We present teacher–researcher partnership (TRP) as a way of fostering teachers’ professional learning. Teachers’ participation as research group members is an essential aspect of the partnership. Teachers and researchers share the same goal, which is to improve their understanding of and enhance students’ engagement in science. Project-based learning (PBL) was selected as a means of enhancing student engagement. The activities of the partnership focused on the co-design and enactment of and co-reflection on PBL units. Teachers participated in the design of the data collection process and the interpretation of initial findings. As an indicator of teachers’ professional learning, we examined students’ engagement during different implementations of the PBL units. Student engagement was measured using a situational experience sampling questionnaire delivered via mobile phones. The students’ experiences of scientific practices and engagement in actual learning situations were measured in the first and second years of the teachers’ implementation of the teaching units. An analysis of the students’ responses showed that the students were 20% more engaged in the second year than in the first year. We argue that TRP has the potential to enhance teachers’ professional learning.

Reciprocal eye contact is a significant part of human interaction, but its role in classroom interaction has remained unexplored, mostly due to methodological issues. A novel approach in educational science, multiple-person mobile gaze-tracking, allows us to gather data on these momentary processes of nonverbal interaction. The current mixed-method case study investigates the role of teacher-student eye contact in interpersonal classroom interaction using this methodological approach from three mathematics lessons. We combined gaze-tracking data with classroom videos, which we analyzed with continuous coding of teachers’ interpersonal behavior. Our results show that teacher communion and agency affect the frequency and durations of teachers and students’ gazes at each other. Students tend to gaze their teachers more during high teacher communion and low agency, but qualitative and quantitative differences between the teachers and their classes emerged as well. To conclude, the formation of eye contacts is situational and affected by momentary interpersonal changes as well as the qualities of teacher-student interactions.

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 boredom (adopted from the dimensional model of emotions) and students' heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) (indicators of physiological arousal and the activation of the autonomous nervous system). Students' physical activity was controlled in the models via the metabolic equivalent of task (MET) values (actigraphy data). A second objective was to explore how to combine the information stored by these three sources of ambulatory assessment. Sample: The study comprised 136 high school students with multiple repetitive data points. Methods: For three consecutive days, students wore biometric sensors and wristbands collecting their HR, HRV, and MET signals, and answered the ESM questionnaires five times a day on smartphones. Results: When MET values were controlled for, self‐reported excitement was related to higher HR as well as lower HRV during a specific moment, indicating stronger sympathetic activity (i.e., physiological arousal/activation). Self‐reported boredom was related to lower HR but was unrelated to HRV. Self‐reported calmness and anxiety were unrelated to HR and HRV after controlling for MET. Conclusions: A 5‐min time window with a Gaussian weighted mean seemed to be an appropriate data processing method for capturing the physiological arousal (or abate) of self‐reported excitement and boredom. The findings suggest that the physiological stimulus of elevated HR could be interpreted by students as an adaptive state of excitement. Combining the experience sampling approach and the physiological measures revealed how the mind and body function in interplay and can therefore provide objective evidence of emotional and motivational processes as they unfold in students' daily lives.

Initiatives for preventing radicalization and violent extremism through education (PVE-E) have become a feature of global educational policy and educational institutions across all phases, from early childhood to universities, also in Finland. If schools may be regarded as safe spaces here for identity and worldview construction and experiences of belonging, the specific subject matter of PVE-E is also dangerous territory. Not least because of PVE-E’s focus on radicalization, but above all because of perceptions of schools being used as an adjunct of governmental counter-terrorism policy. We argue that understanding young people’s views on issues related to radicalization and violent extremism is critical in order to develop ethical, sustainable, contextualized, and pedagogical approaches to prevent hostilities and foster peaceful co-existence. After providing some critical framing of the Finnish educational context in a broader international setting, we thus examine young people’s views (n = 3617) in relation to the safe spaces through online survey data gathered as a part of our larger 4-year research project Growing up radical? The role of educational institutions in guiding young people’s worldview construction. Specifically focused on Finland but with potentially wider international implications, more understanding about the topic of PVE-E is needed to inform teacher education and training, to which our empirical data makes some innovative contribution.

Teacher gestures support mathematics learning and promote student collaboration. Aligned with speech, gestures can help students to notice the important visual information of geometry tasks. However, students’ visual attention to the teacher’s gestural cues during collaborative problem solving remains a largely unexplored field in mathematics education research. This mixed-method case study investigated relations between students’ visual attention, teacher gestures, and students’ collaborative problem-solving process on a geometry task. The data were collected with video cameras and mobile gaze trackers on four students simultaneously in two Finnish 9th-grade mathematics lessons with the same teacher. The findings show that the students attended to their own papers most of the time during the teacher's gestures, but differences in student attention between the gesture types emerged. The qualitative analysis showed that the teacher’s tracing, pointing, and representational gestures helped in directing student attention to targets relevant to the situational learning process. We conclude that teacher gestures can both convey mathematical contents and direct student attention, which intermediates mathematical thinking in problem solving.