This essay deals with the issue how to define the concept successful school and what ingredients it includes. To aim this task I have interviewed four principals at upper secondary schools, two placed in community schools and the other two working for non-community schools. We have discussed how the principals define a successful school, whether they believe that the principal has a major part in contributing to the schools success or not and further if they think that schools have anything in common with private companies.The principals all agreed on what components they believe a successful school consists of, that is good school results from the pupils, a high comfort level for the pupils at school, professional management from the principal and a high level of young people who wants to attend the particular school.Further I have studied Swedish and foreign research in the area of successful schools and management in schools to get at good background in this matter..

This Master?s thesis aims to study how the concept ?youth? is understood and used in papers and publications about public libraries, written at The Swedish School of Library and Information Science from 1972 to 2002. It does this by answering three questions: Firstly, how is the concept ?youth? formulated in papers and publications at SSLIS from 1972 - 2002? Secondly, has the concept ?youth? changed in the analysed texts during the chosen time and, if that is the case, what constitutes this change? And, finally, what types of consequences for the understanding of the users can this have for the writers and readers of these texts? Discourse analysis is used to analyze how this concept is constituted, transformed and understood. Among the things studied in the discourse analysis is the interdiscursivity and intertextuality of the texts, as well as the meaning of the word, the wordings and modality of the analysed texts.

AbstractThe present thesis examines reading acquisition. The aim of the study is to gain a deepened understanding of various methods used for reading acquisition, how teachers? are dealing with these methods and what aspects require special attention. The overall research question of the thesis is: How can one assess children?s future reading ability and identify a method that is appropriate to this ability? The overall aim leads to several more specifically addressed issues.In the theoretical part, different perspectives and theories about reading acquisition are presented along with different methods for how to work in order to facilitate reading.

Children at the age of six, has since 1991 been allowed to start their tuition in the Swedish school system. Studies reveal that; the first school year (preschool) can be a stressful task dueto the new environment, new friendships and higher expectations.The purpose of this study is to describe and analyze how the teachers perceive their own role in the transitioning process from preschool to school. This purpose required a method of qualitative complexion and therefore qualitative interviews were used. The material is based on four interviews with four different teachers. The teachers were asked the same question considering; the transition from preschool to school from a pupil point of view, their own role in that transition and their opinions on different educational tools.

Previous research studies have shown that teacher?s attitude towards girls and boys rather reinforces, than counteracts behavior as stereotyped gender concepts. Order and discipline seem to be important parts of the daily routines in school context and to maintain discipline a constant communication and dealing with pupils are in order. The purpose of our examination aims to study how teachers respond to boys and girls in situations like creation of order. The analysis is based on observations of the interaction that takes place verbally and none verbally between pupils and their teachers in creation of order situations.

The aim of this thesis is to ascertain how primary school teachers would like to improve their mathematics teaching. The central questions for this research are:In what ways do teachers want to improve their mathematics teaching?How do the teachers justify their statements?What main features can be distinguished out of the teachers answers?Three interviews and seven surveys have been used to collect information from a total of nine teachers, at one primary school. Teaching pupils from preschool to sixth grade. The results have been analysed, interpreted and discussed using a drama pedagogical perspective, inspired by a holistic approach to learning.

To explore greatly varied opinion between player and reviewer, in relation to new products in ongoing digital game series, an analytic perspective is suggested, that takes the entire game series into account, instead of analyzing games (who are part of a series) as individual productions. This is explored further by introducing a model to support this perspective, based on the game theories by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, as well as Gordon Calleja. This model and chosen perspective is applied against three separate cases to see whether or not it can give insight into the approach of players (of continuing game series) and the differing opinions of players and reviewers..

The purpose of this study is to explore specific pedagogical activities that benefit the student's verbal language development and to learn more about how our schools use teaching methods to achieve the ambitions in the governing documents in Sweden. The aim is finding the correlation between theory, research, governing documents and the educational work in our schools. This study contains an empirical survey in intention to see how teachers, pupils and school administrators experience school activities, to see if those activities are formed with the intention for pupils to reach the learning goals according to the governing documents.The aim of this study has been achieved by relating empirical data with theories and previous research on conversation analysis. Goffman's and Norrby's research on the importance of dialogue and previous research on dialogicity studied by Dysthe, Vygotsky and Bakhtin are presented. Those are related to empirical data and show that most teachers realize the importance of integrating dialogues in daily activities and in different learning contexts.

