Background: Competence development has become more important since the pressure on effectiveness is increasing and organisations are expected to constantly improvement. The design of the competence development activities is governed by the strategy which in turn will affect the outcome of the same. A knowledge intense business in which changes recently have taken place is healthcare, a business in which competition also has increased as a result from globalization. Due to this, it is highly important to take care of and improve the competence of individuals. According to this, we have found that healthcare is an interesting business to study with regard to competence development.

The aim of this study was to examine what knowledge social workers express about home visits in child welfare investigations and how they know what to do. Sixteen social workers who work with social investigations concerning children were asked to discuss the topic home visit in three focus group interviews in three different municipalities in southern Sweden. The social workers in our focus group interviews mainly discussed the purpose of the home visit, what social workers do during home visits and furthermore their opinions about guidelines and policy documents regarding the home visit.  To get an understanding of what type of knowledge is the basis for social workers use of the home visit, we used Polanyi's concept of 'tacit knowing' as well as the Aristotelian theory of knowledge containing three forms of knowledge, that is, episteme, techne and fronesis. We found that the displaying of ?tacit knowing? was a consistent feature in all groups, as they had difficulty expressing their knowledge use.

The aim of this study is to increase knowledge and understanding of free play or free fun time importance for children of age around five years in preschool, in order to promote children?s development and learning. The focus was on exploring and better understanding of teacher?s and educators? approach to the free fun play time as a tool in their educational work, and also about their own role in this context as well as analyzing of forms, rules and structures spontaneously created by groups of children having free play fun time. Another important moment of this study was to give more light on approaches to this issue in education theories by Piaget, Vygotsky and Freud among others.As to the practical experimental part of the study it has been performed at a preschool and kindergarten in a suburb at the outskirts of Stockholm, with four employed educators there and with groups of children of age around five.

The purpose of the study is to show the conditions there are by working with aesthetic expressions in pre-school and how these activities are implemented. Questions that we are going to discuss are: What are the conditions for working with aesthetics in pre-school? How is the work implemented when it comes to aesthetic expressions? Our ambition has been to study what conditions it takes to use aesthetic expressions in a way that is meaningful for the children and also show the conditions and alternative methods that are present in different schools. We have used a web survey to reach a result in the study. This web survey includes questions about the different aesthetic activities and has given us the answers to the questions above. The result shows that there are different ways of working and different views at aesthetic expressions.

AbstractThe Swedish public school system claims to be a school for all. This means in particular that school is, not only open to all children between 7 and 16 years, but also that compulsory schooling prevailing. Our society's development is making increasing demands on the theoretical capacity, and school's goals aligned in the same direction. The proportion of pupils failing to achieve the goals are increasing in number, a failure which has major implications not only for the individual student but also for society at large. This study's focus is directed against a group of students where the reason for this is a lack of ability to abstract thinking.

The purpose of this study was to describe the experiences of being a family caregiver for aperson with dementia. A further aim was the inclusion criteria and data collection methods inthe studies presented, and how this may have affected the results of the studies. The methodwas a descriptive literature study with qualitative approach. Data were collected throughdatabases Cinahl and Pubmed using the words: dementia, knowledge, information, support,caregivers, coping, spouses, experiences and family caregiving. Keywords were combined indifferent ways in order to refine the search.

This Master's thesis in library and information science aims to shed light on the concept of information literacy in higher education, particularly as manifested in two dissertations on the subject. Two models of information literacy are compared: Christina Doyle's list of ten attributes for students to master and Christine Bruce's seven conceptions of information literacy. The cognitive-behaviourist tradition in Doyle's study and the alternative, phenomenographic approach in Bruce's research are compared and commented. The taxonomies and internal relationship between separate components in the two models are investigated, as well as the ways the models relate to each other. The respective views of knowledge and learning are described.

Our paper is based on matrixes and the feedback process as tools in the daily work in the higher education system. The main purpose with this paper is to investigate if these tools can enhance the effect of formative assessment and increase students? empowerment in the courses. In do-ing so, we investigate if students experience that their efforts result in increased progression in their courses and if they acquire adequate proficiency in the subject matters native to their pro-grams, along with an increased desire for lifelong learning. Compulsory collection of data for profit is conducted through interviews of students in year one of the IT media program and the IT program.

