The main purpose of this C-essay is to answer the question: What have been the consequences and effects of the merit point system on language studies and the parties concerned (teachers, students and principals) during the school year of 2010/11?The merit point system is the result of a political decision and was implicated for the first time in the Swedish upper secondary school during the school year 2010/2011. Being a completely new phenomenon it is of great interest and importance to study its effects.The study in this essay also aims to verify, falsify or nullify two hypotheses very often referred to in the political discussions regarding the merit point system:The merit point system will replace affection and interest as main reasons for language studies in upper secondary school and cause a rectification amongst the students choices of additional courses.The merit point system will have a segregating effect upon society and make it harder for people to rise in society through education in the future.A verification of these hypotheses would imply the appearance of an increased rectification amongst students as well as an orientation towards an in the future more segregated society.The empiric material has been collected and examined with qualitative as well as quantitative methods (questionnaires and interviews) and belongs epistemologically to the phenomenological and hermeneutical traditions..

AbstractThe purpose of this essay is to increase the knowledge of which strategies students with reading and writing disabilities or dyslexia use to learn in secondary school. The study aims to examine the following questions:Which coping strategies do students with reading and writing disabilities use in their studies?How can remedial teachers support students with reading and writing disabilities in their learning process?The study consists of two interviews with a total of three hours recorded material made with a secondary school teacher who teaches Swedish and English. The teacher has experiences of reading and writing disabilities herself but also from teaching students with dyslexia. The interviews are constructed into a lifestory describing experiences of reading and writing disabilities in school, during teacher training and as a teacher.

The purpose of my examination is contributing with knowledge about the relation between language- stimulation in preschool and read- and writes developing and teachers thought about that. In order to meet the purpose I read literature that deals with my matter and is based previous research. I also made qualitative interviews with three elementary school teachers and three preschool teachers who work within preschools that concentrate on development of language in a town in the middle of Sweden.  In this way I find out about their thoughts about what they think is important to work with about language in preschool and how the preschool teachers can work with the development of language to make it easier for the children in their read- and writes developing. The result shows that it is important to work with children?s development of language in preschool.

The purpose of this study was to explore the use of a blog in the classroom. This paper describes why the teacher created the blog and how the blog is used by teachers and pupils in and outside the classroom. The study also describes teachers? thoughts regarding future use of the blog. Seven primary school teachers were interviewed and the material was analysed using a multimodal design theoretical perspective on learning (Selander & Kress 2010).The conclusion of the study was that the teachers created and designed blogs to give parents, pupils, relatives and others an opportunity to have an insight into the pupils? school day.

This paper investigates how Swedish upper secondary school students relate to the financial support available from the Swedish state of education. It also looks at the attitudes of such students to the new CSN[1]truancy rules as they apply to school politics.Is there a difference in students? attitude to these truancy rules and does that difference depend on the students? socio-economic standard, whether they come from a wealthy background or a marginalised society or whether they are ethnic Swedish? Does this in any way affect the attitudes of the students?This financial support is only paid to those students who do not skip school. If they lose their right to this contribution because of truancy, their parents will also forfeit the right to the financial subsidies to which they may be entitled. Naturally, this may affect students in different ways, depending on what kind of financial situation their family is in.Do some students go to school out of their own financial interest or out of that of their parents? Through focus-group interviews, students have expressed their opinions, told about their experiences and stated their attitudes with regards to these matters.

English title: Parents? expectations of municipal school of music and of arts.Thesis in Music Education by Jonathan Lilliedahl. Part of the work for the master´s degree. Studies from School of Music, University of Örebro, 2007. Available from School of Music, Örebro University, SE-701 82 Örebro, Sweden.

The purpose of this study is to investigate? how a professional librarian can support the work with pupils, age six to twelve years, in their reading and linguistic development? how the conditions at the school have to be for this to become possible? what kind of attitudes the teachers have, and how they relate to the impact of a librarian for the pupils reading and linguistic development.The methods used are analyses of steering documents concerning school libraries and analyses of the means of the local school culture. The latter has been carried out by literature studies and through interviews of eight teachers and two school librarians. The result of the interviews showed a limited insight into how a professional librarian can support and assist teachers and pupils in the work with reading and linguistic development. They also showed the influence of existing traditions and local school culture for the use of a librarian?s services, and also how all the teachers, once they have become used to the services a librarian can provide, now find their support invaluable.

