Equity, Equality and Diversity in the Nordic Model of Education

1. Critical Observations and Looking Ahead

   1. Equity, Equality and Diversity in the Nordic Countries—Final Thoughts and Looking Ahead

      • Tove Stjern Frønes, Andreas Pettersen, Jelena Radišić, Nils Buchholtz

      Pages 397-412Open Access

Does the Nordic model of education still stand by its original principles and safeguard education for all? This Open Access volume is a carefully crafted collection of chapters that investigate the different aspects of equity, equality and diversity across the education systems in the Nordic countries. Based on data from various national and international large-scale assessments, the volume provides a better understanding of both the functions and foundations of the Nordic model, along with how the concepts mentioned above are enacted in practice.

Across the chapters, data from different national and international large-scale assessment studies are used for cross- and single-country analyses on a variety of issues related to equity, equality and inequality in diverse educational settings. The investigations address different subject domains (i.e., mathematics, science, reading), age and grade groups, but also issues related to teachers and the schools themselves. In addition to these empirical chapters, the book addresses the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the ideas and tools embedded in the phenomena of equity and equality and how they have met in the Nordic model of education.

• Equity Equality Diversity
• Nordic education model
• International large-scale assessment
• PISA
• TIMSS
• PIRLS
• TALIS
• ICILS
• Mathematics achievement
• Science achievement
• Reading achievement
• Teacher competence
• Teacher satisfaction
• Instructional quality
• Student outcomes
• Student motivation and beliefs
• Immigrant students
• SES and gender in education
• Quantitative methods
• Open Access

• Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

  Tove Stjern Frønes, Andreas Pettersen, Jelena Radišić, Nils Buchholtz

Researcher Tove S. Frønes (born 1975) has worked at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Oslo with test development and research on students' reading comprehension literacy since 2007, working on both Norwegian National reading tests and PISA. Her research interests are children’s reading in and out of school, critical reading and thinking and online reading, and in her doctoral dissertation (2017) she studied students’ navigation strategies when reading online using log files analyses. Recent research and publications have focused on contextualizing findings from large scale assessment in the national educational context and reading didactics.

Andreas Pettersen (born 1984), is a researcher at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on students’ mathematical competence, mathematical tasks and teacher knowledge and is based on both quantitative and qualitative methods. In his PhD (2019), he studied the competency demands of mathematical tasks and teachers knowledge of task demands.

Jelena Radišić (born 1981), originally from Serbia, is a researcher at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Oslo since 2016. Her work is situated in the areas of research on student, teacher and school characteristics affecting student outcomes; and teacher beliefs and practices and their impact on student learning, which she explored in her PhD (2013). In addition, she actively investigates the topics of motivation for learning; mathematics self-beliefs and academic emotions; as well as emergent literacy. In her work, Radišić employs a variety of different approaches constitutive to quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research.

Nils Buchholtz (born 1982), originally from Germany, is an Associate Professor for mathematics education at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Oslo since 2017. His work grounds in mathematics teacher education and the professional competence of mathematics teachers. In his PhD (2014), he studied the longitudinal development of professional knowledge of student teachers, using instruments based on the international large scale study TEDS-M. Nils Buchholtz works both quantitatively and qualitatively and has also published various studies in the field of mixed methods research.