Creativity and innovation have become two very important concepts in today?s society where the demand for these abilities are sought after. At the same time, the school system of today follows a more traditional outlook on what learning and knowledge means.The extend students ability to understand and elevate their motivation is possible through creative methods of working. In order to create a school system which can withstand the demands of the future by including creative methods in its model, a study was carried out to examine how teachers? thoughts on creativity could mean for its development.This study took place in an elementary school in Sweden where Entreprenöriellt Lärande (EL) has been in use for the last two years.

The purpose of this paper was to learn more about the strategies used by senior high school librarians and teachers in educating their students' information skills, such as criticism of the information sources. The paper was based upon qualitative interviews with one senior high school librarian and three senior high school teachers. The respondents were asked to spontaneously tell me about their counseling strategies when the students do research assignments in medicine-oriented subjects. The respondents? narratives were analyzed with Carol Collier Kuhlthau?s theories about the information search process and its levels of mediation, as well as with literature about counseling strategies in mind.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine young people?s information needs whenthey are deciding on what upper secondary education to choose, why they usedInternet to find the information, and how they experienced their informationseeking. A qualitative study was made using interviews. The study?s respondentsconsisted of young people who are soon to be leaving elementary school, andyoung people who have just started their upper secondary education.

The following study is a discourse analysis of the concept of critical thinking within pre-school teacher education. It considers the following questions: how does the concept of critical thinking appear in policy documents, central to the pre-school teacher education, and which possible conceptions of critical thinking are conveyed by students and teachers active within the education. Additionally, the study seeks to discuss, as well as suggest a possible relation, between the findings of those two questions. In reviewing the material (consisting of five semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, and of a selection of policy documents central to the education), I argue the existence of a sort of project within the education, which presents critical thinking as a higher value. At the same time, I argue that the concept is not defined or concretized. This project, however, as I suggest while drawing upon Foucault?s ideas of discourse and government, involves a rather high degree of control.

The purpose of this study is to understand how teachers in the preparatory class and regular class, in the meeting with newly arrived pupils, plan and carry out their teaching. This in order to facilitate social interaction and learning in the classroom, from an intercultural perspective. The examination was conducted through interviews with four teachers from the schools that I selected. The teachers gave their perspective on their approach to newly arrived pupils, through interviews. The result shows that the teachers have ambitions to start from the newly arrived pupils' own ideas and from their prior knowledge.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine and compare the process of starting a school library at schools which haven't had a school library before, and to examine and compare the experience of this process according to the principals and the persons responsible for the school library.I have examined two Swedish independent primary schools (age 6-15 years). I have made qualitative interviews with the principals and the persons responsible for the new school library. In all, I have made seven interviews. As requested by the new Swedish Educational Act, both schools had recently started creating school libraries. One of the schools had recruited a half-time teacher-librarian and the other had no staffing at all.In the interviews, I have examined the attitudes of the informants towards school libraries, if this attitude has changed during the process of starting the school library, the informants' experiences during this process and the informants' views on the school library as an agent for student achievement.

This is a comparative study examining one school with scheduled homework assistance andone school without homework help tuition. The study has investigated the use of the schoolbasedhomework assistance program at a grade school in a municipality outside of Stockholm.To what extent do the pupils use this resource, and what are their attitudes to it? Do theyregard it as a useful resource? What is the opinion of the teachers involved, do they findhomework tuition relevant and meaningful?The governing documents for the Swedish schools do not make the handing out of homeworkmandatory, and do not require that schools organize homework assistance. The emphasis inconnection with homework is that pupils should learn to take responsibility for their ownstudies. There is, however, a commersial market for homework assistance, at prices that arenot accessible for most parents, and some municipal schools have stared programs forhomework tuition.

The aim of this research is to evaluate whether the social environment of Swedish high school students affects their views on the multicultural society. The research material was collected through the use of two focus groups containing high school students from two different schools, one group is used to a multicultural social environment while the other group is used to a less multicultural social environment. With the researcher acting as a moderator in the focus groups, the students discussed different questions regarding multiculturalism, gender equality and religion. The theory that this research is based on suggests that the social environment and the social capital affects the students views on the multicultural society. The results of the research were evaluated and connected to the theory.

