The aim of this study, based on pupils' drawings, is to find out what kind of collective emotional atmosphere dominates in fifth-graders' mathematics lessons. Pupils' (N = 136) drawings were analyzed using a holistic evaluation of emotional atmosphere during mathematics lesson. Even though the collective emotional atmosphere in mathematics lesson is positive in the total data, there are large differences among the different classrooms. In most of the classrooms the emotional atmosphere could be described more or less as ambivalent (there are both positive and negative facial or other expressions). In two classrooms the emotional atmosphere could be described as positive and only in one as neutral. The differences between the classrooms are thus large. Based on our data, it can be said that asking pupils to do drawings is a good and many-sided method to collect data about the collective emotional atmosphere of a teaching group.

Promoting student agency has been seen as the primary function for new generation assessment environments. In this paper, we introduce two models of self-assessment as a way to foster students' sense of agency. A socio-cultural framework was utilised to understand the interaction between student agency and self-assessment. Through a comparative design, we investigated whether formative self-assessment and summative self-assessment, based on self-grading, would offer students different affordances for agency. The results show that while both models offered affordances for agentic learning, future-driven agency was only presented by the students studying according to the summative model.Our results shed light on the interplay of student agency and self-assessment in higher education.

Recent years, Finland has been one of the countries of interest in education because of its success in international comparisons. Several attempts have been made to explain what could have been behind the positive results. However, some of the challenges of Finnish education, such as the productivity (achievement/costs) or its uniformity throughout the school years have not been emphasized. Further, it is under examined in Finland, as well as worldwide, the development of the performance and the attitude during the school years. Here, 3,502 stratified sampled Finnish students' achievement and attitude regarding mathematics were followed up from the beginning of the school (grade 0, age 7) to the end of the compulsory education (grade 9, age 16). The test scores from the different measurements were equated by using IRT modelling. The sharpest change in achievement happens during the lower grades and it evens out towards the upper grades. The achievement level of the student population entering the school is very heterogeneous. The actions during the first two years make the differences between the students disappear almost totally. The attitudes are declining during the years. During all the grades, boys feel themselves more self-efficacy in mathematics than the girls.

Mathematics-related affect is established regarding both individual and interindividual levels. However, the interaction between the levels has not been elaborated. Furthermore, it is known that people may draw either from intrinsic or extrinsic experiences to construct their identities depending on their cultural environment. Thus, affective individual and interindividual levels seem to interact with culture. In this study we focus on the significance of and the interaction between the individual and the interindividual levels of affect. This is done with respect to 2 different types of countries (Finland and Chile) to include cultural effect. We use questionnaire-based data and pupils' drawings of their mathematics class to find out about their individual and interindividual experiences. By using mixed data, we are not only getting a wider picture of pupils' affect but we can also avoid the most typical errors made in the cross-cultural comparisons as the pupils' own voice is strengthened. The main finding in the study is that the 2 affective levels are not congruent and that the incongruence appears differently in different types of cultures

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