children. Despite this, educators have emphasized professional opinions in individual education plans (IEPs), whereas the perspectives of children and parents have remained inconsequential. In this study, we examine the intertextual voices of children, parents, and specialists in IEPs (N = 287) drafted in Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC). The findings show that educators use intertextual voices to serve the following functions: (1) Creating a more multidimensional image of a child, (2) presenting evidence for their argumentation, and (3) assigning the responsibility to others. Consequently, the children, parents, and specialists were positioned as either speakers without influence, legitimators of educator's knowledge, or powerful decision-makers.

Purpose: This study's purpose was to investigate how nurses, using a picture schedule, enable or hinder the realization of disabled children's agency in the preparation for an MRI procedure carried out under general anaesthesia. Methods: A qualitative observation study was used to explore the interaction of nurses and children. The data consisted of video recordings of 25 preparation situations of 3 (3–8 years old) children (with challenges in communication and/or cognitive skills) with 4 nurses. Verbal and nonverbal communication was analysed with interventionist applied conversation analysis. Results: What was most crucial was how the picture schedule was used during the interaction. Reciprocal information sharing, responding to the child's initiatives by negotiating and allowing the child to take physical action with the picture schedule enabled the realization of the child's agency. Conclusions: The preparation process should aim to help the child prepare in his/her own way. The preparation tools should encourage reciprocal interaction in informing and in responding to the children's initiatives. The preparation practices should include enough time for the child's initiatives and physical participation. The results can be used in assessing preparation tools and how they are used from the perspective of the child's agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creating opportunities for meaningful social relationships between through collaborative learning has been suggested to facilitate all students' social inclusion. However, little attention has been given to the interaction processes leading to unsuccessful knowledge co-creation in mixed-ability peer groups including students with and without special educational needs (SEN). This study addressed this research gap by conducting multimodal conversation analyses of the social exclusion during group work of students with and without SEN, and how the students with SEN responded to their positioning as unequal learning partners. The results were based on video-recordings of 24 lessons involving fifth graders in Finnish school spaces featuring open and flexible learning environments. The results showed that although the students with SEN performed relevant on-task initiations, their contributions were misaligned by ignoring, denying, invalidating their contributions, manipulating shared learning materials, or downgrading their status as help givers. Despite this, students with SEN continued to orient toward collaborative working by persistently initiating joint activities, negotiating their task performance and struggling to ensure their right to contribute. The study underlines the importance of instructing all students to create a warm learning community in which every student has equal rights to participate and to be positively recognised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we report an investigation of the possible influence on teachers' essentialist thinking and efficacy beliefs of category labels used to describe children's educational difficulties. A 2x2x2 counterbalanced design was employed in which primary school teachers in Finland and the UK were exposed to vignettes that portrayed a child exhibiting difficulties in one of two domains: either behaviour or reading. Vignettes were presented in two versions. In one, the child was labelled as having either 'ADHD' or 'Dyslexia'; in the alternate condition, no such label was ascribed, descriptions were identical in all other respects. Participating teachers were presented with two vignettes, one from each domain and in each condition. Responses to measures of Efficacy and Essentialist beliefs were solicited. Overall responses indicated that category labels evoked stronger essentialist beliefs but did not influence teachers' efficacy beliefs. Finnish teachers reported stronger essentialist and lower efficacy beliefs than their counterparts in the UK.

This study offers detailed observational analyses of how teachers use optimism as an instructional resource when responding to students' failure expectation displays in classroom situations. The results were based on video-recordings of 25 lessons in two Finnish part-time special education settings, analysed by means of applied conversation analysis. The results showed that the teachers boosted optimism by inverting students' negative utterances, giving examples of successful experiences of peers, offering praise for students' earlier performance or focusing on problems through instructional support. The study underlines the importance of addressing and elaborating students' negative learning-related self-assessments in classroom interactions.

This study investigates the descriptions of support measures in the sequential pedagogical documents (individual education plans or programs and others) of children with special education needs from early childhood education and care to preprimary education. According to the previous research, the role of pedagogical work is largely disregarded in these documents, which typically focus on describing children's challenges instead of support measures. In this study, the sequential pedagogical documents (N = 257) of 64 Finnish children were studied for approximately 3 to 6 years, and the data were analyzed by investigating the textual and content-related coherence, as well as the linguistic precision, of the descriptions of support. Consequently, four chronological patterns of describing and developing the support measures--missing, repetitious, disorganized, and explicit--were introduced, and the study results emphasize the importance of the specificity and continuity of documentation.

The individual education plan (IEP) is an essential part of special education and is used widely in Western countries for documenting both the learning goals and support measures for children with special needs. This study focused on the documentation of support measures in the IEPs of Finnish students with intellectual disability (ID) (N = 21). The documents contained 195 expressions of support measures analysed by content analysis. The results showed that most support measures in the IEPs were general pedagogical principles from the research literature. In general, the expressions were not described thoroughly, although there were some specific expressions of support measures amplified by descriptions of the activity, person in charge or context. Further research is needed on how to best support teachers in documenting IEPs.

