Laboratory work is a big part of chemistry education in high school. During our student training placement we have noticed that the laboratory work is not fully utilized to develop students´ chemistry knowledge. This problem made us want to investigate how the laboratory work in chemistry could be set, to become more meaningful for students. We introduced two preparation methods, and examined the outcome of students learning experiences and their acquisition of chemistry knowledge. This was examined both through surveys and observation.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine the ideological currents that have influenced the swedish school system since the 1990's. The background of my interest is the lively debate in schools and media about the new School reform 2011. My hypothesis is that education in 2011 largely will be influenced by neoliberal and neoconservative values. The method I`ve used is discourse and ideology critique, which examines the relationship between rhetoric and power. These concepts are useful to explain the ideological change in different policy documents and in curricula, for example Lpf 94 and School 2001. The theoretical framework is based primarily on the neoliberal and the neoconservative agenda, which are two distinct political rationalities in the contemporary postmodern world.

The aim of this study was to find relations between parents background and education ina wider sense and their children's success in school. The study also includes genusdifferentiations, the family profile and residential areas influence on children's ability anddetermination to study.The study confirmed earlier research that children's success in school is to some extentdependant on their parents education. At the same time it was shown that in most casesthe children reached higher level of education than their parents ? also when they werepoorly educated or had emigrated from a country with big cultural differences. It was alsoevident that children with at least one Swedish parent (and presumably Swedish as theirmother tongue) reached higher educational levels than other children.Children from single parent families often stopped their school carrier after the 9-yearcompulsory class while children of dual parent families more often continued to university.In general, girls were more affluent in school than the boys.

This study aims to examine what students in two schools think of the physical environment in their school, and how this affect their studies. My main question I wanted to answer was:How does the students think that the physical environment affect their day in school?I also wanted to find out what the students think is important in the physical environment in their school. The study is based on interviews with students i two different schools. One secondary school, in which three eight-grade students were interviewed, and one high school in which two students were interviewed. The result of the interviews is that the students think that their work in school is affected by the physical environment. The most important things is to feel safe in school and to have the possibilities to do studies without limitations in the environment, for example room to do their own studies, and a flexibility and variation in the environment.

AbstractDuring my university trip to South Africa I visit a black township called Lingehlile. There I examined the life situation and education for children and youth with mentally disabilities. I was interested in knowing more about what basic condition they have, period of school and what kind of support they get outside the school. The subjects that I have handled are a school for all, support for the person with mentally disabilities and their family, the opinion of the society, education and life after school. I got my result by two interviews.

This study has been performed at a smaller high school and with its industry students, the high school is located in a small industrial community. The purpose of my study has been to find out what students think about their work with the project work, what they think has been positive and negative, how their motivation is influenced by the work on the project and if the work has been affected by factors outside the school world.The interviews have been carried out like normal conversation with open questions. The students who participated in the study comes from the school where I did my internship. The selection was done by asking all students from a specific course, those who were positive to participate are also the ones I have chosen to interview. My main study results, in summary, described as the students, once they were inside their work were positive to the project work and felt motivated in their work. Negative experiences, for the students which attend a practical program, has mainly been economic, as the school does not provide any financial support.

The aim of this study was to investigate how disabled pupils feel about school lessons in physical education. Previous studies in the area show that many disabled pupils think that this is a problem. Drawing on data from one-to-one semi-structured interviews with six students in the age of 11-14 years, this study focused on how students with disability cope with their impairments and physical activity in school. The interviewees? background displays a wide range of sport related activities and besides school the interviewees seem to be engaged in different sports associations on their leisure time.

The word mathematics is often associated to addition, subtraction, division or multiplication. This is not the kind of mathematics that belongs to pre-school. In my essay I have chosen to write about how mathematics is used in pre-school. In the literature it is written that the best way of becoming familiar with mathematics, is to integrate it in the every day life but that there are educators that use traditional mathematics education in pre-school. The questions I would like to answer are:1.

Sweden's school voucher reform has made the Swedish school system into one of the world's most liberalized. The debate concerning the ownership of Swedish schools is intense and the Swedish Minister of Education is open to restricting private equity owned companies from running schools. Interestingly, fewer calls are heard for restricting smaller profit-driven companies from owning schools. This essay aims to examine whether or not the quality of education provided by an individual school changes if it is acquired by a large private equity owned school group. This is done by conducting a comparative study on four independent schools recently acquired by AcadeMedia, Sweden's biggest private equity owned school group.

