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In the current paper, we present an analysis of a case study in which we have followed Swedish primary teachers who voluntarily began using translated Finnish curriculum materials, i.e. a textbook and teacher guide, in order to reform their mathematics teaching. The multifaceted data, consisting of questionnaires, interviews, protocols from collegial meetings and classroom observations, were gathered during the period 2010-2014. The analysis of the interplay within this cross-cultural setting reveals the special characteristics and the challenges existing in practice. Both the experienced and inexperienced teachers offloaded a great deal of their agency to the materials in order to become familiar with the ideas they mediated. Yet, the lack of a clear rationale behind the organization of the materials, as well as the suggested activities connected to taken-for-granted features of the Finnish teaching tradition, made fruitful interaction problematic. The changes teachers made in their classroom practice were tightly connected to the support offered in the materials, without which the teachers abandoned their new classroom patterns. Based on the results of this study, we suggest a number of general aspects that we regard as important to consider when implementing curriculum materials developed within another cultural-educational context.

Theories for conceptualizing educational policies aimed at improving classroom instruction at scale are under development in the educational sciences. In using such theories, it is essential to note the specific educational context. In this article, we conceptualize the role of contextual factors when operationalizing Cobb and Jackson (2012)[Journal of the Learning Sciences] in the Swedish context. Drawing on data and results from a large-scale project carried out during 2012–2017, studies of Swedish educational contexts, and international research, we conceptualize contextual factors for large-scale projects. Besides rather obvious explicit contextual factors such as ongoing policies and practices, we elaborate on how the underlying, more implicit contextual factors of (1) the positioning of teachers within the educational system, (2) the positioning of teachers within the classroom, and (3) traditions of visible and invisible pedagogy affected the establishment of policy in the Swedish context. Insight into these factors deepens earlier frameworks of context, and helps not only to operationalize of the policy within the context but also in making explicit hidden features of a cultural context that are important to influence if the aim of the educational policy is to reorganize school practices.

This paper investigates how Finnish primary teachers talk about their interaction with curriculum materials, especially the additional facilities that digitalisation and technology provide to mathematics education. Digital curriculum materials are seen as part of available resources for teaching and learning mathematics. The data of this qualitative study consists of semi-structured interviews with seven primary teachers. Six thematic categories emerge in the data illustrating the elements that teachers consider crucial in evaluating and using the curriculum resources. The Finnish teachers prove to be critical and strategic consumers who understand the potential of the digital curriculum materials but make decisions about the use primarily in terms of enhancing student learning. 

The most commonly used Finnish mathematics teacher guides (Grades 1–6) are investigated so as to determine what kind of resource they constitute for teachers in planning and enacting mathematics teaching and what kind of mathematics classroom they promote. The structure and the main contents of the guides were found to be quite homogeneous. The nature of communication was mostly descriptive, but the separate activities suggested for each lesson were quite explicitly described. Suggested activities, such as mental calculation tasks and homework assignment, were typically motivated by nonspecific rationales, and many activities seemed to be taken for granted in the Finnish mathematics classroom culture. The results add both to knowledge about how to analyse teacher guides and to knowledge about Finnish educational features.

Students’ difficulties with proof, scholars’ calls for proof to be a consistent part of K-12 mathematics, and the extensive use of textbooks in mathematics classrooms motivate investigations on how proof-related items are addressed in mathematics textbooks. We contribute to textbook research by focusing on opportunities to learn proof-related reasoning in integral calculus, a key subject in transitioning from secondary to tertiary education. We analyze expository sections and nearly 2000 students’ exercises in the four most frequently used Finnish and Swedish textbook series. Results indicate that Finnish textbooks offer more opportunities for learning proof than do Swedish textbooks. Proofs are also more visible in Finnish text-books than in Swedish materials, but the tasks in the latter reflect a higher variation in nature of proof-related reasoning. Our results are compared with methodologically similar U.S. studies. Consequences for learning and transition to university mathematics, as well as directions for future research, are discussed.

This article explores effective mathematics teaching as constructed in Finnishand Swedish teacher educators’ discourses. Based on interview data from teacher educatorsas well as data from feedback discussions between teacher educators and prospectiveteachers in Sweden and Finland, the analysis shows that several aspects of the recentinternational reform movements are visible in the discourses in both countries. However,the Swedish teacher educators tend to conceptualize effective teaching as interactions withindividual children, building on students’ ideas and emanating mathematics from everydaysituations, while the Finnish teacher educators stress the importance of a clear presentationof mathematics, routines and homework as well as specific goals for every lesson. Theresults of this cross-cultural study cannot be generalized to the two countries but rathershow interesting conceptualizations of effective teaching, adding to international theorybuilding.

This paper reports the results of a quantitative study on primary teachers' (n=253) views on the introduction of steering documents and national examinations for Grade 3. While the majority of the teachers experience the reform as empowering, some teachers feel the new curriculum and the national examination restrict their teacher professionalism. We found differences in how teachers viewed the reform depending on whether they had graduated before or after the reform in 1994. The differing views can be connected to teachers' beliefs about teacher professionalism and the relation between teaching, learning and maturing. We discuss our findings also in the light of curriculum development during the last four decades.

This paper concerns communities of learners and teachers that are formed, develop and interact in university mathematics environments through the theoretical lens of Communities of Practice. From this perspective, learning is described as a process of participation and reification in a community in which individuals belong and form their identity through engagement, imagination and alignment. In addition, when inquiry is considered as a fundamental mode of participation, through critical alignment, the community becomes a Community of Inquiry. We discuss these theoretical underpinnings with examples of their application in research in university mathematics education and, in more detail, in two Research Cases which focus on mathematics students' and teachers' perspectives on proof and on engineering students' conceptual understanding of mathematics. The paper concludes with a critical reflection on the theorising of the role of communities in university level teaching and learning and a consideration of ways forward for future research. 

Finnish students' success on all three content domains of each of the four cycles of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has created much international interest. It has also prompted Finnish academics to offer systemic explanations typically linked to the structural qualities of Finnish schooling and teacher education. Less well-known has been the modest mathematics performance of Finnish grade 8 students on the two Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in which Finland has participated, which, when compared with its PISA successes, has created something of an enigma. In this paper, we attempt to shed light on this enigma through analyses of Finnish mathematics classroom practice that draw on two extant data sets-interviews with Finnish teacher educators and video-recordings of sequences of lessons taught on standard topics. Due to the international interest in Finnish PISA success, the analyses focus primarily on the resonance between classroom practice and the mathematical literacy component of the PISA assessment framework. The analyses indicate that Finnish mathematics didactics are more likely to explain the modest TIMSS achievements than PISA successes and allude to several factors thought to be unique to the Finns, which, unrelated to mathematics teaching practices, may be contributory to the repeated Finnish PISA successes. Some implications for policy-borrowing are discussed.