This study presents co-narrated school experiences of a young Finnish girl diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and those of her parents. The discourse analysis of the family interview focused on the discrepant ways family members gave meanings to and mobilised the ADHD categorisation while narrating their broken school trajectory. The results showed that the ADHD diagnosis was laden with the promise of the whole family being recognised differently by the school. However, this cultural promise proved disillusioning as daughter's support needs and parents' expertise were not recognised nor did the diagnostic category emancipate from stigmatising identities and blame. Interestingly, the parents leaned more on the diagnostic categorisation while accounting for the disillusion of these promises, whereas the daughter aimed at distancing herself from the ADHD category and behaviour characteristics related to it. The discussion concludes by comparing the viewpoints of cure and care when catering to children's needs.

This article explores accounts given by Finnish educators (n = 31) on the topic of flexibly scheduled early childhood education and care (i.e. childcare provided during non-standard as well as standard hours). Previous research has shown this to be a sensitive topic because of the contradiction between what is deemed in the interests of children and the fact of providing childcare during non-standard hours. The research follows the principles of discursive psychology. Educators' accounts were labelled as excusing, compensating, normalising and justifying. Accounts categorised as excusing and compensating shared concern over the effects of childcare during non-standard hours on children's well-being. Similar risks were not expressed in the normalising and the justifying accounts. Accounts differed as to who was held responsible for providing this type of childcare. When the responsibility was attributed to society, the educators' position was weaker than when they constructed themselves as active participants. Both educators and children were uniquely positioned in each type of account. As accounts have consequences for actions, it is important to make them visible both to understand and to develop practices in flexibly scheduled early childhood education and care.

The article critically discusses the practice of describing children's special educational needs (SEN) in early childhood education and care (ECEC) pedagogical documents. Documentation is understood as a form of governance. In current practice, documentation is extensively used in educational institutions. Even when the focus of documentation should be pedagogical, the descriptions of children's SEN commonly describe a child's individual deficits as a source of educational problems. In this study, we used discourse analysis to investigate how professionals position children and construct their SEN in pedagogical documents. The research data consisted of 143 documents on 29 Finnish children. Three ways of positioning children with SEN were identified in the documents: as a problematic child through definitive descriptions, as a multifaceted child through contextual descriptions, and as a learning child through dynamic descriptions. The results highlight the importance of a pedagogical focus and dynamic conceptualisation of SEN in ECEC documentation.

The contemporary education paradigm highlights the interdependency of home and school expertise. This discourse analysis study examines the narrated agentive possibilities of 18 Finnish mothers of children diagnosed with ADHD to influence and be involved in their child's schooling. Mothers' strong involvement endeavor is premised on their expertise concerning ADHD, distrust of teachers' adequate knowledge of and attitude towards their child, and anxiety for their child's wellbeing. However, our analysis reveals a gap between the mothers' narrated potential agency to fight for her child's well-being and their actual capability to be involved as intended, due to unequal institutional power relations between home and school. Educational responsibility, and the promise of recognition the diagnosis holds in educational social practices are discussed.

Although the necessary role of differentiation in special education is well established in the literature, little is known about its social and peer interaction implications from the student perspective. The present qualitative study aims at offering detailed observational analyses of the meanings that 7- to 9-year-old students give to differentiated instruction in its initial phases in authentic classroom activities. The results were yielded from an ethno-methodological conversation analysis of the video-recordings of authentic classroom situations in a part-time Finnish special education setting (N = 12 lessons). The results revealed that whilst differentiation as a pedagogical solution serves to meet children's individual learning needs, students used knowledge of the differentiated treatment as a means by which to construct an understanding of their abilities in relation to those of their classmates or to seek self-enhancement over their peers. (Contains 5 extracts.)

This article examines both the discourses upon which Finnish special needs education professors draw when speaking about their field, and the consequent identities for it. The research material consists of theme interviews with 10 professors of special needs education and is analysed from a socio-constructionist, discourse analytical perspective. The results show that the professors defined special needs education from two separate viewpoints: on the basis of their own personal views, or on the basis of the classical definitions of special needs education. The professors spoke about the field through five different discourses: professional, emancipatory, relativistic, autonomous and critical. The majority of these discourses constructed special needs education as an important part of the science field, although the relativistic discourse problematised its position as an independent discipline. (Contains 1 figure.)

The research reported on a qualitative study of feedback given in one Finnish pre-primary education group which integrated English into the programme as a first foreign language. The study was based on the authentic video-recorded observations of actual pre-primary teaching sessions (N = 11 lessons). The findings suggested that the reactions of the teachers to child errors depended on the types of errors made by children. The study discussed the tension present in feedback giving when balancing between the aim of maintaining the early interest of children in language learning and the purpose of paying attention to correct ways of using the target language. The data were analysed by means of ethno-methodological conversation analysis.

The debate about whether to include all kinds of students in the general education classrooms is a current topic in the European and Scandinavian educational policy. This paper comes to grips with this topic by focusing on the process through which professionals define educational possibilities and risks for one group of children considered as special needs children. The study is based on the transcripts of four Finnish interdisciplinary team meetings in which professionals and parents negotiate for the school choices of preschool-aged children with cochlear implants. Analysis of the data is based on the principles of qualitative discourse analytical methods of conversation. Results show that despite the presence of an inclusive ideal in the meetings, the realisation of the ideal cannot be fulfilled when an appeal is made to limitations in resources in general education or when referring to the lack of skills, fundamental differences or vulnerable personalities of particular children. (Contains 1 table.)