Katariina Salmela-Aro

University of Helsinki | HY

In this chapter, we analyze and discuss teaching, learning and well-being in Finnish education during the COVID-19 pandemic between Spring 2020 and Fall 2022. First, we analyze the preconditions, such as teachers’ and students’ digital competences and the digital infrastructure necessary to switch to distance teaching and learning. Second, we prese...

The COVID-19 pandemic affected adolescents’ social interactions and mental health. However, it is still unclear how the developmental trajectories of individuals at higher risk of social exclusion and victimization changed during this challenging period. Using the Latent Growth Curve Analysis (LGCA), the present study aims to investigate whether be...

Based on the integrative needs model of crafting (de Bloom et al., 2020), we introduce a concept of needs-based study crafting, which refers to students' proactive and self-initiated changes in their study that target psychological needs satisfaction. Specifically, this study aimed to develop an instrument to assess needs-based study crafting and t...

The present study explored a set of plausible directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of constructs involved in Situated Expectancy–Value Theory (SEVT) using cross-sectional data. To do so, three datasets (n = 1,540; 1,867; and 103) with expectancy, values, and prior achievement constructs were used. First, networks showed a consistent magnitude of associat...

Background Prenatal posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), fear of childbirth (FOC), and depressive symptoms have been related to various negative effects during pregnancy, childbirth, and in the postnatal period. This study evaluates the prevalence of PTSS, FOC, depressive symptoms, and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) among pregnant women, t...

The Let’s Talk about Children intervention is a tool for parents and professionals to work together to promote children’s positive development, resilience, and psychosocial well-being in social and healthcare services, at school, and in day care. The aim of this study was to evaluate the fidelity, parents’ experiences, and perceived benefits of usi...

Theoretical background: Proactive behavior-self-initiating change, or "making things happen," with the aim of achieving a different future (Parker et al., 2010)-has been prized by organizations for its potential advantages to both employees and organizations. In particular, such behavior among leaders is of key importance for maintaining effective...

Goal and Theoretical background: The stress of the COVID-19 crisis is clearly taking a toll on school principals, who are already dealing with a large workload (Lien et al., 2022). It is important to take into account their well-being, as they play a crucial role in their school and beyond (Liebowitz & Porter, 2019). Job and off-job crafting, a sel...

Background: Although research has linked children's temperament with weight outcomes, the associations between temperament and dietary outcomes, particularly energy intake, remain understudied. Furthermore, little is known about how temperament is associated with diet in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) context, which is an important...

Background: This study explored the physiological correlates of students' self-reported emotions in ecologically valid settings by combining biosignal data (on physical and cardiac activity) and experience sampling method (ESM) data. Aims: The aim was to examine the concurrent associations between self-reported excitement, calmness, anxiety, and...

This chapter reflects on the twelve-year Swiss research program, “Overcoming vulnerability: Life course perspectives” (LIVES). The authors are longstanding members of its scientific advisory committee. They highlight the program’s major accomplishments, identify key ingredients of the program’s success as well as some of its challenges, and raise p...

According to the modern expectancy-value theory, students’ task values may differ across domains, manifesting as varying motivational patterns. In middle school, students’ motivation becomes increasingly apparent and may direct their future occupational aspirations. Using a person-oriented approach, this study examines students’ self-concept, and p...

Tässä tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan, miten opettajien työhyvinvointi (työn imu ja työuupumus) kehittyi koronapandemiassa keväästä 2020 kevääseen 2022 sekä miten kouluaste, stressi ja koronatartuntojen määrä olivat yhteydessä työhyvinvointiin. Lisäksi tutkitaan, missä määrin työn imu ja työuupumus olivat yhteydessä alanvaihtointentioihin. Opettajat (N...

The present study investigated the qualitatively different moments of engagement and disengagement experienced by students at upper-secondary school in academic situations. Further, we examined between-student differences in the occurrence of these moments and their associations with both momentary task performance and overall academic achievement....

Previous research on Schwartz’s theory of basic human values has mostly applied a variable-oriented approach . This study took a person-oriented approach and investigated how values co-occur and are manifested in individuals, that is, what kind of value profiles exist and how they differ in terms of subjective (i.e., life satisfaction) and social w...