The main purpose of this Masters thesis is to contribute to the understanding of high school teachers information seeking behaviour in the transition from university studies to occupational practice. The theoretical framework encompasses theories of professional socialization, the sociology of knowledge, of professions, and of library and information science. The empirical material has been collected through interviews with six recently qualified high school teachers in different subjects. The interviews have been analysed on two different levels; first on a descriptive level and then on a theoretical level. The major findings are that the academic context limited the student teachers information seeking and they did not have the opportunity to choose cognitive authorities on their own initiative.

My purpose with this study was partly to examine how some Swedish science teachers teach and their knowledge of the science curriculum, and how this affects their teaching. I also aimed to compare the Swedish and Irish science curriculum. The method I undertook to achieve this study was to carry out six interviews with science teachers in Sweden. I also completed a text analyse of both the Swedish & Irish science curriculum. The results of the interviews showed that the teachers think the curriculum is important but they do not always keep to it.

The aim of this study is to analyse how children?s literature for ages 6 ? 8 is adapted to pupils with reading difficulties. The material used for analysis in this study is six children?s books, examining some of the criteria by which a text is classified as easy-to-read. The result of the analysis shows that there is a possibility for pupils with reading difficulties to read something other than easy-to-read literature if it is carefully selected.

The main focus of the essay is to investigate if bugging can be justified from two ethics perspectives, the teleological and the deontology. I?ve chosen to emanate from two specific values which I believe is especially relevant to the ethical problems of bugging, efficiency in fighting crime and the personal integrity. To be able to illustrate this conflict between different values did I do an analysis of an official report which had the task to explore if Sweden should introduce bugging as a new means of compulsion. The official report's statement was that the police should have modern instrument to fighting crimes efficient, including bugging.My examination of the report showed that they used several arguments derived from both the efficiency in fighting crime perspective and the personal integrity perspective.

The purpose of this Master's thesis is to contribute to a betterunderstanding of children's free time reading book practices by studyingpupils in the school library and their processes of finding and borrowingbooks for themselves to read silently in the classroom, so called free timereading books. The study also includes observations of the staff's role,particularly the school librarian's in supporting pupil's book selection.The empirical material consists of field notes from an etnographic studywhere pupils in 4th grade (aged 10-11) and staff were observed duringthree school library visits. The theoretical framework is inspired byLennart Björneborn's concepts of information practices in libraries:serendipity, integrative library interface, mediation flow and affordancespaces.The study shows that pupils' search for free time reading books in theschool library is relatively routine-based at the same time as it isspontaneous. The process is an interplay with factors such as time,display and interaction in the integrative library interface. In the presenceof adults, finding books becomes an imposed task for the pupils.

One of the essential needs of human beings is to be involved in a social context. The intention of this study was to see if the opportunity to have an iPod Touch, could make it possible for students with literacy difficulties to participate in the regular classes and if the implementation of iPod Touch in the school setting would result in informal learning outside the school. In this case study two pupils with literacy difficulties have been using an iPod Touch in their daily school activity. The pupils as well as their teachers have been interviewed about their experiences of implementing iPod Touch as a tool in the regular classroom teatching. The results indicate that iPod Touch can help students to be in inclusive education and that they use the iPod Touch outside school.

 This thesis is based upon the assumption that in Swedish school today it is a wide gap regarding the information flow when pupils are switching school. This was one of the reasons Skolverket published a report clearly stating that this is the case. The purpose of this thesis is to examine and describe how teachers are working in a teacher team at transitions to see and understand what their work may mean individually, in a group and to the school as an organisation. The questions at issue is to see how the teachers cooperate during transitions and how they notice students in need of extra support and students level of knowledge during transitions. The two last questions at issue is first to see how teachers approach parent?s expectations on the school and the teachers, secondly it is to examine what implications their work will have on the school.