Conference Agenda

Drawing from the findings of my PhD research, I aim to highlight how listening to students’ voices about student–teacher relationships, as a complex phenomenon embedded in education systems, can help us understand structural challenges to students’ experiences in school. The research presented is an interview-based study aimed at understanding how secondary school students in Italy make sense of their relationship with teachers and how these understandings influence their school experiences.

I will focus on key findings related to the first research question: how does the relationship with teachers influence adolescents’ relationship with school?

Research on students’ school experiences has long demonstrated the centrality of STR in students’ lives. Students’ perceptions are crucial, as their (self-)perception and behaviours are often in reaction to how they feel treated by teachers (Chandra Handa, 2020; Davis, 2003). I conceive student-teacher relationships (STR) as a dynamic, affective and dialogic relationship between individual students and teachers emerging from their reciprocal (re)actions in the specific physical, social and ideological setting of the school. This conceptualisation is informed by the student voice dialogic idea of STR (Bourke and Loveridge, 2018; Cook-Sather, 2002) and the interactionist notions that students experience and make sense of their schooling through their interactions with teachers as they translate policies and discourses into practice (Woods, 1978).

I will focus on findings relating to assessment, as they can best show how different structural, discursive, and affective aspects of schooling interact in shaping students’ experiences and perceptions of STRs. In doing so, I will touch on other elements that emerged as central to the experiences of STRs, such as workload, ideas of teachers’ role and professional skills, teachers’ attitudes and mindsets, perceived differential treatment, and targeting.

Assessment is a multidimensional activity, involving social, historical, discourse and individual factors, through which teachers mediate students’ experiences of school. Through assessment, teachers convey messages about ideas of teaching and learning. Over time, these experiences not only contribute to their understanding of assessment itself but also influence their well-being at school and their learning identity (Baidoo-Anu et al., 2025). International studies show that teachers struggle to reconcile recent national mandates of formative assessment with demands for accountability that favour traditions of summative assessment (Baidoo-Anu et al., 2025; Bonner, 2016). This gap is reflected in a misalignment between students' and teachers’ reported conception of assessment: teachers tend to view assessment as a reliable support for teaching, while students see it mainly as a tool for accountability, often detrimental to their learning (Baidoo-Anu et al., 2025).

Through examples from my research in the Italian context, I show how students' experiences around assessment amid unclear and conflicting policies, coupled with neoliberal discourse of merit, can become pervasive in STR. These findings have implications for other national contexts as they highlight the need to investigate how influence not only individual actions and experiences, but also relationships in school.

In Italy, the lack of a clear institutional vision for education has favoured the persistence of the traditional modes of teaching and learning, including in assessment. Teachers are asked to balance between formative and summative assessment, focusing on pupils’ learning processes as well as on their performance and behaviour. However, no clear guidance is provided to secondary school teachers, who still have to mark students’ performance on a numerical scale. Under these conditions, teachers, who have full autonomy and responsibility for daily, periodic, and final assessment, have fostered a summative tradition (Pastore, 2024). This effect students who need to maintain a passing mark in all subjects to progress to the next grade and have to cope with ideas of academic merit linked to high marks.

The Finnish education system has long been viewed as egalitarian. Most students attend a nearby comprehensive school operated by the municipality, and all schools follow the same national curriculum (Opetushallitus, 2014). However, in highly populated urban municipalities, schools may organize emphasized teaching on certain subjects. Students participating in emphasized teaching are generally grouped into so-called classes with special emphasis. These classes use entrance exams to select students with the “propensity” to do well in the emphasized subject (PL 1998/628, 28 §). In practice, these classes tend to select for academically gifted students from families with a high socioeconomic status, even if the explicit goal of them is not formal ability grouping (Berisha & Seppänen, 2017, Kantasalmi & Kupiainen; Koivuhovi, 2021; Kosunen, 2016).

