Det planlagda och det som visar sig : klasslärarstuderandes syn på undervisning i teknisk slöjd

Sloyd as an activity concretizes man’s ability to, with the help of mind and body, reshape materials into objects and change her conditions for survival. The sloyd actor outside school works when the spirit moves her, while the pupil in school is expected to sloyd regardless of motivation. Subject teachers become experts on sloyd in educational settings, while the qualification requirements may set the class teachers’ voluntariness within parenthesis. All class teachers qualify to teach all core subjects of the national curriculum in Finland from preschool to grade six. The aim of the current thesis is to deepen the knowledge on how the science of sloyd education can support class teacher students’ future teaching in sloyd. In the empirical part of the study, Swedish-speaking Finnish class teacher students’ views on technical sloyd as one of their future subjects for teaching are examined. The class teacher’s qualifying skills in teaching technical sloyd are expected to take shape during only a few ECTS study points. The teacher students’ experience of the subject from the pupil’s perspective is supposed to move into a budding teacher subject. In a research-based teacher education, self-reflection and reflection as a dialogue are extended aided by research results. Intuitive thinking interplays with rational thinking during this time. The teacher student’s approach to make use of the autonomous free space in teaching is, in the current thesis, as considerations where the individual weighs the pros and cons in relation to various phenomena in sloyd and the school overall. The basis for an individual autonomy is shaped and is expected to interplay on the common arena of autonomy. In the exercise of their profession, the class teacher teaching sloyd is expected to oscillate between the sloyd educational practice and theory. The first step in this movement within the teacher education is the coverage of a selection of theories during the studies. The empirical part of the study is carried out at two separate occasions with directed open-ended interviews with fifteen class teacher students in the beginning and end of their first year of study. The data was analysed with a hermeneutic approach and a qualitatively oriented approach to content analysis. The results are mirrored against theory within the science of sloyd education. The results show that class teacher students have a versatile view of educational sloyd. The overall results overthrow parts of the researcher’s pre-understanding. The viewpoint of the students seems to broaden from a merely manual activity to seeing sloyd as an educational activity. In order for the results to gain significance in the teacher education of the future, a line of reasoning is conducted in order to recommend an extended dialogue and thirteen possible themes for enriching discussions are put forth as a result of the present study. The extended dialogue focuses on that teacher education should make conscious ventures to create opportunities for the students to take part in effective discussions on the subject of sloyd, complementing the existing dialogue between the teacher educator and the students. This thesis lends support to reflections on the following aspects of educational sloyd in these dialogues: the reasons for why the sloyd subject exists, the ambitions of the subject, the content and organization of the subject for students as well as for the teacher educators.

Machine Learning and Clinical Text. Supporting Health Information Flow

Fluent health information flow is critical for clinical decision-making. However, a considerable part of this information is free-form text and inabilities to utilize it create risks to patient safety and cost-­effective hospital administration. Methods for automated processing of clinical text are emerging. The aim in this doctoral dissertation is to study machine learning and clinical text in order to support health information flow.First, by analyzing the content of authentic patient records, the aim is to specify clinical needs in order to guide the development of machine learning applications.The contributions are a model of the ideal information flow,a model of the problems and challenges in reality, and a road map for the technology development. Second, by developing applications for practical cases,the aim is to concretize ways to support health information flow. Altogether five machine learning applications for three practical cases are described: The first two applications are binary classification and regression related to the practical case of topic labeling and relevance ranking.The third and fourth application are supervised and unsupervised multi-class classification for the practical case of topic segmentation and labeling.These four applications are tested with Finnish intensive care patient records.The fifth application is multi-label classification for the practical task of diagnosis coding. It is tested with English radiology reports.The performance of all these applications is promising. Third, the aim is to study how the quality of machine learning applications can be reliably evaluated.The associations between performance evaluation measures and methods are addressed,and a new hold-out method is introduced.This method contributes not only to processing time but also to the evaluation diversity and quality. The main conclusion is that developing machine learning applications for text requires interdisciplinary, international collaboration. Practical cases are very different, and hence the development must begin from genuine user needs and domain expertise. The technological expertise must cover linguistics,machine learning, and information systems. Finally, the methods must be evaluated both statistically and through authentic user-feedback.

