Kirsti Lonka

Kirsti Lonka
University of Helsinki | HY · Faculty of Educational Sciences

PhD (psychology)

About

188
Publications
114,833
Reads
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8,304
Citations
Introduction
Information about projects and research: Kirstilonka.fi Latest projects: DigiConsumers.fi funded by Finnish Strategic Research Council Bridging the Gap - funded by Academy of Finland
Additional affiliations
June 2005 - present
University of Helsinki
Position
  • Professor of Educational Psychology
May 2007 - December 2011
Karolinska Institutet
Position
  • Foreign Adjunt Professor
Description
  • Medical Education
January 2002 - December 2004
Karolinska Institutet
Position
  • Director, Centre for Cognition, Understanding and Learning
Education
April 1997
University of Helsinki
Field of study
  • Psychology

Publications

Publications (188)
Article
In European studies, immigrant‐origin adolescents report more mental health symptoms than natives do. The school is an important developmental context for them, and more research is needed about how their school experience is related to their mental health symptoms, and whether these relations vary by group. The aim of this study was to assess the...
Article
Full-text available
Entrepreneurship education is crucial in fostering and supporting entrepreneurial intentions among young people. However, many factors, such as immigrant background, are associated with whether youth aspire to an entrepreneurial career. The aim of this study was to examine whether immigrant-origin youth in Finland were more likely than natives to a...
Article
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This study investigated the development of study engagement from the end of upper secondary school through the first and second years of higher education. The participants experienced the challenges related to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic while they were either university students or preparing for university entrance exams. The study emp...
Article
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A sense of belonging is crucial for mental health and well-being, but immigrants may find achieving a sense of belonging elusive. This study examined the relationship between sense of belonging and mental health among Finnish native, and first- and second-generation immigrant adolescents (N = 61 540) in Finland. Moreover, we estimated whether sense...
Article
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We developed a six-item Compact Acculturation Scale (CAS) based on common items on comprehensive acculturation scales and examined it with two designs using data from the Finnish Annual Youth Future Report Survey of 2023 (N = 744 immigrant-origin youth, IOY). In Study 1, we first confirmed second-order factorial structure of CAS and its convergent...
Article
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The purpose of this study was to explore school principals’ job crafting profiles during the prolonged COVID-19 crisis in 2021, and investigate profile differences regarding principals’ own perceived servant leadership, stress and work meaningfulness. Methodological approach: Using latent profile analysis (LPA), two job crafting profiles were iden...
Article
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, emerging adults are especially vulnerable as they experience its financial impact as a source of stress. We tested a model of psychological resilience among emerging adults (18–25 years) during the pandemic from six Western countries (Finland, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovenia, and United States) using online survey d...
Article
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Future teachers need to be confidently equipped to teach 21st century ICT skills. We investigated teaching self-efficacy (TSE) in ICT competencies among teacher students. We confirmed distinct ICT competencies among two cohorts from teacher training programs (n = 347; n = 428): practical (i.e., device and data management), and algorithmic (i.e., pr...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose The purpose of this study was to explore school principals’ job crafting profiles during the prolonged COVID-19 crisis in 2021, and investigate profile differences regarding principals’ own perceived servant leadership, stress and work meaningfulness. Design/methodology/approach Using latent profile analysis (LPA), two job crafting profile...
Article
Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan peruskoulun seitsemäsluokkalaisten (N=977) odotuksia ja arvostuksia kolmea lukuainetta sekä ilmiölähtöistä oppimista kohtaan. Aineisto kerättiin syksyllä 2019 sähköisellä motivaatiokysymyksiä sisältäneellä kyselylomakkeella. Henkilösuuntautuneella tutkimusotteella tunnistettiin viisi motivaatioprofiilia odotuksista ja ar...
Preprint
The evidence regarding how social media use (SMU) influences adolescents’ daily lives is contradictory. Using experience sampling design, we examined associations between adolescents’ pre-bedtime SMU, same-night sleep and wellbeing at school the next day. In addition, we examined how social pressure to stay available to others and related availabil...