What is the real value of entrepreneurship? We propose a framework of psychological utility by integrating Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory with a recovery approach from a personal agency perspective. We hypothesize that personal agency together with the positive JD-R pattern of entrepreneurship generates outstanding psychological utility, which...

To piece empirical studies on student engagement together, this chapter uses the framework presented in the Study Demands-Resources (SD-R) model. The SD-R model offers a comprehensive view on engagement, demands, resources, and outcomes, and on the interplay of various antecedents. Unlike previous frameworks , the SD-R model endorses the duality of...

Background and objectives Child's temperament dimensions have been linked with different weight outcomes as well as dietary factors such as consumption of fruit and vegetables, sugar-rich foods and drinks and an overall dietary quality. Links between temperament dimensions and energy intake, however, remain under-examined. This study expands the li...

Lately, new materialism has been proposed as a theoretical framework to better understand material-dialogic relationships in learning, and concurrently network analysis has emerged as a method in science education research. This paper explores how to include materiality in network analysis and reports the development of a method to construct networ...

This study explored the correlates of climate anxiety in a diverse range of national contexts. We analysed cross-sectional data gathered in 32 countries (N = 12,246). Our results show that climate anxiety is positively related to rate of exposure to information about climate change impacts, the amount of attention people pay to climate change infor...

This study contributes to the understanding of the relationship between emotions and development of scientific understanding by examining (1) how students perform in scientific sensemaking in the context of a three-cycle predict-observe-explain (POE) activity, (2) what kind of trajectories of situational epistemic emotions students show when making...

Purpose To identify the changes of school burnout for Finnish adolescents in lower (grades 8–9) and upper secondary schools (grades 10–11) during years 2006–2019; and to examine the associations of personal—(gender, family socioeconomic, and immigrant status) and school-related (school level, urban–rural area) sociodemographic demands and resources...

The COVID-19 pandemic forced most universities to switch from in-person to remote teaching from May 2020 to May 2021. This period covered three semesters of studies, and due to these changes students experienced fundamental changes in their learning. The present research was carried out 3 times during the pandemic (e.g., May 2020, December 2020, an...

To better understand the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) aspiration, the article examines the critical role of domain-specific motivation (i.e., expectancy and task values). Using longitudinal data from 5th and 6th grade (∼11–12-year-old) students (n = 360, 55% girls), person-oriented analyses was applied to understan...

Given that skill variety is widely regarded a key component of entrepreneurial human capital, gender differences in entrepreneurship could be rooted in the formation of such skill variety. Analyzing 12-year longitudinal data following 1,321 Finnish adolescents into adulthood, we study whether gender differences in skill variety open up early in the...

School burnout is a new and emerging trend that presents a risk for student learning, successful educational and occupational transitions, and overall well-being. School engagement, on the other hand, leads to positive outcomes. This paper reviews recent research conducted in Finland examining school burnout and engagement during the major educatio...

In their recently renamed theory, Situated Expectancy-Value Theory (SEVT), Eccles and Wigfield (2020) emphasized the importance of situations in influencing individuals’ motivational beliefs and academic choices. Adopting a novel approach—network analysis, this study aimed to examine how situations may impact the associations among expectancies, su...

The years of adolescence form a crucial period in students’ academic path, as it is during these years that the maladaptive or adaptive academic pathways begin to diverge. Simultaneously, the unsupervised engagement with digital media begins a sharp increase during these years. The dynamics between these have been a recent topic of concern – does e...

Tutkimuksessa selvitettiin, miten luonnontieteen oppitunneilla esiintyvät opetuksen ja opiskelun työtavat ovat yhteydessä opiskelijoiden kokemaan tilannekohtaiseen sitoutumiseen. Tilannekohtaisella sitoutumisella viitataan optimaalisen oppimisen hetkiin, joissa opiskelijoiden kokema kiinnostus, taito ja haaste ovat yhtä aikaa korkealla tasolla. Tut...

The Big Five Inventory-10 (BFI-10; Rammstedt & John, 2007) is one of many short versions of personality inventories that measure the Big Five trait dimensions. Short versions of scales often present methodological challenges as a trade-off for their convenience. Based on samples from 28 countries (N = 10,560), the current study investigated inter-i...

