YUFE Visiting Scholar and UEF’s Postdoctoral Researcher Anna Kristiina Kokko brainstormed educational research ideas in collaboration with the University of Bremen.
The visiting researcher grant from the YUFE European University Alliance (Young Universities for the Future of Europe) facilitates international researcher exchange and close research collaboration among the partner universities.
As a YUFE Visiting Scholar, Anna Kristiina Kokko, a postdoctoral researcher at the UEF Department of Educational Sciences and Psychology, has gained new perspectives for her research during 2026 in cooperation with the researchers of the University of Bremen.
In her postdoctoral research, Kokko focuses on the connections between education and society, especially on the role of prediction within the educational framework.
“I am interested in how various indicators, algorithms, spaces and policies function as political tools for prediction. They render certain phenomena and histories visible while obscuring others. They also generate specific visions of the future toward which education is actively, yet often discreetly, steered within the educational policy and everyday life of educational institutions,” Kokko summarises.
Following communications earlier in the year, Kokko’s visit to the University of Bremen in the autumn of 2026 brought the researchers together in person and yielded new insights for the research.
Collaboration with Thomas Grunau, an Assistant Professor at the University of Bremen, has made it possible to combine the study of prediction with issues related to the marketisation of everyday school life. Grunau studies education as part of market-based and competitive factors, in which comparability and the allocation of resources are central.
“The visit was particularly successful in that we had plenty of time for joint planning and practical work. Engaging with the materials in various ways provided new perspectives even for the teaching of qualitative methods. Furthermore, the environment in Bremen offered numerous opportunities to examine the increasing economisation and marketisation of education", says Kokko.
Shining a light on educational governance
Education has always been a focal point for future expectations, making research into prediction within the field all the more important.
“Education should, for example, identify risks early on and produce measurable results and data for decision-making. At the same time, the day-to-day reality of education is becoming filled with various monitoring systems, as well as spaces and technologies promising a better future. By examining prediction and its history, one can ask what kinds of values and goals the predictions convey, or who benefits from the predictive systems that guide the governance of educational institutions and who is left out,” Kokko explains.
Research into predictive education requires sensitivity to everyday matters and things that often appear self-evident. For instance, a process of politicisation can be discerned by tracking the use of various concepts over time, when looking past numbers or seemingly neutral and technical documents.
Thanks to the collaboration between Kokko and the researchers of the University of Bremen, the subtle forms of governance can be made even more visible than before.
“By combining an examination of marketisation and predictive practices with temporal and spatial perspectives, we can analyse the collective effects of prediction, competition, and economic goals on the everyday realities of education. At the same time, this approach opens up possibility of examining how various numerical metrics and spaces function as economic and political instruments that shape decision-making at multiple levels. I hope that our research collaboration can help us discover new aspects of educational governance,” Kokko concludes.