Article
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The present study identifies job crafting profiles of public sector employees and how they differ in terms of employees’ work engagement, workaholism, and approach to learning. Participants represent various occupations from educational field (e.g., teachers), technical field (e.g., ICT-experts), and administrative field (e.g., customer servants)....
Article
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The purpose of this study was to analyze knowledge co-construction as a self-organization process and the role of technology as its catalyst. Novel AI-directed speech recognition technology and the artifacts it generates were deployed to scaffold the knowledge co-construction process in two groups of pre-service teachers in a science education cont...
Article
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Online shopping addiction can be defined as an Internet‐based behavioural addiction which may lead to economic problems. Even though shopping is increasingly common through mobile devices, the effects of smartphone use on online shopping addiction are underexamined. Following a survey of 1000 18 to 29‐year‐olds in Finland, we examined young adults'...
Article
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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...
Chapter
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In recent years, the school curricula in many European countries have introduced social and emotional learning (SEL). This calls for the teachers to have SEL competencies. The present study evaluates teachers’ and their students’ readiness for SEL during an intervention in five European countries. The participants were teachers (n = 402) in five Eu...
Article
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The aim of this study was to examine entrepreneurship in the context of future Finnish teachers’ readiness to teach 21st century (broad-based) competencies. Teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching entrepreneurial skills and financial matters is vital for their pupils to actively participate and flourish in future society. The study utilized survey data...
Preprint
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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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The aim of this study was to investigate how job crafting, work engagement, and workaholism were related in public sector organizations. The participants (N = 213) were civil servants from three Finnish public organizations, representing different professions, such as school personnel, secretaries, directors, parking attendants, and ICT specialists...
Article
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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. Meth...
Article
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The focus in the present study is on how experienced discrimination, being able to discuss personal matters with parents, and having someone to discuss personal worries with relate to symptoms of depression and generalized anxiety among first- and second-generation immigrant-background adolescents (aged 14–15) living in Finland. The data used was c...
Article
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Teachers’ epistemic beliefs may have consequences for their pedagogical work. We used previously developed scales to assess epistemic beliefs that teachers hold about learning, knowledge and knowing, and how they report putting such ideas into practice. The scales consisted of self-reported Likert-type statements considering collaborative knowledge...
Preprint
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...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, the school curricula in many European countries have introduced social and emotional learning (SEL). This calls for the teachers to have SEL competencies. The present study evaluates teachers' and their students' readiness for SEL during an intervention in five European countries. The participants were teachers (n = 402) in five Eu...
Article
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted students’ opportunities to learn worldwide. Students and teachers have been forced to shift from traditional classrooms to emergency online / remote learning. They face key challenges in adapting practices away from a focus on face-to-face learning to an online learning environment mediated by various form...
Article
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University students’ epistemic beliefs may have practical consequences for studying and success in higher education. Such beliefs constitute epistemic theories that may empirically manifest themselves as epistemic profiles. This study examined university students’ epistemic profiles and their relations to conceptions of learning, age, gender, disci...
Article
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Lay Description What is already known about this topic The developmental ecologies of our youth are being transformed through the socio‐digital revolution. Adolescents participate in their digital media ecologies in Friendship‐ (hanging out with friends) and Interest‐driven ways (messing around and geeking out related to interests). What this pap...
Research Proposal
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S.I.: Motivating online learning: The challenges of COVID-19 and beyond
Article
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The aim of this study was to examine i) the prevalence of achievement goal orientation profiles among Finnish sixth- and seventh-graders (N = 419), ii) the stability and change in these profiles across the transition from elementary to lower secondary school, and iii) the profile differences in academic achievement (grades) and academic well-being...
Article
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This article examined digital learning engagement as the out-of-school learning component that reflects informally emerging socio-digital participation. The gap hypothesis proposes that students who prefer learning with digital technologies outside of school are less engaged in traditional school. This hypothesis was approached from the framework o...
