What Is Evidence Required for and Who Generates That Evidence in the Finnish Educational System?

Abstract

The article will analyze the major opportunities as well as the difficulties in providing and applying research-and evidence-based knowledge in the Finnish educational system. It asks what purposes evidence is required for and who provides that evidence. The chapter introduces the Finnish enhancement-led evaluation policy and its main principles relating to evidence production. In the Finnish system, evidence is a broad concept covering national and international evaluations, researcher contributions, and the practitioner's capacity to create evidence. In the Finnish educational system, evidence comes from different sources and is also discussed with different partners. Creating evidence is not a unidirectional process. It is a joint process where researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners work together in a complementary fashion. However, there are several challenges. Some difficulties arise from the disconnection between decision-makers at policy level. It is also very demanding to generate evidence for the whole educational ecosystem that has equity and lifelong learning as its main objectives. The third issue to overcome is how to disseminate and communicate evidence to different users. Introduction: Public or common good and evidence in the Finnish context Daviet (2016) writes that in global public policy education has commonly been considered a public good. He refers to international organizations, particularly United Nations (UN) agencies and, among these, UNESCO, which have promoted the notion of a public good for decades. A "public good" has traditionally been defined using Samuelson's (1954) notion, whose remarkable criterion is that an individual's consumption of one leads to no subtractions from any other individual's consumption of it. In other classical definitions, such as Musgrave's, public goods are contrasted with private goods and services. Definitions of public good often assume that it is non-competitive and non-excludable, meaning that it is impossible to exclude any individuals from consuming the good (Musgrave, 1969; Desmarais-Tremblay, 2014). All these definitions come from economics and are rooted in neoclassical economic theories. Recently, critical voices have emerged questioning the relevancy of these definitions in the changing educational landscape (UNESCO, 2015). Daviet (2016) questions how well the economic conception of public good provides a real basis for understanding the social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of education. Daviet (2016, p. 5) warns: "The neoclassical theory, which undergirds the concept of public good in its largest sense, builds on a set of interrelated theoretical assumptions, among which are methodological individualism and utilitarianism. Methodological individualism considers a standard and abstract individual as a unit of analysis." Daviet sees how transforming governance models, the increasing