This thesis primarily includes a study on whether companies can develop a mathematical activity that supports students' motivation in mathematics. The work was done together with Midroc Electro, a company that pays attention to the difficulty of recruiting and therefore was interested in investigating how the business world would be able to contribute.The thesis can be divided into three stages. The first part comprised by a exploration into research on student motivation regarding mathematics as well as numerous interviews with engineers to see how the research findings did fit with Midroc Electros reality. In these studies it became clear that the student who aims for a profession whose education or work requires math belongs to the group of students who primarily manage their studies in mathematics, that is, those that have the greatest motivation to work hard and complete their studies.Research information and interviews were compared and resulted in the thesis second part, Midroc Challenge. An activity where students primarily came to learn about the engineering profession and secondly how mathematics can be used in the engineering profession.

The use of history is the concept of people using and analyzing history in the society for various purposes. Study in this area has largely emerged because there are many different reasons for people and societies to be interested in history. To investigate the use of history, a historical material needs to be present in some form. With this study, I intend to show how older tourist guidebooks can provide such materials of study and therefore I use travel guidebooks about Tallinn released under the USSR (Estonian SSR) between the years 1960 to 1990. The analysis is based on Klas-Go?ran Karlsson's (Professor of History) typology of seven different uses of history: scientific, existential, moral, ideological, political, educational, non-use of history and a commercial use of history.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of using more promotion material to enhance the in-store communication of sales promotion. In the retail industry today the research regarding the benefits from using various in-store promotion materials is limited, thus this study was carried out to bring clarity to this subject. The study is carried out in two pharmacies and the design of the study was to add more promotion materials to one store, while keeping the other store in its normal condition and then let the stores change conditions after one week e.g. latin-square design. The data collection of this study consists of four different methods: sales data, a questionnaire with 182 customers, an observation study of 300 consumers and an eye-tracking experiment with 41 participants.

The aim of this study is to investigate into the use of discussions in the classroom to help the pupils develop a deeper understanding of mathematical concepts and operations. The empirical data contain interviews with two teachers and observations from their lessons. The purpose of the interviews was to find out what importance the teachers ascribed to the ability of their pupils to talk about mathematics, and how they organised their classes to encourage mathematical discussions. With the observations, I was able to see the interaction in the classroom and hear discussions between the teacher and the pupils, as well as between the pupils themselves.The interviewed teachers proved to share my own belief in the results of researchers like Malmer (1999) and Löwing (2006) about the importance of verbal discussion, argumentation and reflection during mathematics classes. But convictions derived from the research of others are one thing, the practical application of the wisdom in the classroom another.

This essay is built upon the subject of drama. Its purpose was to examine if drama was a good and important educational method to/for children, and if drama is enhancing childrens self-esteem and self-confidence. By reviewing the results from literature and interviews, my intention was to compare the results, in order to find out what the views of the literature and respondents on drama was.I used qualitative interviewing, to find out what the teachers had to say about drama, and I used literature that was relevant to the purpose of the essay. I took a deeper look at the meaning of educational drama and pedagogical drama was, and also the meaning of self-esteem and self-confidence, in order to connect it with the results from the literature and the interviews.  After studying the literature and the interviews, I could see coherence, and therefore compile a result.  Both literature and the interviewed teachers considers drama to be a good and important method within the educational school and that drama positively has got a strengthening effect on childrens self-esteem and self-confidence.

In my study I have chosen to examine the mathematics in children's free play and everyday situations, with focus on sorting and classification. The purpose of the study was to see how children express their mathematical knowledge. I have chosen to use a qualitative method in my examination, here I did observations in a children's group where the children were between three and six years old. I also did interviews with the teacher's on the department to see how they relate to the mathematics and how they formulate the department to achieve as good a learning environment as possible.The result shows that the teacher's approach is incredible important to the children's learning ability and that they are always present to challenge and discuss together with the children. The observation indicates that children use mathematics all the time in their everyday situations and that it is the interaction between individuals and environment that affects children's development. .

Today, librarians tasks may sometimes take on an educational aspect, e.g. when designing educational courses. Our aim with this paper has been to extend our knowledge of peoples learning and learning processes in order to better adapt our educational courses for different user groups. We have investigated what eight senior citizens wanted to learn about the Internet, and followed seven of them during their course. We have examined how the group experienced a course about Internet use, and how they described their learning and learning processes.

The basic principle of the integrated school according to the Salamanca Declaration is that all children, whenever possible, should be taught together, regardless of any difficulties or diversity. It has been shown that students with neuropsychiatric disorders are having much more difficulties to achieve the targets than the average student. Pupils with neuropsychiatric syndrome will always be present in school and we who are working in the business must be better at learning to adapt to them so that they too can achieve proficiency in school.Mathematics is perhaps the topic that Swedish students generally have most problems with,and it will not obviously be easier if you have some form of neuropsychiatric disability.In our future role as special education teachers, we will mentor and support other teachers in the complex educational environment that exists today. The aim that has been built up is thus partly to explore how mathematics teachers work with included students with neuropsychiatric disorders, as well as how teachers wishing to become supervised by specialeducation teachers in mathematics. The study is conducted from a sociocultural perspective.A sociocultural perspective on learning means that all people are learning all the time in social settings.