Article
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The focus of the current study was to examine teachers’ well-being in terms of work engagement and burnout by using a person-oriented approach. The participants (n = 149, 70.5% female) were subject-matter teachers from 22 schools from metropolitan Helsinki area in Finland. The first aim was to examine the kinds of profiles we can identify based on...
Chapter
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Studies of how students experience their Ph.D. education have been promoted as an indicator to improve doctoral programmes (assessment-oriented studies) and/or to enhance understanding of career development among this collective (research-oriented studies). Interest in the latter group has increased in recent years as researcher development has bec...
Article
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Resumen Introducción: La tendencia global de los nuevos currículos de muchos países de la OCDE indica que las habilidades de interacción social son cada vez más importantes. Los educadores deben comenzar a fomentar el desarrollo de las competencias sociales de los alumnos, lo que requiere el desarrollo de sus propios conocimientos y habilidades. Es...
Article
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Introduction: The global trend of new curricula in many OECD countries indicates that social interaction skills are becoming increasingly important. Educators need to start fostering the development of learners’ social competences, which requires development of their own knowledge and skills. This study investigated the possible change in teachers’...
Chapter
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The positive psychology movement values good atmosphere and flourishing in the classroom. In order to do this, it is important to develop teachers’ social and emotional learning (SEL) as a part of expertise, because teachers are in key position to create supportive and engaging learning environment. Even though promoting SEL as a means to create a...
Article
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We explored doctoral students’ writing profiles using a person-centred approach. We also studied differences between profiles in terms of experienced well-being and perceptions of the learning environment. The participants of our study (n = 664) were PhD students from three faculties at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The Writing Process Quest...
Article
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The Engaging Learning Environment (ELE) model was introduced into a company’s work-place to support the learning and well-being of the employees. The participants were 107 middle managers: E-learning group (n = 42) and a comparison group (n = 42) as well as a blended ELE intervention group (n = 23) assigned by the company that combined e-learning a...
Article
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Töökohal õppimise soodustamiseks ja töötajate heaolu suurendamiseks katsetati ühes ettevõttes kaasava õpikeskkonna (ELE) mudelit. Uuringus osales 107 keskastmejuhti, kes jagati kolme rühma: e-õppe rühma (n = 42), võrdlusrühma (n = 42) ja ettevõtte moodustatud kaasava õpikeskkonna põimõppe rühma (n = 23), milles kasutati nii e-õpet kui ka kontaktõpe...
Article
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The present study investigated the dynamic nature of students’ daily experiences and general study engagement using intra-individual assessment. More specifically, we examined individual differences in the relationship between university students’ task-specific value and situational emotions and, further, whether first-year study engagement would m...
Article
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This study contributes to the research on the differences in young peoples' approaches to socio-digital participation (SDP). We first investigated the differences in SDP between three samples of Finnish students (i.e., elementary school 6th grade, n = 741; high school 1st year, n = 1317; higher education 1st year, n = 1232) and then looked at how t...
Article
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Tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli selvittää, millaisia tavoiteorientaatioryhmiä voidaan löytää kuudennella luokalla ja miten eri ryhmät eroavat toisistaan henkilökohtaisten koulutustavoitteiden, niiden arviointien sekä koulumenestyksen suhteen. Oppilaat (N=761) jaettiin tavoiteorientaatioryhmiin hyödyntäen henkilösuuntautunutta lähestymistapaa ja K-keski...
Article
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Sosiodigitaalisen osallistumisen, unenlaadun ja kouluhyvinvoinnin väliset yhteydet kuudesluokkalaisilla Tässä tutkimuksessa tutkittiin kuudesluokkalaisten sosiodigitaalisen osallistumisen (SDO), unenlaadun ja kouluhyvinvoinnin välisiä yhteyksiä. Tutkimme erityisesti sosiaaliseen mediaan osallistumisen ja digitaa-lisen pelaamisen yhteyttä kuudesluok...
Conference Paper
Readiness to use digital technologies in meaningful ways is in the focus of national Finnish curricula, implemented in 2016. There is variance in how digitalization is proceeding in education. While many schools are even ahead of their time, there are stills schools that are behind. Because the main strength of the Finnish school system has been eq...
