We report on a teacher-researcher collaboration whose goal was to change the role of the Matriculation Examination from an obstacle hindering learner writing to a means to guide their writing. We focus on one teacher-learner interaction, tracing how the teacher probed and guided the learner to reconceptualising the ME role.
The Finnish Matriculation Examination (ME) exerts strong power on upper-secondary school classrooms. Despite the emphasis in the Finnish National Core Curriculum (FNAE, 2020) on assessment to support learning, this learning is oftentimes strongly impacted by what is being assessed in the ME. The apparent tension between teaching, learning, and exam preparation for both teachers and learners is, therefore, oftentimes resolved for the benefit of exam preparation.
In our presentation, we will report on a study informed by Vygotskian praxis (a dialectical unity of research-praxis) to help learners resolve this tension such that it promotes learner development. In other words, the goal was to change the role of the ME from an obstacle hindering learner writing to a means to guide their writing. The data in our study came from courses involving practising writing ME essays and included researcher-teacher discussions, learner essays and teacher-learner interactions during oral feedback sessions. We will focus on one interaction with a learner (OPI2), tracing how the teacher probed and guided the learner to reconceptualising the ME from being an obstacle to becoming a mediational means to develop their writing. We will illustrate how the learner transferred this novel understanding to their subsequent writing.