Learning English is Fun! Incidental vocabulary acquisition of music and traditional class ninth graders via listening to pop songs

Finnish youth are constantly exposed to music and lyrics in English in their free time. It is likely that this has a positive effect on vocabulary learning. Learning vocabulary while simultaneously accompanied with melodies is likely to result in better learning outcomes. The present thesis covers a study on the vocabulary learning of traditional and music class ninth graders in a south-western upper comprehensive school in Finland, mainly concentrating on vocabulary learning as a by-product of listening to pop music and learning vocabulary through semantic priming. The theoretical background presents viable linguistic arguments and theories, which provide clarity for why it would be possible to learn English vocabulary via listening to pop songs. There is conflicting evidence on the benefits of music on vocabulary learning, and this thesis sets out to shed light on the situation. Additionally, incorporating pop music in English classes could assist in decreasing the gap between real world English and school English. The thesis is a mixed method research study consisting of both quantitative and qualitative research materials. The methodology comprises vocabulary tests both before and after pop music samples and a background questionnaire filled by students. According to the results, all students reported liking listening to music and they clearly listened to English pop music the most. A statistically significant difference was found when analysing the results of the differences in pre- and post-vocabulary tests. However, the traditional class appeared to listen to mainstream pop music more than the students in the music class, and thus it seems likely that the traditional class benefited more from vocabulary learning occurring via listening to pop songs. In conclusion, it can be established that it is possible to learn English vocabulary via listening to pop songs and that students wish their English lectures would involve more music-related vocabulary exercises in the future. Thus, when it comes to school learning, pop songs should be utilised in vocabulary learning, which could also in turn result in more diverse learning and the students could, more easily than before, relate to the themes and topics of the lectures. Furthermore, with the help of pop songs it would be possible to decrease the gap between school English and real-world English.

Maahanmuuttajaoppilaat erityiskouluissa

Immigrant Pupils in Special Education Schools The study focused on the opinions of immigrant pupils in the 1st–9th grades of basic education in four special education schools of the City of Turku and in need of special support about the following: 1. Their difficulties in going to school in general education before the transfer to a special education school. 2. Their opinions about the transfer process to special education and the changes in their school practice after being transferred to a special education school. 3. Their experiences about their school and coping in special education school. The study strengthened the idea that immigrant pupils need positive special treatment, linguistic support, individual guidance, small teaching groups and operating models that promote well-being on their integration and education path. The central educational idea of inclusive education is based on deconstructing the power structures concerning gender, ethnicity and “race” and approval of differences in the pupils. Shifting the emphasis from the pupil to working on the learning environment has resulted in special education no longer being primarily separate special education tied to a certain place, but directing the teaching more towards individuality. The central dimension of intercultural competence of a teacher working in a multicultural class seems to be the attitudes and approaches to a different pupil; the teacher must be interculturally sensitive when facing children and young people from a foreign culture. Education and teaching affect every sector of the pupil’s well-being. Learning and learning results have a connection with teaching, education and well-being. Every sector is important for the going to school and integration of an immigrant pupil in need of special support. The basis of the study is the equality of opportunities and the humanistic idea of the human being in the Finnish education policy. The immigrant pupils selected for the study represented the following language groups: Arabian, Albanian, Somali, Russian and Vietnamese. In the four special education schools, the number of immigrant pupils belonging to these language groups (2004) totalled 104. A total of 89 pupils i.e. 86% answered the questionnaire, which is sufficient considering the generalisation of the study. Although this is basically a quantitative study, the interviewing method was used in part of the study, because the questionnaires were in Finnish and consequently, it was difficult for some immigrant pupils to understand them. Understanding the questions was also affected by the fact that the age distribution in the study was very wide (7–18). According to the results of the study, the immigrants felt that the biggest drawbacks in general education were their inability to speak Finnish and lack of concentration. The actual process of being transferred to a special education class remained unclear for immigrant pupils, and they could do very little about the transfer themselves. The results show that immigrant pupils coped well in special education school; they felt that their learning ability and concentration improved in the small groups of the special education school. They considered the individual support given in the special education schools to be useful. The lower-grade immigrant pupils had a more positive attitude towards special education school than the upper-grade immigrant pupils. In all the special education schools the immigrant pupils experienced that they were in a good position in the class; girls felt this even a little more strongly than boys. The teacher-pupil-relationship was felt to be good. School bullying being so common was a negative feature experienced by immigrant pupils, who were often targets or bullies themselves. Immigrant pupils believed in their success at school and in the opportunities offered by special education schools. Generally they were of the opinion that pupils are not labelled by special school; however, upper-grade immigrant pupils were more hesitant than lower-grade immigrant pupils. This study aimed at bringing out the immigrant pupils’ own opinions. Teaching immigrant pupils in special education schools has not been very much studied in Finland, which made the topic new and even more challenging.

