Lotta Tikkanen

• University of Helsinki

Curriculum making characterized by effective change management and knowledge sharing in the professional community is at the core of developing higher education. Curriculum making both contributes to teaching culture and is affected by it. However, empirical evidence of this relationship is scarce. This study addresses the gap in the literature by...

PhD candidates’ wellbeing has become a global concern over the past decade, and the topic has been addressed in several studies. At the same time, PhD supervisors’ wellbeing has remained largely unexplored. Also, most studies about supervisors’ and supervisees’ wellbeing have focused on negative aspects, such as stress and burnout, and they have ge...

Reforming curriculum is potentially a powerful tool for school development. Harnessing this potential calls for teacher engagement with colleagues for active professional learning, i.e., teachers’ professional agency. However, promoting teachers’ ownership and active involvement in curriculum-making provides a challenge for all levels of policy int...

Researcher networks are highly important for a positive PhD experience as well as for the future career of PhD candidates in and beyond academia. This study explores PhD candidates’ engagement in researcher networks, ranging from the local to the global sphere, the key learning experiences embedded in them, and how such engagement is associated wit...

The role of peer relationships in a student’s study wellbeing has been emphasised in research. However, the development of functional relationships with peers in educational settings cannot be taken for granted. In this study, we aimed to understand the variations in upper secondary school students’ experiences of peer relationships in terms of sen...

Purpose Empirical evidence on how supervisors have perceived the changes and the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on their supervision is scarce. This paper aims to examine how the changing landscape of doctoral education has affected supervision from the supervisors’ perspective. Design/methodology/approach This survey addressed change, chal...

Purpose This study aims to advance the understanding on individual variations in PhD candidates’ personal interest in their doctorate and supervisory and research community support, and several individual and structural attributes potentially having an impact on the profiles. Design/methodology/approach The authors explored the interrelationship b...

Supervision is one of the most important determinants of a successful doctoral process. However, there have been few large-scale survey studies on the development of PhD supervisors. In this study, doctoral supervisors’ perceptions of their supervisory competence, professional development activities and professional support from the research commun...

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic has had its impact on research and researchers, potentially influencing the future of academia. Yet, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no empirical studies on the alignment between supervisors’ and supervisees’ estimates of the impact of COVID-19. This study aims to contribute to bridging this gap by exp...

Having the ability to understand emotionally how other people feel and see things is an essential fabric for building and sustaining functional interpersonal relationships. Without such an ability, social interaction crumbles, engagement fails, and learning is eroded. Yet, empirical evidence on the relationship between study burnout and study engag...

Our aim with this study was to gain a better understanding of the emotional landscape of curriculum making by exploring the variety of emotions embedded in shared sense‐making about the national curriculum reform implementation at the district level. Focus group interview data were collected from 12 curriculum reform steering groups around Finland,...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had its impact on research and researchers, and hence potentially on the future of academia. Yet, empirical evidence on the impact of COVID-19 on PhD candidates is limited. This study explores the influences of the pandemic on PhD candidates’ progress and wellbeing. In addition, the aim is to identify potentially particula...

Differences in teacher burnout between schools are likely to occur due to differences in the quantity and quality of interaction within the schools. Multilevel latent growth curve analyses of burnout symptoms were performed on three-wave longitudinal data collected from 2,619 teachers in 75 schools in Finland. The results showed that differences in...

This study focused on exploring individual variations in doctoral candidates’ well-being, in terms of experienced research engagement and burnout by using a person-centered approach. In addition, the associations between well-being profiles and gender, country of origin, study status (full-time or part-time), research group status and drop-out inte...

It has been proposed that well-being or lack of it can spread within tightly knit communities, including classrooms. Yet, to our knowledge, no studies have explored the crossover of burnout between the teachers and the students. In this study, we explored the relationship between teacher exhaustion and students’ study burnout symptoms. We hypothesi...

Sustainable school development is suggested to result in both meaningful learning and enhanced well-being for those involved in the reform work. The aim of the study was to gain a better understanding of the relations between the strategies utilised in school development work, school impact of the reform and burdening in the context of curriculum r...

Teacher burnout has been identified as a significant occupational hazard. However, our understanding about individual variations in burnout risk among in-service teachers is still less than sufficient. This study explored socio-contextual burnout risk profiles and their association with the reported use of proactive strategies among in-service teac...

Purpose The aim of the study was to gain a better understanding of how national board administrators, more precisely, officials at the Finnish National Board of Education (FNBE) have perceived the primary influencing factors, or “regulators”, of the national core curriculum reform and the success of the implementation. The alignment between the id...

School leadership is a demanding job. Those involved in school leadership have shown to experience high levels of work stress that may, if prolonged, result in burnout. The purpose of this study was to examine school leaders’ risks of burnout in terms of work stress and burnout symptoms, and their relationship with proactive self-regulation strateg...