While almost 23 percent of the students in the Swedish upper secondary school are foreigners, only a fraction of the school libraries? collections consists of literature written in other languages than Swedish or English. This study examines how five school librarians experience the task of working with literature composed in foreign languages in the multicultural and multilingual school of today. The results of the qualitative interviews are analyzed in relation to the legislation and policy documents that the school libraries are working by, and also in relation to the theoretical framework of sociocultural theory and the theories on second language acquisition developed by linguist Jim Cummins.The study shows that while multilingualism is discussed as an important matter in the legislation and policy documents that the school libraries work by, the librarians in this study largely view the question of foreign literature as peripheral. Most part of the librarians connects first language reading to leisure-time activities rather than curricular activities, and stresses that the Swedish language should be prioritized in Swedish schools.

The purpose of this study is that, based on expertise in special education tutoring, examine the degree of supervision demanded by teachers in primary schools. As a result of this study, we can see the views teachers have regarding guidance within the following issues: the demand for tutoring, the importance of conversation and reflection, and guidance from the specialist teacher.Since the study deals with phenomena of a qualitative nature, we use semi-structured interviews in the empirical part of trying to understand the informants' way of looking at the phenomenon we are investigating. The study included interviews with six teachers in the elementary school year?s 1-3. The results show that there are more opportunities than obstacles to mentoring.

The main purpose of this C-essay is to answer the question: What have been the consequences and effects of the merit point system on language studies and the parties concerned (teachers, students and principals) during the school year of 2010/11?The merit point system is the result of a political decision and was implicated for the first time in the Swedish upper secondary school during the school year 2010/2011. Being a completely new phenomenon it is of great interest and importance to study its effects.The study in this essay also aims to verify, falsify or nullify two hypotheses very often referred to in the political discussions regarding the merit point system:The merit point system will replace affection and interest as main reasons for language studies in upper secondary school and cause a rectification amongst the students choices of additional courses.The merit point system will have a segregating effect upon society and make it harder for people to rise in society through education in the future.A verification of these hypotheses would imply the appearance of an increased rectification amongst students as well as an orientation towards an in the future more segregated society.The empiric material has been collected and examined with qualitative as well as quantitative methods (questionnaires and interviews) and belongs epistemologically to the phenomenological and hermeneutical traditions..

Today, digital technologies (DT) can be said to play an important role in the Swedish school system. The goal of this essay was to describe DT use by school leaders, in relation to their views on schools? goals and visions, and teachers? and students? use of DTs. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five school leaders of secondary schools in Umeå municipality, Sweden. The results show that school leaders? use of DTs center on three key tasks: communication, information and administration.

Social and emotional learning is getting more and more common to work with in Swedish schools today. That has made it more actual to do studies of how you best can implement a method in health prevention and promotion in schools and how you do for to keep the work sustainable. There are some American studies that describe implementation of methods in schools and a few studies that describe implementation of methods for social and emotional learning in schools. It is important to see implementation as a process and not as an individual event. The process never end but continues as a cycle in three phases; readiness phase, planning phase and implementation phase.The aim of this study was to describe teachers and principals experiences of obstacles and possibilities at implementation of an evidence based program for social an emotional learning in compulsory school as a part of the schools health promotion activities.

The purpose of this study was to examine how Swedish high school students view school staff members, in general, but in particular school counselors. The research questions focused on getting the students descriptions of the staff members roles and functions within the school. The study was conducted using focus group interviews. The answers were divided into themes and then analyzed using role theory and previous research. The results showed that the students relationships with family, friends and previous knowledge about the staff members in school, affects their willingness to seek the support of school staff members.

The purpose of my essay has been to illustrate any possible differences between pre-school teachers? and parents' views on the mission of the pre-school put in relation to the pre-school curriculum. In my study I have taken a starting point in the following questions:How do pre-school teachers understand the mission of the pre-school?Do pre-school teachers recognize the term baby-sitting from their profession?How do pre-school teachers perceive the parents' view on the mission of the pre-school?How concerned are the parents according to the pre-school teachers about the pedagogical activities of the pre-school?What do the pre-school teachers do to inform the parents about the pre-school curriculum and how aware do they think that the parents are of the curriculum?What are the plans of the pre-schools to fulfill the new part of the revised curriculum that comes into effect July 1 2011?I chose to utilize the qualitative method with the hermeneutics as a theoretical framework in my study and through interviews study my questions. The interviews were made with four pre-school teachers from different pre-schools in the south of Stockholm.

April 28th 2010 the Swedish parliament decided that the combined teacher exam will be divided into four parts. This means that the education for preschool teachers and primary school teachers will have to be separated and future teachers will have to decide before their studies what ages they want to work with. To investigate if this could affect the quality of the choice I have interviewed 5 new teachers from the combined teachers program about what ages they wanted to teach before they began to study and what ages they wanted to teach after completed studies. I did this to see whether the choice was influenced by the educations or not. It turned out that all 5 had an idea of what ages they wanted to teach in before they began the educations and only one of my interviewees changed her mind during the studies.