National libraries hold large, valuable repositories of often unique materials. How can we ensure that the knowledge is accessible without endangering the materials that hold the knowledge? Digital preservation is meant to solve this problem. With more and more material being accessible digitally, users are expected to do more and more of the finding on their own, instead of being guided by librarians. What kind of knowledge do the librarians have, that cannot be mediated through a system? How is the knowledge of experienced librarians passed on to new librarians? What is the difference between physical and digital materials? I have interviewed senior and junior librarians of Det Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen, Nasjonalbiblioteket in Oslo, the National Library in Helsinki, and Kungliga Biblioteket in Stockholm to learn about their journey to knowledge of their collections.

This report is a qualitative study on children aged three to five years who are in the Swedish preschool. The purpose of the study is to investigate how five experienced preschool teachers view the way children between three and five years acquire basic mathematical concepts, basic numeracy and geometry. The aim is also to find out whether teachers feel that the size of the group of children affects their learning.The study contains information about what preschool teachers think about the way children learn mathematics and how the size of the group of children affects this learning. From the results it can be seen that children learn Mathematics, both in everyday situations and when playing. Moreover, the group size does not seem to affect the mathematical learning of the child.

Utifrån arbetsmodellen Learning study, med variationsteorin som utgångspunkt har forskning genomförts i två klasser i Sverige med syftet att försöka identifiera kritiska aspekterna för elever i årskurs nio inom ämnesområdet det vita ljuset och dess färgspektrum. Studien är en vidareutveckling av en tidigare genomförd studie i Hong Kong och har därför även haft till syfte att undersöka om de identifierade kritiska aspekterna är generaliserbara från en skolkontext till en annan kontext.Den svenska skolan styrs nationellt utifrån styrdokument, skollag, läroplan och kursplan för skolämnet och läraren har även riktlinjer för att få en yrkesetisk förankring. Dessa delar är viktiga att läraren tar i beaktning inför planering av undervisningen. Elevernas bakgrund och förkunskaper i ämnet är av stor vikt för läraren att ta hänsyn till för att de ska kunna ta till sig undervisningen om det som läraren har tänkt att de ska lära sig.I denna studie kunde åtta kritiska aspekter identifieras i de två klasser som undersökningen genomfördes i. Fem av de kritiska aspekterna var redan identifierade i Hong Kong.

The purpose of this report was to examine the schools views on its task to form good citizens and also the work with children and their souls and feelings. My question of issue was:? Which are the conditions from where you work with feelings and forming good citizens in school?In the Swedish learning curriculum for the compulsory grades, Lpo 94, there is a lot to be read about the schools task to form good citizens and human beings. One can also read that the schools have to work with the feelings of its pupils and also the issue of values. The results of my report show that the school has a responsibility to support the family?s work with the upbringing and the personal growth of their children.

Bakgrund:Läraryrkets komplexitet och bristen på lärares teoretiska förankring öppnar för att i en variationsteoretisk ram fokusera ett lärandeobjekt som ett sätt att utveckla lärarnas lärande samt lärarprofessionen.Syfte:Syftet med studien är att undersöka några lärares föreställningar om innehållet i deras undervisning, deras föreställningar om elevernas lärande samt hur detta innehåll gestaltas under en lesson/learning study.Metod:Genom deltagande i planerings- och analysmöten samt genom observationer studeras lärarnas samtal om och deras gestaltningar av ett innehåll i vad som kan sägas vara en mix av en lesson study och en learning study.Resultat:Lärarnas samtal under planeringsarbetet och genomförandet kännetecknades av en låg grad av teorianknytning, där innehållets strukturella aspekter inte synliggjordes. I lärarnas samtal synliggjordes inte heller elevernas lärande vilket däremot kom till uttryck i undervisningssituationerna..

AbstractThe organization of the health care system in Sweden has been subjected to investigations and discussions in order to make it more effective. The aim is to create a better public health care and to economize on the financial resources. In the year of 2003 an amendment of the Swedish law made it easier for municipalities and county councils to make own solutions and agree about how health service should be organized in the best way. This resulted in a number of test projects. In this paper I will focus on one of these test projects which took place in Borlänge and was based on collaboration between the municipality and the county council in Dalecarlia.

The purpose of my study is to examine why five primary school teachers chose to start using the method ?Learning reading by writing on computer? in their teaching. How do they perceive that the method works in their classroom and do they perceive that the method affect the children?s literacy?The study consists of a qualitative method in form of interviews with five primary school teachers and also some observations made by me in the classrooms. I will use the findings I made during the interviews and observations and contrast these to relevant literature and research that I have collected.The result of my study shows that all of the interviewed teachers had a self-interest in working with the method ?Learning reading by writing on computers? and that they also worked closely with colleagues.