The aim with this master thesis is to analyze a scientific material concerning the context between learning and child/student development, and factors which controls process of learning, to create an image with quality account and teaching in mathematics, which then can raise the mathematical knowledge among students.The phenomena which stand in focus for the investigation is: why there is a negative tendency for development of knowledge in mathematics, among the Swedish students that TIMSSs investigations showed in intercultural comparison within the years 1993, 1999, 2003 and 2007.The method is the ethnographical method, which is based on: analyzing scientific theories about learning child/student development, factors which controls process of learning, and factors which controls process of learning the most and qualitative empiric investigation with qualitatively analyzes the questionnaires, which is about factors which are controlling the process of learning and factors which are controlling the process of learning the most.Result of the theoretical and empiric analyzes shows that factors as school environment, attitude for subjects and teaching, controls and influence the learning. To end a unenthusiastic tendency as a negative development of mathematical knowledge among students that is shown in TIMSS investigation and to elevate the students' performance in mathematics, an elevated qualitative account and teaching in mathematics, by the factors named. Safe school environments as the intercultural meeting place, the teachers influence part to the students' subjects' attitude in mathematics and goal related grading criteria in teaching, is all required for e qualitative teaching in mathematics..

A rhetorical analysis of the educational interactive film ?Riskprofilen?, produced by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (Swedish: Myndigheten för Samhällsskydd och Beredskap). This essay uses the theories and methods of Procedural Rhetoric, as described by Professor Ian Bogost, and Visual Rhetoric, as described by Professor Brigitte Mral to analyse the interactive and visual component parts of the artefact, and compares them to the intended purposes of the artefact as stated by documents pertaining to its creation, found to be those of educating the public; marketing the agency; and driving traffic to its webpage. The artefact is through analysis found to fulfil the purposes of marketing the Agency and of likely increasing traffic to the website upon which it is hosted. Regarding the primary, educational purpose this analysis finds that the artefact does not teach a user the accident-avoidance strategies it claims to do, but is dependent upon further materials..

Att eleverna i skolan ska utvecklas och nå de mål och kunskapskrav som finns skrivna i läroplanen är en central del i skolvärlden. Men hur når man då dessa på bästa sätt? Hur ska man som lärare veta vilken undervisning som är bäst för sina elever? I läroplanen står att eleverna ska ges en varierad undervisning där eleverna själva ska få gestalta, prova och utforska (Lgr11). Syftet med denna litteraturstudie är att undersöka om laborativa arbetsätt i matematik är gynnsamt för eleverna. I studien framställs att arbeta laborativt kan vara gynnsamt men till en viss del och att det beror på en del olika faktorer, som exempelvis lärarens roll och hur väl uppgiften och materialet framträder varandra..

Swedish students' knowledge of both mathematics and reading comprehension has deteriorated in recent years. Scientists are discussing whether there is a connection between these areas and that the pupils deteriorating math skills may have something to do with their increasingly lower results in terms of reading comprehension. To investigate this possible connection, I conducted a survey among students in ninth grade and have come to the conclusion that the scientists are right: this connection absolutely exist. Students who received a high score on tasks designed to test students' mathematical problem-solving skills, also received high results on the reading comprehension test. And students who received a poor performance on the problem-solving tasks, were also low performers in the reading comprehension test.

The physical environment is constructed of materials. The materiality of different places contributes to how places can be distinguished and the material can contribute to the construction of place identity. For architects with different orientations the material is one of the principal means by which they can express their idea. The material remains when the design process is finished and instead the material becomes a precondition for how people will perceive and deal with the place. The literature study of the essay examines how the concept of place and materiality is dealt with in different disciplines and how these descriptions are linked to the concept of place identity.

In this project a method used for performing accurate simulations on magnetization dynamics based on constrained field density functional theory has been validated and used for performing computations on a few magnetic materials. The method has been shown to simulate systems consisting of iron well, but there are still problems with simulations of alloys containing both magnetic and non-magnetic materials..

As demand for renewable energy is increasing rapidly, the market for biomass pellets is expected to continue to grow in the near future. Most of the new raw materials that are discussed for pellet production have one thing in common; the production costs will increase compared to using traditional raw materials such as sawdust and planer shavings. The aim of this thesis is to investigate to what degree increased use of new raw materials for pellet production will affect the general pellet prices in Sweden and to survey what plans Swedish pellet producers have concerning new raw materials. To investigate the raw material situation of the Swedish pellet producers an industry survey was performed. Literature studies were also made on previous research in the subject field. Calculations of the production costs for pellets were done for the raw materials sawdust, wet sawmill chips and energy wood respectively. New raw materials are already used by the large-scale pellet producers in Sweden.