The power of support: an exploration of the mentoring relationship

Tutkimuksen pääasiallisena tavoitteena on selvittää ne moninaiset näkökulmat, joita mentori sekä mentoroitava läpikäyvät osallistuessaan mentorointiohjelmaan. Tutkimuksen avulla pyritään myös selvittämään vastaavanlaisen tuen saannin tehokkuutta sekä mentoroinnin sisältäminen elementtien hyödyllisyyttä. Pyrkimyksenä on myös selvittää sekä ymmärtää ne dynaamiset mentorointiprosessin ominaisuudet molempien prosessiin osallistuvien tahojen näkökulmasta. Tutkimuksen teoriaosuudessa käsitellään mentorointia, mentorointiin liittyviä vuorovaikutussuhteita sekä näihin liittyviä eri näkökulmia. Teoria koostuu monipuolisesta, kansainvälisestä sekä kotimaisesta kirjallisuudesta. Tutkimuksen aineiston keruu suoritetaan puolistrukturoiduilla avoimilla haastatteluilla, jotka suoritetaan järjestämällä kahdenkeskisiä teemahaastatteluita. Mentorointisuhteella on todettu olevan voimakas vaikutus siihen osallistuvien henkilöiden elämään. Mentorointisuhteen tarkoituksellisuus on tullut todettua myös kun itse vuorovaikutussuhde on osoittautunut hyödylliseksi osallistujille. Mentoroitavilla on odotuksia, että mentorit täyttävät seuraavanlaisia rooleja: neuvonantaja, roolimalli sekä mahdollisesti tukea antava ystävä. Kaikissa läpikäydyissä tapauksissa mentori pystyi tarjoamaan jonkun näistärooleista mentoroitavalle. Mentoroitava, puolestaan, otti tämän tuen vastaan jahyötyi siitä.

The Roles of Cultural, Functional and Value Diversity in Innovativeness and Learning

Tutkielman tavoite on tutkia kulttuurista, funktionaalista ja arvojen diversiteettiä, niiden suhdetta innovatiivisuuteen ja oppimiseen sekä tarjota keinoja diversiteetin johtamiseen. Tämän lisäksi selvitetään linjaesimiesten haastattelujen kautta miten diversiteetti case -organisaatiossa tällä hetkellä koetaan. Organisaation diversiteetin tämänhetkisen tilan tunnistamisen kautta voidaan esittää parannusehdotuksia diversiteetin hallintaan. Tutkimus- ja tiedonkeruumenetelmänä käytetään kvalitatiivista focus group haastattelumenetelmää. Tutkimuksessa saatiin selkeä kuva kulttuurisen, funktionaalisen ja arvojen diversiteetin merkityksistä organisaation innovatiivisuudelle ja oppimiselle sekä löydettiin keinoja näiden diversiteetin tyyppien johtamiseen. Tutkimuksen tärkeä löydös on se, että diversiteetti vaikuttaa positiivisesti organisaation innovatiivisuuteen kun sitä johdetaan tehokkaasti ja kun organisaatioympäristö tukee avointa keskustelua ja mielipiteiden jakamista. Case organisaation tämänhetkistä diversiteetin tilaa selvitettäessä havaittiin että ongelma organisaatiossa ei ole diversiteetin puute, vaan paremminkin se, ettei diversiteettia osata hyödyntää. Organisaatio ei tue erilaisten näkemysten ja mielipiteiden vapaata esittämistä jahyväksikäyttöä ja siksi diversiteetin hyödyntäminen on epätäydellistä. Haastatteluissa tärkeinä seikkoina diversiteetin hyödyntämisen parantamisessa nähtiin kulttuurin muuttaminen avoimempaan suuntaan ja johtajien esimiestaitojen parantaminen.

Integrating Group Support Systems to innovation process of a forest company

The objective of this study was to analyze the effects of Group Support Systems (GSS) to overall efficiency of innovation process. Overall efficiency was found to be a sum of meeting efficiency, product effectiveness, and learning efficiency. These components were studied in various working situations common in early stages of innovation process. In the empirical part of this study, the suitability of GSS at the forest company was assessed. The basics for this study were idea generation meetings held at LUT and results from the surveys done after the sessions. This data combined with the interviews and theoretical background was used to analyze suitability of this technology to organizational culture at the company. The results of this study are divided to theory and case level. On theory level GSS was found to be a potentially valuable tool for innovation managers, especially at the first stages of the process. On case level, GSS was found to be a suitable tool at Stora Enso for further utilization. A five step implementation proposal was built to illustrate what would be the next stages of GSS implementation, if technology was chosen for further implementation.