Vocal technique and interpretation are the key elements of voice training. Thepurpose of this article is to investigate what vocal technique and interpretation meanto teachers and students and how they would describe the relationship between thetwo. The questions at issue, intended to be answered in this article, are the following:What is the relationship between vocal technique and interpretation? How should theteaching be structured for the students to experience progress on the musical plane?What role does the teacher have in the musical development of the student?This is a qualitative survey and the methods of investigation are semi-structuredinterviews and classroom observations. Presented in the article are a number ofresearchers and writers whose thoughts on the subjects have gained great importanceto vocal teachers and students, as well as leading the research on the voice and itsfunctions forward to higher grounds.

The aim of this investigation was to determine if, and in that case how, the resources of personne1 in what in this essay will be referred to as the department of students' health in four industrial municipalities had changed from 1999 until 2004. The establishment of the department of students' health could be discussed and analys ed in regard of a few concepts from new institutionaI organizational theory and studies on implementation. The investigation answers the following questions:What differences were there between the municipalities regarding the children's accessibility to the department of students' health?What differences were there between pre-school, compulsory school and upper secondary school within the municipalities regarding the children's accessibility to the department of student's health?The municipalities were commissioned by the government to combine school health service, student welfare and the field of remediaI teaching in order to establish a new section, the department of students' health. The study was carried out quantitatively.

Umeå University currently uses two Course Management System, Moodle and Sakai (Cambro). Both Moodle and Sakai are based on open source code and are today the two more popular choices among Swedish Universities. They both have different strengths and weaknesses both from a technical perspective and a user perspective. This can create problems for a course responsible/teacher when it comes to planning the course structure at a distance course but also when planning the course structure on a campus course that uses a Course Management System. With this as my starting point my formulations of questions become:How do the Course Management Systems that Umeå University uses differs, both from a technical perspective and user perspective?What possibilities is there in the Course Management Systems to use a different Course Structure?Is there a noticeable difference on the view of Course Management System of teachers and students at different departments?The purpose with my essay is to create a basis that course responsible/teacher can use to plan the course structure.

Arbetets syfte är att undersöka vad ett förebyggande arbete för att undanröja hinder och svårigheter för elevers läs- och skrivutveckling kan innebära. Fokus ligger på speciallärarens roll i detta arbete. De frågor som undersökningen besvarar är hur klasslärare och speciallärare kan beskriva ett förebyggande arbete, hur samarbetet kan se ut, hur man kan tillvarata speciallärarens kompetens samt vilka faktorer som kan ses påverka. För att besvara frågeställningarna har kvalitativa intervjuer med fyra klasslärare och tre speciallärare i grundskolan genomförts.För att analysera och tolka de data som insamlats har ett sociokulturellt perspektiv på lärande använts, tillsammans med tidigare forskning och litteratur kopplad till ämnet.Ur ett sociokulturellt perspektiv framträder kunskapen om elevers proximala utvecklingszon, samt användandet av medierande redskap och scaffolding som betydelsefullt för ett förebyggande arbete. Resultatet för undersökningen visar att förebyggande arbete kan ske på flera olika sätt, exempelvis genom tidiga insatser, genom att organisera undervisningen, genom att skapa delaktighet och genom att ge eleverna en positiv självbild.

AbstractThe purpose of this work is to contribute knowledge about the transition of children from preschool to preschool classes. The experiences of pedagogical staff, parents and children are described, based on four deepening questions. The questions are about what the actors experience as positive and what the difficulties were in the transition process, and they also cover the differences of children and collaboration between actors. The method consists of qualitative interviews with parents, children, and pedagogical staff. The interviews concern the experiences of transition from the different actors.

We are two students at Malmö Högskola, writing our final essay for obtain our teacher diplomas. On our partner schools, we have been facing but little information about how to invite the parents to collaborate with the school. Our thought is that the schoolwork is favorable to the pupils if both school and home are working together side by side. Therefore, we decided to dig deeper into this matter of how one particular school is working with parental collaboration, to be able to see if their method is useful. This particular school is offering studies in a course form so called family class. Here the pupils can get extra help from remedial teachers and their parents are also invited.

Who is integrating school-holiday home? It is for the teachers, recreational pedagogue or the students? How do the students think and act to keep the different activities apart?My purpose was to study how children sort the day between school and recreational home interactions. The issues were: How do they distinguish between the different activities during the day?  See the students their stay after school program as part of the school day? Who decides whether you have to go to school, and whether you have to go to after school program? And do you really have to?I have interviewed six students at an elementary school, based from a phenomenographic perspective, I've used myself of issues that students have been able to respond from a school perspective and after-school perspective. My interview questions have been comparative in nature, where the same question have given different answers depending on whether the question focused on school or the afterschool program.