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Immigrant Student Achievement and Education Policy in Finland

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Immigrant Student Achievement and Education Policy

Part of the book series: Policy Implications of Research in Education ((PIRE,volume 9))

Abstract

Finnish society has faced many changes during the past decade. One major change has been the increasing number of students speaking languages other than the national ones. This chapter provides an overview of the immigrant student population in Finland, including its change during the last decades. This chapter also takes a closer look at results of national and international assessments of students with an immigrant background, particularly the PISA 2012 results in which this student group was oversampled in Finland. This oversampling made the data considerably more representative of students having an immigrant background than in any other rounds, and also allowed more reliable statistical analyses. The findings of several analyses present an alarming picture regarding the learning achievement of students with an immigrant background in Finland. For instance, their performance in the PISA assessment in mathematics was clearly below that of the others and a greater portion of first-generation immigrant students did not reach the minimal level of mathematical proficiency. These findings are critically discussed in the increasingly multicultural, multilingual educational context of Finland.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Heidi Harju-Luukkainen

  2. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Heidi Harju-Luukkainen

  3. University of Califonia, Los Angeles, USA

    Heidi Harju-Luukkainen

  4. TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

    Nele McElvany

Authors
  1. Heidi Harju-Luukkainen
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  2. Nele McElvany
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Correspondence to Heidi Harju-Luukkainen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, Brock University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

    Louis Volante

  2. Waikato University, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Don Klinger

  3. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Ozge Bilgili

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Harju-Luukkainen, H., McElvany, N. (2018). Immigrant Student Achievement and Education Policy in Finland. In: Volante, L., Klinger, D., Bilgili, O. (eds) Immigrant Student Achievement and Education Policy. Policy Implications of Research in Education, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74063-8_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74063-8_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74062-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74063-8

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