Comparison of application frameworks designed to support application extensibility

Reusability has become more popular factor in modern software engineering. This is mainly because object-orientation has brought methods that allow reusing more easily. Today more and more application developer thinks how they can reuse already existing applications in their work. If the developer wants to use existing components outside the current project, he can use design patterns, class libraries or frameworks. These provide solution for specific or general problems that has been already encountered. Application frameworks are collection of classes that provides base for the developer. Application frameworks are mostly implementation phase tools, but can also be used in application design. The main purpose of the frameworks is separate domain specific functionalities from the application specific. Usually the frameworks are divided into two categories: black and white box. Difference between those categories is the way the reuse is done. The application frameworks provide properties that can be examined and compared between different frameworks. These properties are: extensibility, reusability, modularity and scalability. These examine how framework will handle different platforms, changes in framework, increasing demand for resources, etc. Generally application frameworks do have these properties in good level. When comparing general purpose framework and more specific purpose framework, the main difference can be located in reusability of frameworks. It is mainly because the framework designed to specific domain can have constraints from external systems and resources. With general purpose framework these are set by the application developed based on the framework.

World Class Manufacturing (WCM) aineettoman pääoman johtamisen työkaluna

Tämän kvalitatiivisen tutkimuksen tavoitteena on tarkastella jatkuvan pa-rantamisen työkalun, WCM:n, roolia aineettoman pääoman johtajana. Tutkimuksen teoreettisessa osassa selvitetään aineettoman pääoman eri muotoja; inhimillistä, suhde- ja rakennepääomaa. Lisäksi tutkitaan WCM:n ideologiaa, sen käyttöönottoa ja eri osa-alueita. Teoriaosan lopussa selvite-tään WCM:n ja aineettoman pääoman yhteyttä toisiinsa ja niiden vaikutusta suorituskykyyn. Teoriaa tukemaan tehtiin empiirinen tutkimus case -organisaatiossa haastattelemalla organisaation toimihenkilöitä sekä työntekijöitä. Empiirisen tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli selvittää case –organisaation jatkuvan parantamisen mallin kehitystarpeita WCM:n ja inhimillisen pääoman näkö-kulmasta. Tutkimustulokset osoittivat, että WCM:llä voidaan johtaa aineettoman pää-oman eri muotoja – saaden siten myös suorituskykyä paremmaksi.

Learning Preferences with Kernel-Based Methods

Learning of preference relations has recently received significant attention in machine learning community. It is closely related to the classification and regression analysis and can be reduced to these tasks. However, preference learning involves prediction of ordering of the data points rather than prediction of a single numerical value as in case of regression or a class label as in case of classification. Therefore, studying preference relations within a separate framework facilitates not only better theoretical understanding of the problem, but also motivates development of the efficient algorithms for the task. Preference learning has many applications in domains such as information retrieval, bioinformatics, natural language processing, etc. For example, algorithms that learn to rank are frequently used in search engines for ordering documents retrieved by the query. Preference learning methods have been also applied to collaborative filtering problems for predicting individual customer choices from the vast amount of user generated feedback. In this thesis we propose several algorithms for learning preference relations. These algorithms stem from well founded and robust class of regularized least-squares methods and have many attractive computational properties. In order to improve the performance of our methods, we introduce several non-linear kernel functions. Thus, contribution of this thesis is twofold: kernel functions for structured data that are used to take advantage of various non-vectorial data representations and the preference learning algorithms that are suitable for different tasks, namely efficient learning of preference relations, learning with large amount of training data, and semi-supervised preference learning. Proposed kernel-based algorithms and kernels are applied to the parse ranking task in natural language processing, document ranking in information retrieval, and remote homology detection in bioinformatics domain. Training of kernel-based ranking algorithms can be infeasible when the size of the training set is large. This problem is addressed by proposing a preference learning algorithm whose computation complexity scales linearly with the number of training data points. We also introduce sparse approximation of the algorithm that can be efficiently trained with large amount of data. For situations when small amount of labeled data but a large amount of unlabeled data is available, we propose a co-regularized preference learning algorithm. To conclude, the methods presented in this thesis address not only the problem of the efficient training of the algorithms but also fast regularization parameter selection, multiple output prediction, and cross-validation. Furthermore, proposed algorithms lead to notably better performance in many preference learning tasks considered.