The assessment of student wellbeing has been often static and lagged behind for the intervention/diagnostic purpose. In this chapter, we aim to introduce an automated school wellbeing scoring dynamic real-time system, School Day Wellbeing Model. With Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based item sampling methods and answers scoring and reporting systems,...

Previous studies have examined the neural correlates of receiving negative feedback from peers during virtual social interaction in young people. However, there is a lack of studies applying platforms adolescents use in daily life. In the present study, 92 late-adolescent participants performed a task that involved receiving positive and negative f...

Three studies on the relationship between curiosity and interest were reported. The first study was a meta-analysis that examined the Pearson correlations between scales assessing curiosity and interest. Based on 24 studies (31 effect sizes), we found that the curiosity scales correlated with the interest scales at a moderate level (r = .53), but t...

Social-emotional skills have been shown to be beneficial for many important life outcomes for students. However, previous studies on the topic have suffered from many issues (e.g., consideration of only a small subset of skills, single-informant, and single-cohort design). To address these limitations, this study used a multi-informant (self, teach...

Current educational reforms concerning curricula and digitalization challenge educators to meet new demands for learning and schooling. What is common for current educational reforms is that they tend to emphasize competencies that are not related to the traditional subject-matters and reflect a stance which presents learning as a naturally reflect...

Epistemic emotions (surprise, curiosity, enjoyment, confusion, anxiety, frustration and boredom) have an object focus on knowledge or knowledge construction and are thus hypothesized to affect learning outcomes. In the context of upper secondary school science, the present study clarifies this relation by examining the students' pre-and posttest pe...

The increasing use of digital technology among adolescents and young adults has led to concerns about possible detrimental effects on cognitive and brain functions. Indeed, as reviewed here, according to behavioral and brain-imaging studies, excessive media multitasking (i.e., using different digital media in parallel) may lead to enhanced distract...

Since the turn of the millennium, the digital revolution has opened a new layer of opportunities for adolescents to participate, create and learn. Simultaneously there has been growth in both debate and worries regarding how the intensive engagement with digital media affects students’ academic performance, engagement, and school-related well-being...

Introduction Evidence for the relationship between movement behaviors and mental health among adolescents is inconclusive. We aimed to identify profiles of digital media use (including related bedtime delay) and leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) in adolescence, and to examine whether preadolescent mental health predicted later behavior profiles...

Introduction: The majority of adolescents engage with others online, and using social media is one of their top activities. However, there is little longitudinal evidence addressing whether active social media use is associated with study-related emotional exhaustion or delayed bedtime at the individual level of development during adolescence. Me...

The study aimed at investigating how different young people going through the post-high school transition set, monitor, pursue, and renegotiate career goals in real-time and in everyday life circumstances. A theoretically driven proposition supported the conceptualization of career goals as complex dynamic systems and guided the examination and the...

Measurement of adolescent life satisfaction across cultures has not received much attention in previous empirical research. The present study evaluated measurement invariance of the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) among adolescents in 24 countries and regions (N = 22,710; age range = 13-19 years; 53% female). A single-factor model with residual...

Crafting Engaging Science Environments is a high school chemistry and physics project-based learning intervention that meets Next Generation Science Standards performance expectations. It was administered to a diverse group of over 4,000 students in a randomized control trial in California and Michigan. Results show that treatment students, on aver...

This study explored the antecedents and outcomes of negative emotional responses to climate change among people from a diverse range of cultural and national contexts. We analysed cross-sectional data gathered in 28 countries (N = 10,963). Our results show that negative emotional responses to climate change are positively related to the amount of a...

This study investigates the validity and reliability of the School Burnout Inventory in the German language (SBI-G) with 1,570 secondary school students (Mage = 14.11, SD = 0.78; 51.7% girls). Results indicate that school burnout is comprised of two correlated but separate dimensions including (1) exhaustion at school, (2) cynicism toward the meani...

The present study examined latent profiles of school principals’ stress concerning students’, teachers’, parents’, and principals’ own ability to cope during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the role of job demands (workload, remote work stress, difficulty to detach from work, COVID-19 crisis, COVID-19 infections at school, impact of COVID-19 on...