Students studying in a class with a special emphasis generally perform better academically than their peers in general classes (Kantasalmi & Kupiainen, 2021; Koivuhovi et al., 2025). This is at least partly attributable to the selective nature of these classes. The socioeconomic status of the family is also correlated with better academic performance (Eriksson et al, 2021). While previous research seemed to indicate (Koivuhovi ym., 2021), that most of the performance advantage is due to the aforementioned selection effects, Koivuhovi et al (2025) found that even when controlling for socioeconomic status, students in classes with special emphasis performed better than their general class counterparts. It’s possible that the homogeneity of the class could lead to faster development of academic skills, if, for example, the teacher is able to introduce more challenging content (Mazenod ym., 2019).

Previous research on classes with a special emphasis has used many different cognitive measures (Koivuhovi ym., 2021; Koivuhovi ym., 2025). However, relatively little research on literacy in classes with a special emphasis exists to date. The modern information environment presents a challenge for reading comprehension and credibility evaluation. The literacy skills of Finnish students have been on the decline for a while now, and especially the number of low performing students has increased (Hiltunen et al., 2023). The best performing students’ literacy has declined slightly as well, but the gap between the best and the worst performing students has widened. If classes with special emphasis provide additional advantages to students beyond the effects of having a high socioeconomic status, they could lead to diverging school paths and widening of the gap in literacy skills in Finnish cities. Beyond the specific context of Finnish classes with a special emphasis, the results of this research could provide insight into the impact of school choice across education systems.

We sought out to investigate whether students studying in a class with a special emphasis had a higher initial level and faster development of reading comprehension and credibility evaluation. We controlled for students’ socioeconomic status, gender and migrant background, since they are important predictors of literacy performance (Eriksson et al., 2021; Hiltunen et al., 2023; Pulkkinen ym., 2024). We expect students studying in a class with a special emphasis to perform better at the initial level and experience faster development on both measures. However, after controlling for socioeconomic status, we expect the difference to decrease or disappear entirely (Koivuhovi ym., 2021; Koivuhovi ym., 2025). To answer the research question, we employed multigroup latent growth curve models.

This paper discusses how data originating from the yearly National Assessment of Basic Competences (NABC), a system-wide, PISA-like student assessment in Hungary, are translated into public discourse in the form of school league tables, and how this shapes public understandings of educational quality.

The NABC includes background questionnaires and allows longitudinal analyses; sociologists and economists have extensively used these datasets to demonstrate the strong predictability of achievement by social background and the stratified nature of the school system. However, public interpretations tend to rely on much more simplified readings of performance indicators, and this has serious consequences for the further stratification of the education system.

Parents rarely use the original databases: performance data reach them through various mediations and translation processes. One of the most influential of these is the annual “Best Hundred Secondary Schools” ranking published by a major national media outlet. The ranking aggregates seven indicators (standardised test results from the NABC, school-leaving examinations, and higher education admission outcomes) into a single composite index and produces a highly visible league table of schools. The list attracts wide public attention, and its top positions are widely perceived as representing the “best” or “top” schools.

Besides the analysis of how complex assessment data are translated into simplified public knowledge through rankings and league tables, the main research question of the paper concerns how parents interpret these data and how this contributes to the legitimisation of social selection in education. Furthermore, alongside scrutinising the translation of a multidimensional dataset into an easily communicable one-dimensional league table, the paper also presents cases in which educational researchers attempted to draw public attention to dimensions that remain hidden in pure league tables. Two such cases — an alternative ranking based on pedagogical added value and another highlighting the correlation between students’ socio-economic background and their performance — and the public reactions to these alternatives are analysed.

The theoretical framework draws on sociological approaches inspired by the work of Alain Desrosières on the social nature of statistics and indicators (Desrosières, 1998), as well as on the literature on quantification and the role of PISA in educational governance (Sellar-Lingard, 2014), governance by numbers (Grek, 2009) and performativity (Ball, 2003). These approaches treat data and indicators not as neutral or purely technical representations but as social constructions that actively shape reality by defining what counts as quality, success, and legitimacy.

The Hungarian case is interpreted in a broader European and international context shaped by PISA and transnational benchmarking. Large-scale comparative assessments have successfully challenged earlier national myths of educational excellence and strengthened evidence-based public debate. At the same time, the growing dominance of numerical indicators tends to narrow public understandings of educational quality and to reinforce market-like logics of comparison and competition. The paper thus connects local empirical material to wider sociological debates on datafication and changing modes of governing education.