Abstract:
Finnish students have received the leading scores on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test in reading, mathematics, and science multiple times. The PISA standardized test is given to nearly half a million fifteen-year-olds in over forty countries around the world. Students from the United States of America placed somewhere in the middle. What makes the difference? Finland began drastically reforming their education system over forty years ago, and now has students who outperform others worldwide. The United States of America may benefit from a similar education reform, and it would be advantageous for Americans to learn about a reform movement that has been successful. As a future mathematics teacher, I am interested specifically in how the mathematics programs differ between the two countries. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze Finland's revolutionary education system, and compare mathematics education in Finland to mathematics education in the United States of America. My study will include the middle and high school mathematics curriculum, assessment methods, classroom demographics, and teaching conditions in each country.
