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.

 In his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) Saul Kripke claims that Wittgenstein argues for a certain form of scepticism in his book Philosophical Investigations (1953), namely a new form of philosophical scepticism, a result of Wittgenstein´s idea of language as language games. Nihilism, scepticism of meaning or of concept, constitutive scepticism are other commentators´ different names of the same phenomenon. The philosophy of Wittgenstein accounts for how our words, including the words of mathematics, have no meaning and there are no a priori justified objective facts as to what I mean about a word. We follow the rules blindly and without justification. We are unable to find any facts against this proposal.

Reading old handwritten documents can be a real challenge for genealogists, especially as some documents in Sweden are written in the old German alphabet that is not used today. Much research has been done on how to enable computers to read old handwritten documents, but computers have so far not reached the level of reading that expert humans have. The focus seems to be on the computers reading the document with or without the help of human experts, with the aim of making the documents available in easily read form. I have, however, not found any research on how computers can help non-expert humans trying to read handwritten documents. In this project I have focused especially on beginning genealogists as reading gets easier with practice, and you need the help more in the beginning. By conducting interviews and observations with genealogists I established that reading is an issue and that there are many factors involved that make it difficult to read.

This thesis aims at examining to what extent a few, algorithmically very easily extractable document features can be used to classify electronic documents according to genre. A set of experiments is therefore carried out, using only 11 such simple features in an attempt to classify 84 documents belonging to electronic academic journals into three manually identified genres: table of contents, article, and review. The 11 features are also divided into three sets, containing metrics of words and sentences; punctuation marks; and URL links, respectively. The performance when using these sets of features is then measured with regard to classification accuracy, using a k-NN classifier, four different values of k (1, 3, 5, 7), and both leave-one-out and 10-fold cross-validation. Best results are achieved when using all three feature sets (i.e.

This project in an in depth exploration about the basics of creating space in the form of an experimental investigation using my own perceptions as reference. Within a method, especially outlined for the project using descriptive words of opposites, my interpretation of the words has been formed into models of rooms. Four workshops with restrictions and rules acted as a platform for the striving towards the aim of a wider understanding of how space can be experienced. Through analysis I have formulated the different parameters influencing space itself and my perceptions of it. During the project a language for visualizing the interpretations of a room has been further evolved.

It is important that the language in textbooks for foreign language learners reflects the language that the learners would encounter in real life. For this reason, the presence of the thousand most common nouns in two Swedish textbooks in Spanish for upper secondary school is observed in this study. Furthermore, this study aims to examine how these nouns occur in order to determine if their pattern of occurence favours the learning and consolidation of words. The main materials that have been used are A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish by Davies (2006) and the word search program available in the digital versions of the textbooks. The results show that the presence of the thousand most common Spanish nouns does reflect the frequency information presented in the frequency dictionary but not all thousand nouns are included.

It is important that the language in textbooks for foreign language learners reflects the language that the learners would encounter in real life. For this reason, the presence of the thousand most common nouns in two Swedish textbooks in Spanish for upper secondary school is observed in this study. Furthermore, this study aims to examine how these nouns occur in order to determine if their pattern of occurence favours the learning and consolidation of words. The main materials that have been used are A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish by Davies (2006) and the word search program available in the digital versions of the textbooks. The results show that the presence of the thousand most common Spanish nouns does reflect the frequency information presented in the frequency dictionary but not all thousand nouns are included.

It is important that the language in textbooks for foreign language learners reflects the language that the learners would encounter in real life. For this reason, the presence of the thousand most common nouns in two Swedish textbooks in Spanish for upper secondary school is observed in this study. Furthermore, this study aims to examine how these nouns occur in order to determine if their pattern of occurence favours the learning and consolidation of words. The main materials that have been used are A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish by Davies (2006) and the word search program available in the digital versions of the textbooks. The results show that the presence of the thousand most common Spanish nouns does reflect the frequency information presented in the frequency dictionary but not all thousand nouns are included.

Det nya arbetslivet har blivit alltmer komplicerat och kravfyllt. Nya kunskapskrav har växt fram i takt med arbetsmarknadens strukturomvandling och samhällets individualisering (Allvin, 2006). Individer förväntas bli ?sin egen agent? och ständigt sträva efter att hålla sig anställningsbara och ?anställningsbarhet? har således blivit ett policybegrepp som används flitigt inom den politiska debatten kring utbildning och arbete (Berglund & Fejes, 2009). Som blivande karriärvägledare är det relevant att förstå vad det innebär att vara anställningsbar för att på bästa sätt se till individens behov.

How do gender and socioeconomic backgrounds affect students? academic performance, educational choices and attitudes towards education? Moreover, does class play the same role for girls and boys? In order to find this out, I surveyed students in a small province located in the northern inlands of Sweden. The survey was answered by nearly every student in the ninth grade of that year, a total of 160 people. The results revealed that girls in this area have less faith in their capabilities than boys, despite getting much better grades. Many more girls than boys want to go onto college or university studies.

Långvarig smärta är ett växande hälsoproblem med en komplex symptombild. Precis och igenkännande information är en förutsättning för att komma vidare i den egna hanteringen av långvarig smärta. Syftet med studien var att undersöka om en information om smärta med fokus på egenhantering på en CD-skiva kan påverka self-efficacy och coping hos personer med långvarig smärta. Deltagare i studien (N=22) uppfyllde de uppsatta kriterierna för deltagande och lottades in slumpmässigt i interventions respektive kontrollgrupp. Studien pågick under en månads tid med självskattning med hjälp av instrument och enkäter vid studiestart, i samband med intervention och vid avslut.

Retiring from elite sport can be a difficult and disruptive process for an elite athlete. To improve the quality of the transition after retirement, elite athletes are recommended to have dual careers which mean they combine their sport with education to be prepared for a new career when they retire from elite sport. To help elite student-athletes with this combination, universities and sport organizations provide different kind of support. This study was conducted and aimed to investigate elite athletes? perceptions of support offered by a university in Sweden and the elite athletes? perceptions of combining top level sport and academic studies.

In this degree project I have studied how an anti-discrimination bureau can adapttheir online information to the target group ? immigrants who only have modestunderstanding of the Swedish language. This group is often subject of discriminationmatters, and therefore it?s important that they can take part of the information.To find answers to my questions I have studied different relevant theories, performeda readability analysis on the online information and have had qualitativeinterviews with representatives from the target group. I have also tested my rewrittentexts on both representatives and other readers.The result from my studies has shown that it is words that are the most difficult inthe current online information, while length and structure of the sentences are alsoof importance when it comes to the readability.

Secondary schools have for decades debated whether they promote social reproduction which is considered to generate the homogeneous student compositions. The gap between the academic programs and vocational education programs is considered to increase. What in recent years has appeared in research is that the gap is increasing most tend to be in the specific academic program, particularly in science. This paper's intention is to describe the science program at a local level and the pupils who were admitted to the science program autumn 2009 on the basis of an educational sociological perspective. The survey consisted of a census in which all students were given the opportunity to answer a questionnaire.

In media the debate about discipline and order in school is widely heard. A politician, some teacher or a representative from the teacher´s union, most often speaks these words. The interest for these issues seems to be persistent.This study is primarily about the expression ?discipline and order?. The aim is to find out how the expression ?discipline and order? is used in the investigated material.