Promoting Programming Learning. Engagement, Automatic Assessment with Immediate Feedback in Visualizations

The skill of programming is a key asset for every computer science student. Many studies have shown that this is a hard skill to learn and the outcomes of programming courses have often been substandard. Thus, a range of methods and tools have been developed to assist students’ learning processes. One of the biggest fields in computer science education is the use of visualizations as a learning aid and many visualization based tools have been developed to aid the learning process during last few decades. Studies conducted in this thesis focus on two different visualizationbased tools TRAKLA2 and ViLLE. This thesis includes results from multiple empirical studies about what kind of effects the introduction and usage of these tools have on students’ opinions and performance, and what kind of implications there are from a teacher’s point of view. The results from studies in this thesis show that students preferred to do web-based exercises, and felt that those exercises contributed to their learning. The usage of the tool motivated students to work harder during their course, which was shown in overall course performance and drop-out statistics. We have also shown that visualization-based tools can be used to enhance the learning process, and one of the key factors is the higher and active level of engagement (see. Engagement Taxonomy by Naps et al., 2002). The automatic grading accompanied with immediate feedback helps students to overcome obstacles during the learning process, and to grasp the key element in the learning task. These kinds of tools can help us to cope with the fact that many programming courses are overcrowded with limited teaching resources. These tools allows us to tackle this problem by utilizing automatic assessment in exercises that are most suitable to be done in the web (like tracing and simulation) since its supports students’ independent learning regardless of time and place. In summary, we can use our course’s resources more efficiently to increase the quality of the learning experience of the students and the teaching experience of the teacher, and even increase performance of the students. There are also methodological results from this thesis which contribute to developing insight into the conduct of empirical evaluations of new tools or techniques. When we evaluate a new tool, especially one accompanied with visualization, we need to give a proper introduction to it and to the graphical notation used by tool. The standard procedure should also include capturing the screen with audio to confirm that the participants of the experiment are doing what they are supposed to do. By taken such measures in the study of the learning impact of visualization support for learning, we can avoid drawing false conclusion from our experiments. As computer science educators, we face two important challenges. Firstly, we need to start to deliver the message in our own institution and all over the world about the new – scientifically proven – innovations in teaching like TRAKLA2 and ViLLE. Secondly, we have the relevant experience of conducting teaching related experiment, and thus we can support our colleagues to learn essential know-how of the research based improvement of their teaching. This change can transform academic teaching into publications and by utilizing this approach we can significantly increase the adoption of the new tools and techniques, and overall increase the knowledge of best-practices. In future, we need to combine our forces and tackle these universal and common problems together by creating multi-national and multiinstitutional research projects. We need to create a community and a platform in which we can share these best practices and at the same time conduct multi-national research projects easily.

Verbal learning in mild cognitive impairment and alzheimer's disease : behavioural and neural approaches

