Peruskäsiteet

Peruskäsiteet refer to the essential ideas, principles and cognitive structures that form the backbone of learning in a subject. They are stable, reusable building blocks that help students connect new content with prior knowledge and transfer understanding to unfamiliar contexts. In Finnish education, peruskäsiteet are highlighted in curriculum design and used to guide instruction, learning materials, and assessment.

Educators identify the peruskäsiteet relevant to a topic and design teaching so that students encounter them with increasing depth. Instruction commonly follows a concrete-to-abstract progression, using examples, representations and language development to support meaning-making. Conceptual understanding is prioritized over recall, with tasks crafted to reveal students’ grasp of the core ideas.

Examples across subjects include: in mathematics, numbers, operations, relations and patterns; in science, matter, energy, systems and change; in language and literacy, meaning, grammar and text structure; in social studies, time, cause-effect and interconnections. Peruskäsiteet support cross-curricular competencies such as reasoning, communication and problem-solving, and they help students organize knowledge by forming networks of related ideas.

Assessment of peruskäsiteet typically relies on formative feedback and task-based demonstrations of understanding, with the aim of showing that students can apply core concepts in new contexts. The concept also supports inclusive teaching, as instruction can be adapted to varied starting points and expressed through multiple representations to accommodate diverse learners.