Evaluation of Material

Title: What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? Author: Ellen Gamerman Name of Publisher: Wall Street Journal Date of Publication: February 29th, 2008
This article is about the success of Finnish students and elaborates on various methods that Finland adopts to ensure that they produce excellent students. The article is published three years ago, in 2008 and it is reliable as statistics has shown that Finland has been constantly producing top students up till 2011. This article was published in Wall Street Journal, under the Personal Journal section hence, it might be biased as it is a personal opinion of the author on the Finnish education system. However, it is still relatively reliable as the author has substantial evidence to support her claims of the education system. Since our project is to make pre-school education compulsory and to regulate pre-school syllabus to reduce the difference in standards in primary school students, the article can aid in providing insights as to what we can incorporate in our project to ensure a more successful education for pre-school students. One reason for the success of Finnish education system as stated by Ellen Gamerman is having responsible students who take charge of their learning. In our project, students are young and might not know the importance of responsibility of their own learning. Thus, Teachers must guide them along. This is achieved by the Get Small policy in our project, where the class size is reduced to maximum 20 students. This helps the teacher to effectively monitor and guide each student according to a suitable learning pace, ensuring that their learning ability is maximized. However, to enable students to know how to take charge of their own learning, pre-schools can introduce a Project Work scheme once a term for kindergarten students. Students will work in various groups to learn about different topics and present information to the whole class. Students will then learn both teamwork and sourcing for information which will teach them importance of taking charge of their own learning. Ellen Gamerman states that Finnish educators believe they get better overall results by concentrating on weaker students rather than by pushing gifted students ahead of everyone else. The idea is that bright students can help average ones without harming their own progress. However, this is a risky assumption as this might cause brighter students to learn at an inefficient speed which will backfire and slow down their learning progress. In our project, we are dealing with young children who need to be actively learning in order to stimulate faster development. Due to their age, these children need to learn at

their own suitable pace to ensure results and this assumption might cause brighter students to advance slower and not produce expected results. We did not consider the idea of peer tutoring in our project. This could be effective for older students in kindergarten where peer tutoring is more feasible as they can communicate more effectively. However, peer tutoring will only involve only one aspect such as spelling or corrections so that learning progress for student tutors will not be affected as they do not need to commit much time for peer tutoring.

Lastly, Ellen Gamerman mentioned that finnish customize lessons and and quoted "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the
entrepreneurs. from Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD1, which began the

international student test in 2000. This implies that creativity in lessons is important in helping students learn. This supports our idea of creativity in preschool education and can be achieved by the Get Out of the Box scheme where lessons are in the form of excursions. In addition, Pre-schools must ensure that while lessons are creative and engaging, students must also understand the learning objectives of the lesson as there is an education syllabus that students are required to follow. Hence, worksheets can be provided during excursions to ensure students achieve the learning objectives. However, if worksheets are given before the excursion, students might be too focused on answering the questions and this result in a rigid lesson, which is what we do not want. Thus, worksheets will be given to students after the excursion so as to allow them to learn freely during the excursion. In conclusion, this article gives great insight on how to have a successful education system and is useful in helping to evaluate our project methods and its effectiveness.

Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development