Knut Neumann (2014) What makes the Finish different in science? Assessing and comparing students' science learning in three countries. International Journal of Science Education, 36:18, 3042–3066, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2014.950185.
When the article was first published online, the word, “Finnish” was misspelt as “Finish” in the article title, running heads and in few sentences. This has now been corrected.
The title now reads: What makes the Finnish different in science? Assessing and comparing students' science learning in three countries.
The running heads have now been changed to: What Makes the Finnish Different in Science?
The corrected sentences are in page numbers 3049, 3050, 3060 and 3061.
Finnish students performed at the highest level of all tested countries since 2003, whereas German and Swiss students mostly exhibited an average performance (OECD, 2004, 2007, 2010).
When authoring these items, Finnish and German school textbooks were utilized (the latter being similar to Swiss school textbooks) to guide item content selection.
An analysis of several meta-analyses by Hattie (2009, p. 20) concludes that the average effect size for students' learning across one school year can be expected to be between d = .15 and d = .40 (independent from the subject)—suggesting that our findings are well in line with the suggestion that German students appear to be typically at the very low end of growth while Finnish students excel.
As a consequence of the differences in students' learning, Finnish students were found to outperform both Swiss and German students.