The State of Educational Research in Finland

Marjatta Lairio
Faculty of Education, Jyväskylä University
February 2012

In Finland there are eight faculties of education in eight universities involved in educational research and this brief review concerns the work done in these faculties.  The universities covered are: The University of Helsinki, The University of Eastern Finland, The University of Jyväskylä, The University of Lapland, The University of Tampere, The University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University (Swedish-language university).

In the economically harsh times research funding has been and is an issue in Finland. The most important sources of funding for educational research are the Academy of Finland and the Ministry of Education and Culture. Other sources of research funding are European Union FP7, Ministry of Education and Culture, The Finnish National Board of Education, various private foundations as well as cities and municipalities. The foundations mostly finance doctoral dissertations and post doctoral research carried out abroad, but starting 2012, the Council of Finnish Foundations has offered professors funding for a research period.  The start-up of this funding was the response to the fact that professors have less and less time for research due to increased number of teaching and administrative duties. The Foundations also expressed a wish that universities themselves would start to organise financing for professors’ research leave in the future. During the years 2008-2011 the Research Council of Culture and Society in the Academy of Finland financed educational research with about 430 000 euros per year.  However, since the applicants themselves announce their field of study, all those who received the funding do not necessarily work at the faculties of education.

Educational sciences have a huge teaching load, because all teachers in Finland must complete a master’s degree. However, the number of doctoral degrees in education is lower that what would be expected given the numbers of those who have a master’s degree. Yet a lot has already been done to systematize and modernize doctoral training.

There is friction between the demand to increase internationalisation and the need to serve national audiences such as teachers. This friction is probably most visible in publishing the research results. The indicators of profitability focussing on the impact and quality of research, developed and used by the Ministry of Education and Culture as the bases of delivering resources, emphasise at the moment international publishing adopting the model of measuring from the “hard sciences”.  Questions, such as, what is preferred and most valued language of publishing research results have caused a lot of discussion, especially in connection to the Finnish Publication Forum. The Forum classified scientific publication channels in all research fields in similar way as it is done in Norway and Denmark. The problem for educational research is caused by the fact that it is very difficult with the quality indicators (e.g. impact factor) used, to show that publications in Finnish are of good quality.

One of the new trends launched by the Ministry of Education and Culture is the request for profiling the universities and faculties. For educational research this means that larger research groups focussing on the same topic should be established and that the research within each faculty should specialise to certain topics.