The main focus of the present thesis was at verbal episodic memory processes that are particularly vulnerable to preclinical and clinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Here these processes were studied by a word learning paradigm, cutting across the domains of memory and language learning studies. Moreover, the differentiation between normal aging, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and AD was studied by the cognitive screening test CERAD. In study I, the aim was to examine how patients with amnestic MCI differ from healthy controls in the different CERAD subtests. Also, the sensitivity and specificity of the CERAD screening test to MCI and AD was examined, as previous studies on the sensitivity and specificity of the CERAD have not included MCI patients. The results indicated that MCI is characterized by an encoding deficit, as shown by the overall worse performance on the CERAD Wordlist learning test compared with controls. As a screening test, CERAD was not very sensitive to MCI. In study II, verbal learning and forgetting in amnestic MCI, AD and healthy elderly controls was investigated with an experimental word learning paradigm, where names of 40 unfamiliar objects (mainly archaic tools) were trained with or without semantic support. The object names were trained during a 4-day long period and a follow-up was conducted one week, 4 weeks and 8 weeks after the training period. Manipulation of semantic support was included in the paradigm because it was hypothesized that semantic support might have some beneficial effects in the present learning task especially for the MCI group, as semantic memory is quite well preserved in MCI in contrast to episodic memory. We found that word learning was significantly impaired in MCI and AD patients, whereas forgetting patterns were similar across groups. Semantic support showed a beneficial effect on object name retrieval in the MCI group 8 weeks after training, indicating that the MCI patients’ preserved semantic memory abilities compensated for their impaired episodic memory. The MCI group performed equally well as the controls in the tasks tapping incidental learning and recognition memory, whereas the AD group showed impairment. Both the MCI and the AD group benefited less from phonological cueing than the controls. Our findings indicate that acquisition is compromised in both MCI and AD, whereas long13 term retention is not affected to the same extent. Incidental learning and recognition memory seem to be well preserved in MCI. In studies III and IV, the neural correlates of naming newly learned objects were examined in healthy elderly subjects and in amnestic MCI patients by means of positron emission tomography (PET) right after the training period. The naming of newly learned objects by healthy elderly subjects recruited a left-lateralized network, including frontotemporal regions and the cerebellum, which was more extensive than the one related to the naming of familiar objects (study III). Semantic support showed no effects on the PET results for the healthy subjects. The observed activation increases may reflect lexicalsemantic and lexical-phonological retrieval, as well as more general associative memory mechanisms. In study IV, compared to the controls, the MCI patients showed increased anterior cingulate activation when naming newly learned objects that had been learned without semantic support. This suggests a recruitment of additional executive and attentional resources in the MCI group.

Parallella, dynamiska representationer i gymnasiefysiken : implementering av ett interaktivt datorverktyg i didaktiska situationer och uppfattning av effektivt lärande

The computer is a useful tool in the teaching of upper secondary school physics, and should not have a subordinate role in students' learning process. However, computers and computer-based tools are often not available when they could serve their purpose best in the ongoing teaching. Another problem is the fact that commercially available tools are not usable in the way the teacher wants. The aim of this thesis was to try out a novel teaching scenario in a complicated subject in physics, electrodynamics. The didactic engineering of the thesis consisted of developing a computer-based simulation and training material, implementing the tool in physics teaching and investigating its effectiveness in the learning process. The design-based research method, didactic engineering (Artigue, 1994), which is based on the theoryof didactical situations (Brousseau, 1997), was used as a frame of reference for the design of this type of teaching product. In designing the simulation tool a general spreadsheet program was used. The design was based on parallel, dynamic representations of the physics behind the function of an AC series circuit in both graphical and numerical form. The tool, which was furnished with possibilities to control the representations in an interactive way, was hypothesized to activate the students and promote the effectiveness of their learning. An effect variable was constructed in order to measure the students' and teachers' conceptions of learning effectiveness. The empirical study was twofold. Twelve physics students, who attended a course in electrodynamics in an upper secondary school, participated in a class experiment with the computer-based tool implemented in three modes of didactical situations: practice, concept introduction and assessment. The main goal of the didactical situations was to have students solve problems and study the function of AC series circuits, taking responsibility for theirown learning process. In the teacher study eighteen Swedish speaking physics teachers evaluated the didactic potential of the computer-based tool and the accompanying paper-based material without using them in their physics teaching. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected using questionnaires, observations and interviews. The result of the studies showed that both the group of students and the teachers had generally positive conceptions of learning effectiveness. The students' conceptions were more positive in the practice situation than in the concept introduction situation, a setting that was more explorative. However, it turned out that the students' conceptions were also positive in the more complex assessment situation. This had not been hypothesized. A deeper analysis of data from observations and interviews showed that one of the students in each pair was more active than the other, taking more initiative and more responsibilityfor the student-student and student-computer interaction. These active studentshad strong, positive conceptions of learning effectiveness in each of the threedidactical situations. The group of less active students had a weak but positive conception in the first iv two situations, but a negative conception in the assessment situation, thus corroborating the hypothesis ad hoc. The teacher study revealed that computers were seldom used in physics teaching and that computer programs were in short supply. The use of a computer was considered time-consuming. As long as physics teaching with computer-based tools has to take place in special computer rooms, the use of such tools will remain limited. The affordance is enhanced when the physical dimensions as well as the performance of the computer are optimised. As a consequence, the computer then becomes a real learning tool for each pair of students, smoothly integrated into the ongoing teaching in the same space where teaching normally takes place. With more interactive support from the teacher, the computer-based parallel, dynamic representations will be efficient in promoting the learning process of the students with focus on qualitative reasoning - an often neglected part of the learning process of the students in upper secondary school physics.