Article
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Background Adolescence is a time of ongoing neural maturation and cognitive development, especially regarding executive functions. In the current study, age‐related differences in the neural correlates of different executive functions were tracked by comparing three age groups consisting of adolescents and young adults. Methods Brain activity was...
Article
The present study examines antecedents of university students' academic emotions (Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry, 2002) in the context of self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985; 2000), using real-time assessment and intra-individual analyses. We investigated whether daily autonomous and controlled-motivated educational goals predicted stud...
Article
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Thesis work is the first important research where the PhD candidate has to take primary responsibility for their work. Sometimes it is forgotten, or at least not enough attention is paid to the fact, that for many PhD students it is also the first time they have to face such a complex, ultimately self-regulated learning task (Sachs, 2002, p.99) as...
Article
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Given the importance of entrepreneurial thinking and acting as a meta-skill in the future world of work, we focus on the emerging entrepreneurial mindset in the transition to adulthood. We study the role of personality characteristics and age-appropriate entrepreneurial competencies (leadership, self-esteem, creativity, proactivity motivation) in t...
Article
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Recent research shows an increased concern with well-being at school and potential problems associated with students' use of socio-digital technologies, i.e., the mobile devices, computers, social media, and the Internet. Simultaneously with supporting creative social activities, socio-digital participation may also lead to compulsive and addictive...
Article
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Using digital technologies (DT) in learning is expected to foster students' school engagement. International surveys, however, show that using of technologies for learning in Finnish schools is still far from optimal. This study was conducted as a part of Mind the Gap project. The aim was to examine how frequently students use technologies for lear...
Article
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Implementing 21st century skills at school, including social and emotional learning (SEL), has become increasingly important in many countries. The present study investigated in four countries the development of teachers’ SEL, through which people develop their social and emotional intelligence, by using internationally widely-used Lions Quest (LQ)...
Article
Prior extensive literature on Social Networking Sites (SNSs) has linked their use with psychosocial well- being. Facebook use has also been associated with different attributes of psychosocial well-being. However, the extant literature is inconclusive regarding the nature of the relationship shared by the different attributes of psychosocial well-b...
Article
Gaming experience has been suggested to lead to performance enhancements in a wide variety of working memory tasks. Previous studies have, however, mostly focused on adult expert gamers and have not included measurements of both behavioral performance and brain activity. In the current study, 167 adolescents and young adults (aged 13–24 years) with...
Article
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Applying a person-oriented approach, this study set out to examine what profiles of school engagement and school burnout (i.e., exhaustion, cynicism, inadequacy) can be identified among elementary school children at age 12, a generation also often referred to as the generation of digital natives. We compared the group memberships in their use of so...
Article
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Entrance to university does not automatically lead to high academic engagement and success, and there may be individual differences in student engagement. In the present study, university students' (N = 668) academic engagement and disengagement profiles, and the differences between them in terms of academic achievement, were investigated. Students...
Article
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the core dimensions of user experiences in a physical and technologically embedded learning environment (LE) designed to support active student-led inquiry-based studies and collaborative knowledge creation in higher education. Design/methodology/approach The paper integrated the USEframe of usabili...
Article
The current generation of young people indulge in more media multitasking behavior (e.g., instant messaging while watching videos) in their everyday lives than older generations. Concerns have been raised about how this might affect their attentional functioning, as previous studies have indicated that extensive media multitasking in everyday life...
Article
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High goal coherence of a course has a positive effect on the participant's competence development. However, studies on the goal coherence of the youth development programmes are scarce. The participants were 153 teachers who attended to the LQ teachers’ workshop. They filled in the questionnaire before and after the training. In addition, 61 teache...
Article
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The role of motivation and emotions in learning has been extensively studied in recent years; however, research on the role of the physical environment still remains scarce. This study examined the role of the physical environment in the learning process from the perspective of basic psychological needs. Although self-determination theory stresses...