Although social-emotional skills are more malleable than cognitive skills and have potential benefits for a range of academic and life outcomes, previous studies on the topic have suffered from many issues (e.g., consideration of only a small subset of skills, single-informant and single-cohort design). To address these limitations, this study used...

Murphy (2021) argues that the field of Industrial-Organizational (I/O) Psychology needs to pay more attention to descriptive statistics (“Table 1”; e.g., M, SD, reliability, correlations) when reporting and interpreting results. We agree that authors need to present a clear and transparent description of their data and that descriptive statistics a...

This study examines how classroom activities, student gender and student personal interest in science studies and careers predict situational interest in physics learning. Teaching modules were designed based on the secondary physics curricula in Finland (Helsinki) and Chile (Santiago and Viña del Mar) emphasising students engagement in scientific...

This study investigates the associations between school principals’ job crafting and well-being. Drawing on the job demands-resources approach of the job crafting model and self-determination theory, we hypothesized that need satisfaction and need frustration act as likely mechanisms between the positive and negative effects of job crafting behavio...

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, higher educational institutions worldwide switched to emergency distance learning in early 2020. The less structured environment of distance learning forced students to regulate their learning and motivation more independently. According to self-determination theory (SDT), satisfaction of the three basic psychological...

Given that recent research on entrepreneurial behavior and success has established skill variety as a central human capital factor, researchers, educators, and policymakers have turned their interest to a deeper understanding of the formation of skill variety. Based on human capital theory and the competence growth approach in developmental psychol...

This study investigates how different instructional activities relate to epistemic emotions in science classes. Study data were collected during the implementation of a project-based learning unit in five Finnish upper secondary school classes using experience sampling, video observations and stimulated recall. From the videos, the excerpts prior t...

Previous studies have examined the neural correlates of receiving negative feedback from peers during virtual social interaction in young people. However, there is a lack of studies using platforms adolescents use in daily life. In the present study, 92 participants ages 17 to 20 performed a task that involved receiving positive and negative feedba...

This longitudinal study examined school engagement and burnout profiles among early and middle adolescents before and during COVID-19, and within-class latent change and stability in students' socio-emotional skills the profiles. The longitudinal data were collected in fall 2019 and 2020 from 1381 5th to 6th, and 1374 7th to 8th grade students. Usi...

The present study examined latent profiles of parental burnout dimensions (e.g., exhaustion in parental role, contrast with previous parental self, feelings of being fed up, and emotional distancing, measured with a shortened version of the parental burnout assessment scale) among Finnish parents of sixth and eighth grade children. In addition, the...

In this chapter, the teaching and learning in Finnish compulsory education during the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring and autumn terms of 2020 will be analyzed and discussed. First, preconditions, such as teacher and student digi-competences and digi-infrastructure for switching to distance teaching and learning, will be analyzed. Second, the organ...

Situational engagement is a key element in promoting students’ maintained interest and focused attention in learning. Most research on students engagement has been variable-centered, and only few studies have examined situational patterns of student engagement. The present study used person-oriented approach (e.g., latent profile analysis with Mplu...

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, research teams in the United States and Finland were collaborating on a study to improve adolescent academic engagement in chemistry and physics and the impact remote teaching on academic, social, and emotional learning. The ongoing “Crafting Engaging Science Environments” (CESE) intervention afforded a rare data...

The present two studies with a 3-year longitudinal design examined the co-development of science, math, and language (e.g., Spanish/Finnish) interest among 1,317 Spanish and 804 Finnish secondary school students across their transition to post-compulsory secondary education, taking into account the role of gender, performance, and socioeconomic sta...

Despite the growing body of research on the transition from school to work, an important aspect of young people’s social realities in this phase has been largely overlooked: their peers. This study investigates to what extent peer networks in late adolescence, and particularly peers’ appraisals of their own career goals, are related to young people...

We systematically mapped and analyzed the longitudinal research on student engagement in adolescence published during 2010-20 to provide the review of how this topic has been covered conceptually, theoretically, and methodologically. A total of 104 studies, involving 104,304 adolescents, met inclusion criteria. Studies were mainly conducted in Nort...

The sudden switch to distance education to contain the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered adolescents’ lives around the globe. The present research aims to identify psychological characteristics that relate to adolescents’ well-being in terms of positive emotion and intrinsic learning motivation, and key characteristics of...