Practical and theoretical learning are methods that are used in schools as a way to prepare students for the working life. Within the practical learning knowledge is not only acquired to learn in practice, but the students must also be able to apply their theoretical knowledge to what he/she does. Against this background, the aim of the study was to investigate the importance of practical learning for students in college / university level and how they are experiencing the stress that may arise out of the loss of practical learning during their education, as well as their vision for working life after completing their education. The population of the study consisted of N = 36, which 18 of these had used both practical and theoretical learning and the remainder had only used theoretical learning. The method was a questionnaire survey with a high proportion of fixed alternative answers according to likert scales.

Johanna Petrén, a prospective teacher of religion, has examined how a couple of students view Christianity as it is presented in a Religious Education classroom. Furthermore, how this image matches their experience of Christianity outside of school. The key questions of this essay are: How do the students generally describe Christianity and what it means to be a Christian based on the image they have acquired from outside of school, or from Christian friends, confirmation or their own faith? How do the students describe Christianity according to what they learn in Religious education at school? What potential differences do the students perceive between the image of Christianity conveyed by the school and the image they have of Christianity from outside of school? Does the school's teaching influence the credibility and interest in Christianity? The questions have been discussed in focus group interviews, in which the students way of reasoning and talking about religious matters were analysed based on previous research. References used in the analysis includes research on topics such as science of religious history, religion in multicultural and postcolonial rooms, secularism and discourse analysis have.

Student influence is a well debated subject and all Swedish teachers should let the students influence their education. According to research the student influence is generally low and something that varies from school to school. The school policy documents do not clarify how much impact the students get to have on their education and the impact is therefore something that every individual teacher decides. These individual differences are the reason of this study.This is a qualitative study about four teachers work and thoughts focusing on the subject of school democracy and student influence in the school environment. The study is based on qualitative interviews in order to highlight four different teacher?s thoughts.

The purpose of my study was to find out how staff in after-school activities thinks they work with norms and values, we may call this values education, and how this in turn may influence children's norms and values. By extension, how children are socialized with each other and develop socially. In my research, I have interviewed five of the after-school activities staff who work with children aged 6-9 years at a school in the neighbourhood Rinkeby-Kista in northwestern Stockholm.The results show that after-school activity according to the staff can play a very important and sometimes crucial role in children's social development. Staff believes that if they do not learn the social rules by participating in playing and games in early childhood, when growing up they are outside and cannot participate. By their pedagogical approaches, in terms of values and norms, the adults in after-school activities can help children to become socialized into a community of solidarity and eventually as adults become responsible citizens able to function and participate in society..

The climate issue is a significant question, and the problem is mainly caused by human activities. Everyone can help to counteract the enhanced Greenhouse effect by reducing the amounts of energy they use and by not consuming more products then they need.Schools are some of societies many consumers and therefore contribute to the Greenhouse effect. The School also has an important task; to teach and disseminate knowledge and information about the climate and the environment. According to the Swedish National Agency for Education, Skolverket, must all schools regularly consider the environment and sustainable development throughout the entire education process. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many schools in Sweden today.One of many tools that can be used to coordinate environmental work and initiatives, and also to make it more efficient, is environmental management systems.

AbstractThis paper is about the organisation of the special needs education in three nine-year compulsory schools in Stockholm and the pedagogical thoughts and theories that underlie these organisations. The main purpose of the paper was to investigate whether the special needs education of these schools should be interpreted in accordance with a segregating or an including view on integration as these perspectives are presented by the Norwegian professor Peder Haug. In addition to this I also wanted to investigate if there were any historical arguments in favour of one or another of these perspectives that were still being put forward in today?s debate.The methods that I used were a study of literature regarding special needs education and interviews of a qualitative character with three special educationalists and a special teacher that were working on three different nine-year compulsory schools in Stockholm.The result of the study shows that a big part of the special needs education of the schools that I visited can be interpreted in accordance with the segregating view on integration.The organisation of the special needs education of the three schools differed slightly from school to school but the common trait was that the largest part of this work took place outside of the student?s regular classroom and sometimes outside of the scheduled school day.Two of the schools had special groups where students that were believed to have a need of special education got some, or their entire schooling. That the schools chose to build a big part of their special needs education upon solutions that should be regarded as segregating was motivated on the basis of an effect oriented view on education.